As we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we find ourselves not only celebrating a defining moment in our nation’s history, but also reflecting on the deeper, ongoing story of Pennsylvania.

I will admit that when we first started planning for 2026, I wondered if the anniversary would resonate with people. Would they care about an anniversary year that didn’t end in ’76? People stumbled over the word “Semiquincentennial.” In the history profession, we were coming off the national “history relevance” campaign, hoping that people would see more clearly the relevance of history to their lives today. That almost seems quaint now, at a time when there is a tug-of-war over stories and narratives like the President’s House in Philadelphia.

Our nation’s story — like any good story — has never been straightforward. Our anniversaries have always been complicated. At the time of the Centennial, we were still trying to stitch together a nation that had been divided by the Civil War. The Bicentennial came on the heels of the Vietnam War, again a time when our country was struggling to overcome deep rifts.

In 1776 Philadelphia stood at the center of a bold experiment — one that would shape the course of the world. Yet the story of our commonwealth did not begin or end there. For 250 years, Pennsylvania has been a place where diverse people, ideas and ambitions have converged to shape the American experience.

From the earliest Indigenous peoples who first stewarded this land, to the waves of immigrants who built its towns and industries, Pennsylvania’s history is one of many voices. Farmers, ironworkers, abolitionists, entrepreneurs and reformers all played a role in defining not only this state but also the nation itself. Their stories, sometimes celebrated and sometimes overlooked, remind us that the American journey has always been complex, layered and evolving.

Across Pennsylvania, commemorations, exhibitions and educational programs will bring new energy to familiar stories and highlight lesser-known ones, providing the opportunity to introduce new audiences to our shared past. Many of PHMC’s Pennsylvania Trails of History sites have strong ties to the American Revolution and will be offering related exhibitions, lectures, activities and other special events over this year and into the next to provide a deeper understanding of this significant period in our history and why it matters today.

As we mark the 250th anniversary, I hope you will participate in historical programs, visit historic places, and engage with the history that lives all around us, recognizing the role that each of us — ordinary Pennsylvanians — plays in shaping what comes next.

Andrea Lowery
Executive Director, PHMC

Natural rights, individual liberties and the social contract — these Enlightenment ideals were at the core of the transformation of America in the second half of the 18th century. Such values would serve as not only the basis for the American Colonies to dissolve their “political bands” with Great Britain but also the catalyst for internal revolutions that were beginning to foment in the new United States. In 1776 Pennsylvania, already primed by the religious and civil liberties granted in William Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges, was at the center of it all, the locus of the nation’s birth. With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence now upon us, this edition reflects on ideological shifts within revolutionary Pennsylvania.

At the outset of the American Revolution, Pennsylvania was still a British colony in the hands of the Penn family, with William Penn’s grandson John serving as proprietary governor. As the Continental Congress moved toward severing ties with Great Britain, delegates from Pennsylvania’s counties convened at Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia where they would decide to support independence and draft a state constitution. In this issue, Philadelphia-area historian Lorett Treese tells the story in “A Radical Shift,” following Pennsylvania’s progression from its last days as a British province to its new identity as one of the “united states” of America with a constitution that would test the limits of democracy.

Another revolution was brewing in the era of independence, as some women were beginning to challenge the traditional roles set out for them. Jennifer Eaton Barndt has written about many of these pioneering individuals in these pages — Esther DeBerdt Reed, who advanced the role of women in public service through an organization she inspired and cofounded to support the Continental troops; Margaret Corbin and Mary Ludwig Hays, who took up arms in battle, both becoming known as “Molly Pitcher”; and now, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson. Barndt’s article “A Woman of the American Enlightenment” chronicles the ultimately tragic life of Fergusson, a poet, translator, salon hostess, mentor to other emerging women writers of the period — a “woman of uncommon talents,” as her close friend and founding father Benjamin Rush described her — who was respected in intellectual and cultural circles in colonial Philadelphia, among women and men alike.

As the Declaration of Independence was being drafted, some of the founders recognized a glaring contradiction regarding the “self-evident truths” that the document espoused: If “all men are created equal,” then how can slavery in the new United States be permitted to exist? Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder himself, had included a condemnation of the slave trade in an early draft of the Declaration, but several Southern delegates objected and it was removed. Four years later, however, Pennsylvania had decided to chart a course for eliminating slavery within its own boundaries with the General Assembly’s passage of an act for gradual abolition. In “Understanding Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780,” regular contributor Todd M. Mealy places the act in context, explaining its provisions, its strange loopholes, and what gradual abolition actually meant to those who were in bondage when the law was enacted and to their children born after it was adopted.

Other articles related to the American Revolution in Pennsylvania, and in some cases the subsequent anniversaries that commemorated it, appear in Marking Time, Our Documentary Heritage, Picturing PA, A Place in Time and Trailheads to complete a commemorative issue that I hope will give you not only a stronger sense of the commonwealth in the era of independence and its keystone role in the founding of the nation but also how this transformative age continues to impact us today.

Kyle R. Weaver
Editor

On November 17, 1774, three members of Philadelphia’s Committee of Safety met with 28 citizens at Carpenters’ Hall to discuss forming a volunteer troop amid rising tensions with Great Britain. From that meeting emerged the Philadelphia Light Horse, later known as the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry (FTPCC), or simply the “First Troop.” Its founders pledged to equip and support themselves and offered their services to the Continental Congress. When Congress formally established the Continental Army on June 14, 1775, the First Troop was already prepared for action. Over time, the unit came to be recognized as one of the oldest military organizations in continuous active service in the United States.

The First Troop’s founders were prominent merchants, shipowners, importers and traders. Many belonged to elite civic and social organizations, including the Gloucester Fox Hunting Club, the Schuylkill Fishing Company, the Schuylkill Company of Fort St. Davids, the St. Andrew’s Society of Philadelphia, the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick and the Sons of St. George. These men combined their skills to form a highly capable elite unit. Strong horsemanship, intimate knowledge of local terrain and waterways, and considerable social influence defined the First Troop from the outset.

Members of the City Troop and Other Philadelphia Soldiery, circa 1813, by John Lewis Krimmel (1786–1821).
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Armed with sabers, horse pistols and carbines, the troopers trained for both mounted and dismounted combat. They drilled extensively with fencing and riding instructors and even retained a trumpeter to relay battlefield signals.

During the American Revolution, the First Troop performed vital reconnaissance, security and courier duties for the Continental Army. They escorted George Washington from Philadelphia to New York in 1775 and crossed the Delaware River on Christmas night in 1776. The First Troop fought at Trenton and Princeton, saw action at Brandywine and Germantown, and served throughout the harsh winter at Valley Forge. By March 1776, they had expanded their membership to 40 troopers.

Distinguished members have included William Ward Burrows, the first commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, and Charles “Pete” Conrad, commander of Apollo XII and the third person to walk on the moon.

Today, membership in the First Troop is limited to soldiers serving in A Troop, 1st Squadron, 104th Cavalry Regiment of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard and is attained by election. The unit serves as the U.S. Army’s official ceremonial mounted organization while maintaining an active riding program and a continuous combat-arms lineage. Since 1774, more than 2,500 members have served, with approximately 50 to 60 active troopers today.

The Pennsylvania Historical Marker for the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry was dedicated on June 5, 2021, at the Armory at 22 South 23rd Street in Philadelphia.

