TheatreWorks of Southern Indiana

The Indiana General Assembly passed a bill to establish a Second State Bank of Indiana in 1833 and two years later built one of its ten new branches in New Albany, then Indiana’s largest city and an important port along the Ohio River, connected to trading networks from Pennsylvania to Louisiana. The state provided half of the capital for each branch and individual citizens provided the remaining capital. Designed in the fashionable Greek Revival style, the gable-front building features a tetrastyle portico with fluted Greek Doric columns and pilastered side elevations. A Doric frieze and cornice features triglyphs and metopes. The building is clad in native Floyd County sandstone and was reported to have cost $40,000.

Some sources list Edwin J. Peck (1806–1876) as the architect of the New Albany Branch Bank, with Hugh Pugh as the builder. Other sources state that Pugh was the winner of a design competition and received a $100 prize for his design. Several of the State Bank’s ten branches (others were located in Lawrenceburg, Madison, Evansville, Vincennes, Bedford, Terre Haute, Indianapolis, Richmond, and Lafayette) were built by Peck, who came to Indiana in 1833 as an employee of New York architects Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, superintending the masonry work on their new Indiana State House (1833–1836). The New Albany bank was nearly identical to the earlier branches at Madison and Terre Haute and the contemporary branch Lafayette—all Greek Revival structures built by Peck.

In 1857, the charter for the Second State Bank of Indiana expired and a third charter was established that later became part of the First National Bank. The bank was liquidated in 1897. The building was used as a church and later home to the Knights of Pythias. The New Albany Chapter of the American Red Cross moved into the building in 1941 and remained in it through 1982. Develop New Albany, an Indiana Main Street organization, and later Steve Goodman and Carl Holliday, rehabilitated the building at the turn of the twenty-first century. The building is now home to TheatreWorks of Southern Indiana, which operates a theater on the first floor and rents out the second floor for events.