Alli Davis is the coordinator of the Pennsylvania Historical Marker Program.

In concurrence with the national Bicentennial events of 1976, Pennsylvania counties and local municipalities also staged celebrations for the nation’s birth. Smaller events such as parades, picnics and performances were frequently held throughout the state during the year. One unusual event held in the north-central part of the commonwealth was the Bicentennial Raft project.

After the Revolutionary War, logging became one of the first large industries in Pennsylvania. The Bicentennial Raft paid tribute to the commonwealth’s history of transporting timber by raft to established markets further south on the Susquehanna River. Before the luxury of a robust railroad or automotive highway system, Pennsylvania’s enormous wilderness forests were cut and taken to markets in the southern part of the state using the world’s oldest means of transportation, the river system. The era of floating rafts down the West Branch of the Susquehanna ran from 1837 to 1917, with the peak occurring between 1850 to 1890. It is estimated that close to 3,000 rafts were floated to market each year during this period. Most of the logs in the rafts were white pine with some oak included.

In the spring of 1975, Ron Cole of Lock Haven first approached James Maguire of McElhattan with the idea of building and floating a full-scale log raft down the West Branch of the Susquehanna during the Bicentennial year. They presented their plan to the Clinton County Bicentennial Commission, which happily accepted the rafting project as a Clinton County Bicentennial Event. Maguire, owner of an automated sawmill called Wood Chips Inc., paid for the entire project and donated the use of his company’s logging equipment.

The log raft was constructed at Miller’s Landing in Clearfield County, 3 miles upstream from Karthaus on the West Branch. Initial construction of materials for the raft began in January 1976 and the process ran until March 6. It was assembled over the weekend of March 20–21. The raft was made of 45 white pine and hemlock timbers that were squared using chainsaws. When assembled, the raft was 27 feet wide by 116 feet long, weighing 80 tons. It was held together with wooden bows, pins and lash poles.

A 5.5-foot flood stage was needed to launch the raft and begin its trip down river. For the next three months, the average river stage was only 2.4 feet. When the raft was finally launched on June 22 at 1:24 p.m. it moved low in the river with only a few inches of timber above the river’s surface. It was navigated with a front and rear oar by an all-volunteer crew.

The raft made three stops on its trip. The first one was at Keating after floating 25.5 miles on June 22, another at Renovo on June 23 after another 13 miles, and the final one at Lock Haven on June 24 after 24.5 miles. It took three days and a total of 63 miles to complete the journey. The trip was successful with the raft and its 22 crew members arriving safely in Lock Haven at about 4:45 p.m. The raft remained in Lock Haven as part of the city’s Bicentennial celebration.

Thousands of people observed the raft trip in person while others watched film footage taken by Penn State University’s WPSX-TV (now WPSU). The raft was finally taken apart by James Maguire’s lumber company in October 1976. Most of its timbers were cut at his sawmill in Lizardville for various lumber products.

Materials on the Bicentennial Raft are located at the Pennsylvania State Archives in Record Groups 6.52 and 6.55.

Richard C. Saylor is an archivist for the Pennsylvania State Archives and author of the award-winning book Soldiers to Governors and numerous articles on military, political and sports history.

The Heller–Wagner Grist Mill property from above, with the mill at center, the wash house to the right, and the miller’s house, barn and shed in back.
Hellertown Historical Society

It’s a common misconception that all places in the National Register are of national significance; however, many sites and buildings have been listed for their local importance as well. The Heller–Wagner Grist Mill, listed in August 2025, is an example of one such place.

The mill was built around 1764 by Simon Heller, whose family named the town where the mill still stands today, Hellertown in Northampton County. Heller established the mill on one of the few widened dirt roads at the time, which connected Philadelphia to Bethlehem. During the Revolutionary War, the road served as a major thoroughfare for Continental Army troops. Although ownership changed hands over the years, the mill operated continuously until 1946.

Close-up view of the the turbines with the tailrace visible at left.
Artefact Inc.

The Heller–Wagner Grist Mill complex includes a miller’s house, a wash house, a former carriage house, a storage shed and the original mill race. The mill, a vernacular fieldstone and heavy timber structure, changed over time with newer machinery as technology advanced. Originally operated by a water wheel, the mill was updated with two turbines in 1876. These turbines — as well as many other pieces of machinery — are still intact.

In grist mills, the miller used large millstones to grind grains into corn meal, flour or feed for livestock. Most towns during the 18th and 19th centuries had a grist mill where local farmers could take their grains. These large, solidly built masonry buildings lend themselves well to adaptive reuse. Across the state, mills have been turned into housing, restaurants and commercial spaces.

The Heller-Wagner Grist Mill, however, has been preserved as a historic site. It retains much of its integrity because of the Hellertown Historical Society, which has managed the property since 1984. The society undertook a large restoration effort in the late 1980s and has used the space for historic exhibitions, events and educational purposes.

The Heller–Wagner Grist Mill is not only a mill with great integrity but also an example of the power of volunteers in local preservation efforts. As we observe the Semiquincentennial this year, we not only commemorate our national heritage and historic places but also the local communities who work to share history and preserve those spaces.

The north façade is the original section of the mill with the mill race waterfall and bridge. This area was heavily restored in the late 1980s.
Artefact Inc.

Recent listings in the National Register of Historic Places include Arlington Apartments, Pittsburgh, Allegheny County; Bobb Mill and Farmstead, Barto, Berks County; IBM Building, Pittsburgh, Allegheny County; Mercyhurst College, Erie, Erie County; Miller–Leedom–Dickinson House, Haverford Township, Delaware County; and Morse Elevator Works Historic District, Philadelphia.

Arden Jordan is a National Register reviewer for the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office.

The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 featured such radical provisions as an annually elected unicameral legislature, a 12-member executive council, and a judiciary appointed to seven-year terms by the legislature. The document’s first page is reproduced here.
Pennsylvania State Archives, RG-26

“Our form of government still continues, but I think it cannot last long,” John Penn (1729–95) wrote to his family in England in October of 1775. The grandson of William Penn, John Penn was serving as governor of Pennsylvania. For some time, he had been observing changes in the attitudes of Pennsylvania residents regarding their relationship with the mother country. In June of 1774, he had expressed his hope that the first Continental Congress, soon to meet in Philadelphia, would “state the rights & represent the Grievances of America to the Throne & to agree upon such measures as may be thought most likely to relieve Boston & restore harmony between England & America.” He had since heard that some Americans were already considering independence.

By the autumn of 1776, Pennsylvanians would have two revolutionary documents to contemplate. One was the Declaration of Independence adopted by the Second Continental Congress. The other was a new constitution for Pennsylvania. It had been written not by the Quaker and Anglican merchants who had so long dominated Philadelphia society and politics, nor by the proprietary Penn family, but rather the city’s artisans and mechanics in alliance with farmers on Pennsylvania’s western frontier.

***

Since 1701 Pennsylvania had been governed under a constitution known as the Charter of Privileges. William Penn had drafted this document establishing an Assembly of elected representatives empowered to initiate legislation that might be approved or vetoed by a governor. The Penn family appointed the governor who was advised by an appointed council. The 1701 charter also guaranteed religious freedom protected from state interference.

In 1681 England’s King Charles II had established Pennsylvania as a proprietary colony controlled by William Penn and his descendants. The Penn family had absolute ownership of the land, which they could sell, lease or grant as they saw fit. They also held mining rights and controlled use of the colony’s waterways. Pennsylvania’s proprietors represented the British crown in their colony. They were required to uphold the crown’s privileges as well as British trade regulations.

The death of William Penn in 1718 caused his descendants by his first and second wives to debate which branch of his family would inherit the proprietorship. It was not until 1727 that the British Court of Chancery decided that the sons of his second wife, Hannah Penn, would inherit this very valuable asset.

While this issue was being disputed, many Pennsylvania settlers failed to pay their quitrents, annual fees that confirmed their land titles and acknowledged their proprietors’ overlordship. Squatters withheld all payments for the land they arbitrarily occupied. In 1732 William Penn’s son Thomas arrived in Philadelphia primarily to work with the land office to see that procedures were followed and money collected. He remained until 1741, leaving the interests of the Penn family in the hands of their appointed governors.

The members of Pennsylvania’s Assembly were elected every year in Philadelphia’s wards and Pennsylvania’s townships. To vote, a man had to be a legitimate owner of property worth at least 50 pounds. Provincial civil officers and Assembly members had to take an oath or affirmation acknowledging the sovereignty of the British king.

From time to time, Pennsylvania was troubled by political friction, including charges that peace-loving Quakers were soft on defense. There were attempts to convert Pennsylvania into a royal colony rather than a proprietary colony. Through it all, the Penn family continued to regard the government of Pennsylvania and the ownership of its land as two separate issues, which may explain their relative passivity as patriotic spirit claimed the American Colonies.

Pennsylvania’s earliest settlers came from England and other English colonies. By the middle of the 18th century, they dominated Philadelphia, Bucks and Chester counties in the colony’s southeastern corner. They were mostly Quakers and Anglicans, with a minority of Baptists and Methodists.

William Penn’s policy of religious toleration attracted migrants from Europe’s oppressed religious sects. Many were German-speakers, and they settled farther west in Berks, Northampton and Lancaster counties. Most were Lutheran and Reformed, but others were divided among various sects, including Moravians, Brethren (Dunkers), Mennonites, Amish, Schwenkfelders and smaller groups. Their religious diversity made it difficult for them to organize for effective political representation, compounded by the fact that many of them could not read English.

Pennsylvania’s Scots Irish migrated in the latter half of the 18th century and pushed west to the frontier. They were predominately Presbyterian.

In the 1770s it could be estimated that Pennsylvania’s population was one-third English and one-third German, with the remaining third predominately Scots Irish. This meant that the majority of Pennsylvania residents had no particular allegiance to or love for the British crown.

By the mid-18th century, it had become a tradition for dissenting sects or other groups to form committees to petition governing bodies to redress their grievances. Committees were not illegal; they were extralegal. In Philadelphia, resistance committees had been formed to oppose the widely unpopular Stamp Act.

John Penn, the grandson of William Penn, was governor of Pennsylvania when the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution was written.
New York Public Library

When Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773, neither Gov. John Penn nor most members of the Assembly saw much reason for concern. Others viewed the legislation as yet another way to get Americans to accept taxation by Parliament without American representation. In Philadelphia, those in opposition, who were beginning to call themselves Whigs, formed a committee and pressured those merchants preparing to sell the East India Company’s tea to resign their commissions. When a ship bearing East India Company tea arrived in December, committee leaders informed the captain that no one would receive the tea or pay its freight. The tea ship left peacefully without being unloaded — a significant contrast to all the brouhaha in Boston.

The committee movement gave new men, perhaps lacking inherited wealth or family status, a voice in Pennsylvania politics. Charles Thomson (1729–1824) was among the emerging leaders. Born in Ireland, he had arrived penniless in Delaware after his father died aboard ship on their voyage to America. Initially cared for by a blacksmith, he got an education and became a tutor in Latin at a school that would become the University of Pennsylvania.

John Dickinson (1732–1808) was born on a Maryland plantation, the great-grandson of an indentured servant. He studied law in Philadelphia and became a barrister and solicitor. By the 1770s he was well known to American Whigs as the author of a series of opinion pieces first published in the Pennsylvania Chronicle collectively titled “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.” Protesting the Townshend Duties of 1767, he convincingly argued that Parliament had the right to regulate American commerce but not to tax American citizens. His work was widely reprinted in other American newspapers.

In May 1774, Paul Revere arrived in Philadelphia bearing letters from Boston requesting support in opposing the Boston Port Bill, which closed the port of Boston in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party. Thomson and Dickinson attended a meeting at the City Tavern where Dickinson proposed that the governor be petitioned to call the Assembly into session. He advocated the creation of a committee of correspondence to express moral support for Boston.

John Penn first declined to call the Assembly but later acquiesced, writing his family in England, “Every step will be taken that can to keep things in as moderate a state as possible.”

In June, Dickinson presided over a public meeting in the State House Yard where Whigs declared it was unconstitutional to close the port of Boston and that Americans must convene a Continental Congress to strategize and unify their resistance efforts. In July, representatives from Pennsylvania county committees met in Carpenters’ Hall with their Philadelphia counterparts. Charles Thomson acted as clerk. They advocated support for Boston and requested that Pennsylvania’s Assembly members name delegates to the upcoming Continental Congress.

When the congressional delegates began to arrive in Philadelphia that August and September, many of them had read Dickinson’s “Farmer’s Letters.” They wanted to meet Dickinson as well as the men they had already corresponded with. They chose Carpenters’ Hall as their meeting place and elected Charles Thomson as secretary. They adopted a plan of non-importation: an American boycott of British goods to continue until America’s grievances were heard.

Following Pennsylvania’s annual election, the new Assembly members appointed delegates, including Dickinson, to a second Continental Congress to be convened the following year. The Whigs of Philadelphia formally organized themselves into Philadelphia’s Committee of Observation and Inspection to enforce the non-importation agreement by inspecting incoming ships and supervising all commercial activity. Committee board members would meet weekly in the meeting place of the American Philosophical Society.

The following spring brought the alarming news that the British government had declared Massachusetts in a state of rebellion. British troops had been ordered into Boston, and on April 18 they began marching toward Concord to seize gunpowder stored there. Alerted Massachusetts militia men began firing on them at Lexington. After the soldiers found nothing in Concord, militia companies turned their march back to Boston into a retreat.

John Penn wrote his family in England, “Miserable I am that I can only wish for Peace & harmony without being able to do anything toward their reestablishment: however nothing in my power will be wanting for this purpose.”

Many Pennsylvanians decided that the colony had better prepare for war. On April 25, 1775, thousands gathered in the State House Yard for a meeting that had probably been organized by the City’s Committee of Observation and Inspection to establish militia units in Pennsylvania. Calling themselves “associators,” citizens formed companies, began military exercises, and asked the Assembly for financial support. Pennsylvania had no history of compulsory military service and the associators were all volunteers. They would later ask that those who chose not to join them in bearing arms pay a tax.

Benjamin Franklin served as president of the convention that drafted the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution. Anne-Rosalie Bocquet Filleul painted Franklin’s portrait in France, circa 1778.
Philadelphia Museum of Art (Gift of the Honorable Walter H. Annenberg and Leonore Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation, 2007)

Pennsylvania’s Assembly convened in May and added some names to their roster of delegates for the second Continental Congress. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), recently returned from England after having been dismissed from his position as deputy postmaster for the American Colonies, would be one of them. James Wilson (1742–98) would also join the delegation. Wilson had been born in Scotland. Having studied under John Dickinson, he practiced law in Reading. Dickinson drew up instructions for Pennsylvania’s congressional delegates.

In June, the Assembly appointed a Committee of Safety to take charge of Pennsylvania’s militia units and defend the colony in case of invasion. The committee had members from every Pennsylvania county, and they effectively distanced John Penn from his intended role in defending the province.

When the 1775 Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, its members also made preparations for war. On June 14, they created the Continental Army to coordinate military operations among the American Colonies. The army would be supplemented by the local militias and commanded by George Washington.

That summer, John Dickinson would join his fellow Congressional delegates in promoting reconciliation with the mother country. Franklin had earlier written Charles Thomson his opinion that petitions were useless, but Congress adopted the respectful petition Dickinson recommended.

That summer they also discussed whether some of the existing royal colonial governments had become obsolete. Perhaps Massachusetts needed a new constitution? Samuel Adams observed that the time was near when “the most timid will see the absolute Necessity of every one of the Colonies setting up a Government within itself.”

In January 1776, in a pamphlet titled Common Sense, recent immigrant Thomas Paine (1737–1809) proposed that rather than seeking reconciliation, Americans declare their independence. Written in clear, persuasive language, the text was widely distributed and convinced many that “there is something absurd, in supposing a Continent to be perpetually governed by an island.”

While Pennsylvania’s aristocracy, its Quakers, its wealthy merchants, and its Penn family appointees, wanted to maintain the status quo, Paine’s Common Sense divided the Whigs into two camps. Moderates like Dickinson, Thomson and Wilson wanted to preserve Penn’s Charter of Privileges, nor would they support independence until all hope of reconciliation was exhausted. More radical Whigs, including the Scots Irish in outlying areas, were ready to deny the authority of Great Britain even if it meant overthrowing Pennsylvania’s charter government.

When the Assembly met in February, moderates dominated. They were willing to fund the province’s military associations and prepare to defend Pennsylvania if it became necessary, but they denied more radical demands. In response to allegations that the Assembly no longer represented the people of Pennsylvania, they arranged for a special election to be held on May 1 that would admit 17 new members to the Assembly. If the radical Whigs had hoped to take control of this body, they were disappointed with the special election’s results. Moderates retained control by a very small majority.

Pennsylvania’s radicals found common cause with like-minded members of the Continental Congress who also favored American independence. However, Pennsylvania’s congressional delegates were still operating under instructions from the Assembly directing them not to vote for independence.

On May 15, John Adams proposed that all governments deriving their authority from the British crown be replaced. Congress passed a resolution suggesting that the colonies “where no government sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs hath been hitherto established, to adopt such government as shall in the opinions of the representatives of the people best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular, and America in general.”

Between the special election on May 1 and the congressional resolution on May 15, current events significantly altered public sentiment in Philadelphia. And together with greater willingness to accept independence came greater willingness to overthrow the proprietary government of Pennsylvania.

On the afternoon of May 7, two British warships that had been on patrol at the mouth of the Delaware Bay began sailing upriver. Philadelphia’s newspaper accounts differed in their intentions. Their commanders might have been simply seeking to take on fresh water. Or they might have been sounding the channel for military purposes. Or they might have been on their way to attack the city. Those in charge of the city’s defense ordered out boats that had been armed to protect the city. Following a skirmish and exchange of fire lasting into a second day, the Americans forced the British back downriver to New Castle.

Philadelphians heard the sounds of battle and warnings of imminent attack. Around the same time, news reached the city that Great Britain was sending foreign mercenaries to quell the growing unrest in the colonies. Citizens feared that these foreigners would have little respect for American property or persons. It became clear that there would be war in America, and Pennsylvania would need to join with the other colonies for her own defense.

The Committee for Observation and Inspection issued a call for a public meeting advertised by broadsides printed in English and German. On May 20 an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 people gathered at the State House in the rain. Col. Daniel Roberdeau (1727–95), a merchant and militia leader, was appointed to chair the meeting. The May 15 resolution of Congress was read, and the people were informed that America had received no response to her respectful petition. Instead, their mother country was sending over hired mercenaries. Next the Assembly’s instructions to Pennsylvania’s Congressional delegates were read, with the suggestion that such instructions had “a dangerous tendency to withdraw the province from that happy union with the other colonies.”

The meeting’s leaders and attendees resolved that Pennsylvania’s current government was indeed not “sufficient to the exigencies” of the times, nor was the current Assembly empowered to form a new government. To execute the Congressional resolution, a provincial convention would be needed, its representatives chosen by the people. The Committee of Observation and Inspection would join with counterparts from the counties to convene a provincial conference to determine how to elect delegates to a convention that would write a new constitution for Pennsylvania.

This map of Philadelphia, published in London by Andrew Dury in 1776, shows the downtown neighborhood where revolutionary documents were drafted and signed.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

The meeting’s resolutions were presented and read to the Assembly the following day. Public meetings were soon held throughout Pennsylvania, many of them drafting memorials to the Assembly favoring independence, though one document signed by some 6,000 citizens demanded that Pennsylvania’s Charter of Privileges be retained.

In what might have been a wait-and-see delaying tactic, Dickinson led the Assembly in writing new instructions for Pennsylvania’s congressional delegates that did not prohibit them from voting for independence, nor did it compel them to do so. The new instructions passed by a vote of 31 to 12 on June 8, 1776.

It was not long before the provincial conference delegates convened on June 18. According to their records, they met at Carpenters’ Hall because there was not sufficient space at the State House where the Continental Congress was in session. Among the representatives were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas McKean (1734–1817), a lawyer and representative to the Continental Congress from Delaware who was named chairman. Most of the 108 delegates already favored independence, but few of them had ever taken part in Pennsylvania politics or government before.

On the first full day of the conference, Congress’ May 15 resolution was read and unanimously approved. The delegates declared that “the present government of this province is not competent to the exigencies of our affairs,” thus making necessary an election for a constitutional convention.

The delegates’ most consequential decision determined who was going to vote in this proposed election. They eliminated the old 50-pound property qualification. It seemed undeniable that the military associators who were willing to defend the province should vote, so the delegates extended the franchise to associators over 21 who had lived in Pennsylvania for at least a year and paid provincial or county taxes. The conference members also resolved that before any elected convention delegate could take his seat, he would need to take an oath denying allegiance to the king and swearing to promote the creation of a new Pennsylvania government based on the authority of the people alone.

July 8 was chosen for the election. Pennsylvania’s counties and the city of Philadelphia would each elect eight delegates. This was hardly proportional to population, but a proper census would have been impractical.

Before they adjourned on June 25, the delegates recommended that the existing Committee of Safety be replaced by a Council of Safety, assuming all executive powers of government relating to the province’s defense. Following a banquet at the Indian Queen Tavern, the delegates returned home.

Before the election was held, another dramatic event took place in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation had previously voted against declaring independence and so had other Middle Atlantic colonies’ delegations. However, the provincial conference had urged Pennsylvania’s delegates to concur with any congressional vote for independence, and popular sentiment was rapidly changing in Maryland and New Jersey after the British fleet had been seen off the Jersey coast on June 30.

On July 1, four out of seven Pennsylvania delegates still voted against declaring independence. Benjamin Franklin is credited with proposing a graceful, face-saving solution. On July 2, two anti-independence delegates, John Dickinson and Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris (1734–1806), absented themselves from Congress. This left three Pennsylvania delegates in favor of independence and only two opposed. Pennsylvania cast her vote for independence.

That same day, Ceasar Rodney, the third delegate from Delaware, arrived after riding overnight in a rainstorm to break a tie vote in Delaware’s congressional delegation. On July 4, the text of the Declaration of Independence was formally adopted unanimously by the Second Continental Congress.

The declaration was read to the public assembled in the State House Yard on July 8, which was also election day in Pennsylvania. The provisions put in place by the Provincial Conference meant that more conservative citizens still wary of independence did not vote, nor were any conservative or moderate leaders on the ballot. Those elected to the Constitutional Convention were mostly farmers and artisans, many with militia experience. Honest and well-meaning as they may have been, most of them had no legal education or prior experience in government. One exception was Benjamin Franklin, who was chosen by the convention as its president when sessions opened on July 15 in the West Room of the State House. Despite his title, Franklin was often absent because he was simultaneously serving as a member of Congress. It remains unknown how much he contributed to the creation of a new state constitution.

The members laid some down-to-earth ground rules for debate, such as not interrupting another speaker, and no use of indecent language.

Delegates of the 11 counties of Pennsylvania signed the last two pages of the Constitution of 1776.
Pennsylvania State Archives, RG-26

Before taking up the task that they had been elected to do, convention members issued orders for the province’s defense. As the Provincial Conference had suggested and Franklin approved, they appointed a Council of Safety. Following directions from Congress, they issued orders for troop movements of Pennsylvania’s militia associators. They recognized and considered requests from committees in outlying counties for military funding and equipment.

They also named a new delegation to Congress, exhorting them to constant and punctual attendance and instructing them to cultivate and strengthen “by every means in your power, the present happy Union of these States.”

Work on the new constitution continued until early September. Among its authors were men like Robert Whitehall (1735–1813) of Cumberland County, a farmer who strongly favored local government; Timothy Matlack (1736–1829), a Philadelphia brewer, militia associator and disowned Quaker; and George Bryan (1731–91), a Presbyterian born in Dublin who would later propose legislation to gradually abolish slavery. James Cannon (1740–1782), a mathematician born and educated in Edinburgh, is acknowledged as the constitution’s principal draftsman. He also drafted the instructions for Pennsylvania’s new Congressional delegates. On September 10 the document was published in folio form, and its text appeared in newspapers by the following week. Before most citizens had a chance to read it, let alone consider and vote on it, the convention adopted the constitution on September 28 and adjourned.

While the convention had remained in session, the Assembly had trouble reaching a quorum. As their final official act, they voted to pay all public officers, including John Penn, before they also adjourned for the final time.

The new constitution had a bill of rights similar to Virginia’s Declaration of Rights penned by George Mason the previous May. It stated that all men were born equally free and independent, possessing inalienable rights including life, liberty and property, and that all governmental power was derived from the people. Like Penn’s Charter of Privileges, it guaranteed religious freedom. It also granted other rights familiar to American citizens today including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to bear arms.

The constitution retained Pennsylvania’s one-chamber legislature, its members to be elected annually. Suffrage was broadly granted to male residents but required them to take an oath to accept and uphold the new constitution. Initially, each county would elect six members to the new legislature, but a census was planned, and representation would thereafter be proportional to the population.

The constitution stipulated that all bills introduced by the legislature would be printed for public review and not passed until the following legislative session. This was intended to allow people living in outlying areas to read the proposed legislation and make their opinions known.

The constitution made no provision for a governor with veto power over the legislature. Pennsylvania would have an elected Executive Council to see that the province’s laws were executed. The council would be made up of one member from each county and one from the city of Philadelphia, each serving a three-year term. A Council president would be chosen annually by the council members and legislators. Council members would appoint all non-elected government officers as well as the judges of Pennsylvania’s supreme court. The legislature retained the power to establish lower courts. Perhaps because many settlers had always resented the fees and quitrents collected by the proprietors, there would be no public role for the Penn family.

It would not be easy to change the new constitution. Amendments could be made only once every seven years by a Council of Censors elected from each county. These censors would determine whether the government was operating according to the constitution’s terms, with no one assuming unwarranted powers. The censors could propose amendments and convene a new constitutional convention.

The Pennsylvania constitution was finalized around the time the British army landed in Manhattan and began their occupation of New York, a time when a revolution was already underway. The convention was reported to have passed the constitution unanimously but whether it had the full support of all convention members cannot be known. Not every member signed the document. It is possible that those with objections simply absented themselves when the final vote was taken, like Pennsylvania’s congressional delegates.

Pennsylvania soon had two new political parties: constitutionalists and anti-constitutionalists. In opposition were moderate Whigs, men of property, Quakers, and other pietists. Anti-constitutionalists criticized the lack of checks on the unicameral legislature. There was no upper legislative body, and the Executive Council lacked veto power over legislation. There were no courts of appeal. The Council of Censors, with its equal vote by county, gave too much power to less-populated rural and frontier areas, and they were authorized to meet too infrequently, meaning it would take too long to amend the constitution.

Organized opposition began that October. Following a plenary session in Philosophical Hall, a town meeting was held in the State House Yard on October 21 with about 1,500 people attending. Some speakers supported the new constitution; those opposing included John Dickinson and Thomas McKean. The meeting’s resolutions stated that the new constitution deviated too much from Pennsylvania’s former government, as well as the governments of other American states.

A few days before the next scheduled election in November, more anti-constitutionalists met in Philosophical Hall to draw up an opposition ticket. Even though many Quakers refused to take the oath needed to vote, when the votes were counted, the constitutionalists lost in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania’s first new legislature had many members opposed to its constitution. When they met, they elected a speaker and treasurer but lacked the votes to call a new constitutional convention, so some anti-constitutionalists walked out, making it difficult to maintain a quorum. This left the old Council of Safety in charge, raising the question of how the new government could effectively operate.

Former governor John Penn never mentioned the new constitution in his surviving letters to his family in England. A letter from John Penn’s brother-in-law to his aunt, Lady Juliana Penn, written the following spring from British-occupied New York, stated that, “When the frenzy of the people became to[o] high to be opposed, & they had thrown off all allegiance to his Majesty, [John Penn] thought it proper to retire to his house over Schuylkill, where he has lived in the most private manner.”

In November 1776, Congress issued an urgent demand that Pennsylvania’s Council of Safety call out associators from Philadelphia and the surrounding area. British Gen. William Howe was marching his army across New Jersey, apparently intent on capturing Philadelphia. A lukewarm response caused Congress to issue a second call in December for armed and supplied troops to support Washington’s army. Many Philadelphians made hasty plans to leave town. Washington’s surprise attack and victory at Trenton briefly calmed the city down, allowing party strife to once again dominate public affairs.

Sometime during 1777, Benjamin Rush (1746–1813), a prominent physician and Pennsylvania delegate to Congress, wrote a pamphlet titled Observations upon the Present Government of Pennsylvania. Organized as a series of four letters, he argued against Pennsylvania’s unicameral legislature and promoted instead the checks and balances of a government with effective legislative, executive and judicial branches. The solution for Pennsylvania? “The way of duty is plain,” Rush wrote, “Let a convention be chosen, to alter and amend the government. This measure alone will restore vigor and union to Pennsylvania. Say not, my dear countrymen THIS IS NOT THE TIME, THE ENEMY ARE AT OUR GATES, LET US FIRST REPEL THEM.”

The enemy was indeed coming closer. During the summer of 1777, the British fleet was sighted off Delaware Bay. An invasion of Philadelphia again seemed imminent. John Penn, still keeping a low profile, received a visit from armed men asking him to sign a parole: a written promise that he would take no action against the United States, and provide no intelligence to the approaching British army. He hesitated to attach his name to a document that might brand himself and the Penn family British traitors. After all, in 1777, there was no guarantee that the American rebels would win the war. When Howe landed at the head of the Elk River in Maryland, John Penn was ordered out of the city, but he was exiled only as far as a farm his wife’s family owned in New Jersey. His wife, Anne Allen Penn, remained in Philadelphia.

The British army arrived in town on September 26, 1777, encountering no opposition as they occupied the city. By that time the most ardent patriots had fled, and so had Congress, reconvening first in Lancaster, then in York. The British remained until the following spring while Washington’s army spent the winter of 1777–78 at their encampment at Valley Forge.

Once the theatre of battle moved away, the election of 1778 gave Pennsylvania a new legislature, which required its citizens to pledge allegiance to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and swear that they had given no aid to the British since July 4, 1776. Those who refused were barred from participation in politics.

John Penn moved back to his country house to wait out the war. He heard unpleasant rumors that the constitutionalists planned to seize the Penn family’s millions of acres of vacant, unsold land in Pennsylvania. There was also talk of confiscating the private property of loyalists, but this failed to gain momentum among Americans who considered private property sacrosanct. No doubt in an effort to protect the family holdings, John Penn finally took a loyalty oath with the full support of the Penn family.

In March of 1779, Pennsylvania’s legislature debated the justice of leaving so much land in the hands of the Penn family. In September, legislators passed “An ACT for vesting the estates of the late Proprietaries of Pennsylvania in this Commonwealth.” It divested the Penns of approximately 24 million acres of unsold land and formally abolished quitrents. It allowed the Penns to retain personal estates and manors surveyed prior to July 4, 1776. It reimbursed them with a cash settlement of 130,000 pounds, payable after the war was over. The Divestment Act reduced the Penn family from proprietors to private landowners.

By 1780 a counterrevolution was brewing, and the constitutionalists began losing their grip on Pennsylvania’s government. In 1782 John Dickinson was elected to the Executive Council and named its president, giving him the title president of Pennsylvania, which he held until 1785, when Benjamin Franklin was elected to serve out his unexpired term. In 1787 Dickinson became a delegate to the Federal Constitutional Convention.

As soon as Pennsylvania ratified the new United States Constitution, those who had long opposed the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution began pointing out the inconsistencies between these frames of government. In November 1789, a convention held in Philadelphia’s State House addressed the shortcomings of the 1776 state constitution. A committee of convention members drafted a new frame of state government that would give Pennsylvania a bicameral legislature and a single executive with veto power, as well as an independent judiciary. The new constitution retained a bill of rights and guaranteed broad suffrage with no property qualification. Following the convention’s adjournment in February 1790, the document drew general satisfaction from the public. Although there were new versions in 1838, 1874 and, most recently, 1968, which itself has been amended several times, the constitution remains largely intact today.

Pennsylvania’s experiment with a purer form of democracy was over. But it had been Pennsylvania’s own 1776 revolution that gave many citizens a vote and a new voice in government and motivated Pennsylvania to unify with other North American colonies to declare and fight for independence from the British Empire.

Sidebar: The Rooms Where It Happened

Carpenters’ Hall

Carpenters’ Hall
Wikimedia Commons / Photo, Peter B. James / CC BY-SA 4.0

Located east of the State House, Carpenters’ Hall was constructed by the members of America’s oldest craft guild: the Carpenters’ Company of the City and County of Philadelphia. The guild acquired their building lot in 1768. Their hall was intended to be an income-producing rental space, and it can still be rented for events. It was also intended to be a showcase for the skills of the guild members, and it is acknowledged today as one of America’s finest examples of late Georgian public architecture. It is a square building with cutouts on each side, giving it the shape of a Greek cross.

When the First Continental Congress arrived in 1774, the building was mostly completed but lacked some finishing architectural touches. John Adams recorded in his diary that his fellow delegates had inspected and approved the venue. By that time the Library Company had moved to Carpenters’ Hall, another benefit for the Congressional delegates. In September and October of 1774, the Congressional delegates were received at the State House by the Assembly for a “grand entertainment” in their honor, presumably in the Long Room.

Like their use of the State House, the British also occupied Carpenters’ Hall in 1777 and used it as a hospital.

In 1982 the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission officially recognized Carpenters’ Hall as the “Birthplace of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” honoring the building’s use by the Provincial Conference in 1776.

The State House (Independence Hall)
Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

The State House

The building that John Penn and his contemporaries called the State House is now known throughout America as Independence Hall. It is famous as the place where both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were adopted and signed. It is now the centerpiece of Independence National Historical Park, its interior carefully restored to its 18th-century appearance.

When the Second Continental Congress arrived there in 1775, the State House was already well known as the official government building of Pennsylvania. Plans for its construction date to 1729, when the Pennsylvania Assembly committed funds to build themselves a dedicated meeting place. Before that the legislators had been meeting in rented properties or sometimes in Philadelphia’s original City Hall at Second and Market Streets. In 1730 designated trustees purchased building lots on what was then the outskirts of town. The large building was completed in phases between 1732 and 1753 as funding became available, but by 1735 the building was sufficiently finished for the Assembly to begin meeting there.

The Assembly Room, which became Congress’ meeting room, was one of two large chambers on the building’s ground floor, located on the east side of a central hall. The room on the west side housed Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court.

Upstairs were two smaller chambers. The Governor’s Council Chamber was on the west, and on the east was a room used as the Assembly’s committee chamber. Pennsylvania’s Assembly moved up there when they relinquished their Assembly Room to the Continental Congress in 1775.

Extending the entire length of the second floor on the Chestnut Street side was a gallery intended for public entertainments. In the 18th century it was known as the Long Room.

Since Congress continued to meet in the Assembly Room until 1783, more space was made for the state legislators by removing a wall between their small room upstairs and part of the Long Room.

The State House was constructed with two wings joined to the main building by covered walkways. For a time, Philadelphia’s Library Company deposited its collections on the upper floor of the west wing. During the  building’s early years, visiting Native American delegations were sometimes housed in one of the wings.

When 18th-century documents refer to the State House Yard, they do not mean modern-day Independence Mall. The State House Yard was the area south of the building, or the remainder of the city block between Chestnut and Walnut streets, now called Independence Square.

The British made use of the State House when they occupied Philadelphia. They quartered troops there and used the Long Room as a hospital. After the British evacuated, returning Philadelphians recorded that they had left the place “in a most filthy condition.”

Philosophical Hall
Wikimedia Commons / American Philosophical Society / CC BY 2.0

Philosophical Hall

The building known today as Philosophical Hall stands just south of Independence Hall on Fifth Street. It is the headquarters of the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned and scientific society in America. Initially proposed as an organization “for promoting useful knowledge,” by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, it merged in 1768 with the American Society, a club with the same mission descended from Franklin’s Junto, which had been established for the mutual improvement of members of various trades.

In 1769 the society asked the Assembly for a plot of ground in the State House Yard where they could construct a building. However, the Assembly did not vote to accommodate them until 1785, and Philosophical Hall was not completed until 1789. So, when documents refer to meetings in “Philosophical Hall” in 1774 and 1776, exactly where were these meetings? According to advertisements for the fortnightly meetings of the American Philosophical Society, the members were then meeting in Christ Church School on Second Street.

While there is no such building on Second Street today, a history of Christ Church published by the Rev. Benjamin Dorr in 1841, mentions a church school established in 1718 when the bishop of London sent Philadelphia a school master. In 1766, church records note that the schoolhouse was then vacant, its lower floor to be used as a meeting place for the church vestry. Presumably this chamber was also the meeting place of the American Philosophical Society, whose members applied the name “Philosophical Hall” when they gathered there. Only later was “Philosophical Hall” adopted as the name of the society’s headquarters building.

Further Reading

Bockelman, Wayne L., and Owen Ireland. “The Internal Revolution of Pennsylvania: An Ethnic-Religious Interpretation.” Pennsylvania History 41, no.2 (April 1974): 124–159. / Brunhouse, Robert L. The Counter Revolution in Pennsylvania: 1776–1790. Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, 1971. / Ryerson, Richard Alan. The Revolution Is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765–1776. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978. / Selsam, J. Paul. The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776: A Study in Revolutionary Democracy. New York: DaCapo Press. 1971.

Lorett Treese is a regional historian living in Chester County. She is the author of many articles and books on Pennsylvania history including The Storm Gathering: The Penn Family and the American Revolution and Valley Forge: Making and Remaking a National Symbol. Her most recent works deal with railroad history including her latest book Railroads of the Eastern Shore.

Well-known throughout Philadelphia for her literary gatherings and impressive intellect, Elizabeth Graeme lived a life fraught with difficulty. Swept up in treasonous plots through her marriage to Henry Hugh Fergusson, she struggled to regain her reputation and her property.
Graeme Park, GP86.1.1

By the late 1760s, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s name was known throughout the city of Philadelphia for her evening literary gatherings attended by the city’s intellectual elite. Dubbed “the most learned woman in America” by Anne Hollingsworth Wharton, first historian of the National Society of the Colonial Dames in America, Fergusson’s poetry and journals captured the experience of a woman whose life was shaped, and perhaps shattered, by the turbulence of the Revolutionary War. Twice swept up in scandal by her marriage to a British sympathizer, she spent many years using her literary voice to regain her property and her reputation.

Born in 1737 to Ann Diggs (1700–65) and Dr. Thomas Graeme (1688–1772) of Philadelphia, Elizabeth Graeme enjoyed a privileged upbringing as a member of the city’s upper class. Thomas Graeme was an unofficial advisor to the Penn family and one of the few trained doctors in the colony. His amiable personality earned him numerous political jobs as well, including naval officer of Philadelphia and justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Ann was the stepdaughter of Pennsylvania provincial governor Sir William Keith (1669–1749). She bore between nine and 12 children (no firm record exists) during her marriage but much to her distress, only three in addition to Elizabeth survived to adulthood: Thomas, who died at 26 in 1747, Ann (1726–66) and Jane (1727–59). Though Ann and Jane were significantly older than Elizabeth, the three sisters shared a close relationship throughout their lives.

By the time of Elizabeth’s birth, the Graeme family maintained two houses: a rented mansion in Philadelphia used during the winter months and an estate in Horsham called Graeme Park, which Graeme had purchased in 1739 from Keith, who had a falling out with the Penn family, forcing him to return to England. The 1,700-acre estate, originally established in 1722, consisted of a mansion house, servants’ quarters, a malthouse and several dependencies. Under Graeme’s supervision, the property flourished into a lush country estate and working farm with a deer park, livestock, ornamental and medicinal gardens, and marketable crops such as wheat, rye, barley, oats and hay. He also remodeled the house to reflect the style of the day, installing fine wood paneling and imported marble fireplaces. The Graeme family spent their summers at Graeme Park until 1772, when Elizabeth made it her permanent residence.

Though numerous educational institutions for girls existed in Philadelphia during Elizabeth’s childhood, her mother took it upon herself to provide her with an extensive education. Influenced by pamphlets circulating from Great Britain that encouraged elite women to pursue an education grounded in the Enlightenment ideals of reason and rationality rather than ornamental pursuits, Ann introduced her daughter to a broad variety of subjects, such as history, literature, the arts, moral philosophy and the sciences. She encouraged Elizabeth to think critically, read extensively, and voice her opinions. Careful to ensure her daughter was a well-rounded woman, Ann also instructed her in the feminine pursuits of needlework, spinning and weaving — activities Elizabeth pursued throughout her life.

Elizabeth and her elder sisters were often present at gatherings hosted by their mother where upper-class Philadelphians of both sexes engaged in discussions related to literature, history and philosophy. By the time Elizabeth reached adulthood, she was a prolific poet, well-versed in the Bible and popular literature of the day. She could read the classics in Latin and Greek, spoke fluent French, and studied Italian.

Dr. Thomas Graeme purchased this estate in 1739 as a summer home. The house was originally constructed in 1722 by provincial governor Sir William Keith and named Fountain Low. Graeme began extensive renovations in 1755, including the installation of Georgian-style paneling, a formal garden, and a 300-acre deer park.
Wikimedia Commons / Mechanical Curator Collection, British Library

Through her parents’ broad social connections, Elizabeth established a circle of friends that included many influential Philadelphians: Benjamin Rush (1746–1813), Francis Hopkinson (1737–91) and Rev. Jacob Duché (1737–98). Elizabeth and her friends socialized at dancing events, spinning bees and hunting parties. They also gathered to read aloud and discuss poetry that they had written, critiquing each other’s work, exchanging ideas, and offering suggestions for self-improvement.

Elizabeth’s affluent upbringing and extensive education should have enabled her to lead a comfortable life. Her family had prepared her well to become the wife of any number of eligible Philadelphia bachelors. Elizabeth’s fate, however, was much more complicated and fraught with difficulties. An early failed romance followed by the death of her mother and sister caused Elizabeth much grief, but later a disastrous marriage rife with betrayal, combined with the outbreak of the Revolutionary War and its ensuing consequences, irrevocably damaged Elizabeth’s reputation and finances. These events cost her the loss of many of her friends and ultimately her home, leaving her with little in her later years but her writing, for which she is still known today.

In 1752, when Elizabeth was 15, she began a relationship with 21-year-old William Franklin (1730–1813), son of Benjamin Franklin, who was studying law, serving as clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, and acting as aid to his father. Thomas Graeme, a political opponent of Benjamin Franklin, disapproved of Elizabeth’s budding relationship. William declared his love for Elizabeth in a letter dated February 26, 1757. He addressed Elizabeth by her pseudonym, “Laura,” and in verse: “Laura’s too powerful Charms have shown, My Heart is now no more my own.”

William urged Elizabeth to agree to marriage before he went to England to continue his legal studies. Elizabeth’s parents, hoping the relationship would dissolve during William’s absence, persuaded the couple to postpone a formal engagement or marriage until William returned from England. Elizabeth’s frustration with William’s poor communication while abroad, and his inability to reconcile their families’ political differences, caused the relationship to founder, and the pair ended their engagement in 1759.

The son-in-law of Sir William Keith, Dr. Thomas Graeme was a respected physician who served as the port physician of Philadelphia. He was appointed to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1731 and frequently served as an unofficial advisor to the Penn family. Graeme died of a heart attack on the grounds at Graeme Park in 1772.
Graeme Park

Between 1759 and 1762 Elizabeth’s family suffered numerous hardships. Her elder sister Jane Graeme Young died in childbirth in January 1759. Jane’s husband, James, unable to raise their surviving children alone, left Anny, aged 3, and John, aged 2, with Elizabeth and her parents, who raised and educated them until 1772. Elizabeth’s mother suffered several bouts of illness, complicated by the grief of losing Jane, prompting Ann to prepare for her own death. Thomas Graeme developed a lingering cough that so debilitated him, he feared he would have to give up his medical practice. And Elizabeth herself, who had always been frail, was plagued by recurring headaches and fevers.

In 1763 an opportunity arose for Elizabeth to accompany family friend Richard Peters (1704–76) on an extended trip to England. Peters, the Anglican rector of Christ Church in Philadelphia, was traveling overseas to seek medical advice and formalize his appointment as rector. Highly educated, literate and well connected, Peters promised to introduce Elizabeth to his English acquaintances and guide her through the country. The pair arrived in England in July 1764, and during the trip, Elizabeth kept a travel journal that she sent home to Philadelphia in three parts, where it was passed among family and friends who read her observations with great pleasure.

Though Elizabeth’s original journals no longer exist, friends copied portions of them into their own journals, some of which survive. Her observations reflect the pleasure she took in making new friends and absorbing the arts, culture and natural beauty of England; however, tragedy struck on July 15, 1765, when Elizabeth received a packet of letters from Pennsylvania, including a letter from home informing her that her mother had died on May 29. Ann Graeme fell ill not long after Elizabeth left Philadelphia but had placed her family under strict orders not to inform Elizabeth of the severity of her illness. Elizabeth and Richard Peters sailed for Pennsylvania in October, arriving in Philadelphia the day after Christmas. She joined her father and remaining sister, Ann, in an emotional reunion. Their reunion was short lived; Ann died suddenly in March 1766.

Unmarried, childless, and now solely responsible for caring for her aging father and her young niece and nephew, Elizabeth reflected sorrowfully on her situation: “an Exile left, forlorn, alone, / One antient Parent all I claim my own.”

Elizabeth turned to her writing to assuage her grief; she paraphrased the Psalms and other sections of the Bible, completed a verse translation of the French work Les Adventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse, and published two articles in the Pennsylvania Chronicle. Elizabeth also exchanged works with other women who shared her passion for writing, including her niece Anna Young Smith (1756–80), whose literary ambitions she encouraged and helped shape; Annis Boudinot Stockton (1736–1801), one of the first female published poets in the colonies; and Hannah Griffitts (1727–1817), a Quaker poet best known for her satiric celebrations of American resistance to British policy in the years leading up to the Revolution.

Serving as her father’s hostess, Elizabeth began to keep regular calling hours through the winter months on Saturday evenings in 1767 at their rented home in Philadelphia. These gatherings to discuss literature, philosophy and politics, similar to salons that were popular in France during the Enlightenment, attracted the intellectual elite of the city. Attendees included Dr. Benjamin Rush, John Dickinson, Rev. and Mrs. Jacob Duché, Francis and Ann Hopkinson, and others. Rush, with whom Elizabeth enjoyed a lifelong friendship, recalled the gatherings with fondness in a biographical essay in Portfolio, published in 1809 a few years after her death: “The genius of Miss Graeme evolved the heat and light that animated them . . . she charmed by a profusion of original ideas, collected by her vivid and widely expanded imagination.” Elizabeth’s “attic evenings,” as Rush called them, became the talk of the city.

In December 1771, Rush attended an attic evening with a guest, Henry Hugh Fergusson (1748–1819), who had recently arrived from Scotland. Twelve years younger than Elizabeth, he was tall, handsome and charming, classically educated, fluent in French, proficient in Italian and Spanish, and had traveled extensively in Europe. Elizabeth was quickly smitten with him. Again, her father had reservations, fearing that Fergusson’s questionable origins and his youth made him a poor suitor. In a poem dated March 4, 1772, Elizabeth declared her love to Fergusson and agreed to marry him, though she was reluctant to set a date. Eager to solemnize their union, Fergusson urged Elizabeth to elope with him, arguing that her reluctance indicated a lack of commitment. They quietly wed on April 21, 1772, in Philadelphia at Swedes Church. Much to Fergusson’s dismay, their union remained a secret throughout the spring and summer as he prepared to return to Scotland on family business. By September of that year, Elizabeth resolved to tell her father, but the day she decided to do so, he died suddenly while walking in the gardens at Graeme Park.

Built between 1698 and 1700, Gloria Dei in Philadelphia is the oldest church in Pennsylvania. Elizabeth Graeme secretly wed Henry Hugh Fergusson in the churchyard on April 21, 1772. After the ceremony, Elizabeth allegedly tripped on a grave—a poor omen for the future.
Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Thomas Graeme’s death presented Elizabeth with a serious financial predicament. As a married woman, under colonial law, all her property became her husband’s for her lifetime, and she was now unable to dispose of her recent inheritance, including Graeme Park, without Fergusson’s approval. Though Elizabeth had spent many happy summers at the estate, she was ill-equipped to manage the sprawling property, nor did she wish to live so far removed from Philadelphia society. She hoped to sell most of the estate and live off the invested capital from the sale, but in her husband’s absence, Elizabeth struggled to be able to settle the debts accrued by the estate. Further, under the terms of her father’s will, Elizabeth inherited the property with the stipulation of a £1,000 legacy payment to her brother-in-law, James Young, and his children, payable at any time or immediately upon the sale of the property.

Fergusson returned to Pennsylvania around 1773 and by October had agreed to sell Graeme Park, though the sale was unsuccessful. Unable to afford a rented house in Philadelphia, the couple lived at Graeme Park year-round. Fergusson spent much of his time on the grounds of the estate, leaving Elizabeth, who had been accustomed to the lively social scene of Philadelphia, isolated and bored.

In November, Fergusson disappeared into the city for a week. Frustrated by his absence, Elizabeth wrote a poem entitled “An Advertisement,” imploring the reader to help her locate her husband who was “Lost, Strayd or Stollen” from her. The emotional toll of her situation likely weighed heavily on her and stifled her intellectual energy. During the period from 1773 to 1777, the once-prolific writer composed only two poems and ceased correspondence with many of her friends, though she did remain in sporadic contact with her niece and nephew. With Anny, Elizabeth discussed poetry, and with John, she discussed the growing conflict between America and Great Britain.

Torn between supporting the increasingly violent colonial opposition to British policy and allegiance to the mother country and not wishing to be swept up in violence, many of Elizabeth’s friends fled Philadelphia. Fergusson himself spoke freely of his disaffection with colonial resistance and his desire to see the colonies reconcile with Britain. In correspondence with Benjamin Rush in June 1775, Fergusson questioned whether war with Britain was worth the sacrifices it required: “Are then our resentments so high, is revenge so sweet a thing, that to distress Britain a few particulars, we will expose ourselves to every horror the imagination can paint? – Our cities destroyed, our fields uncultivated, our plains strew’d with death and ruin and to what end all this?”

Fergusson’s outspoken disaffection upset Elizabeth, who feared that he would be labeled a traitor and punished or imprisoned by colonial authorities. In September 1775, Fergusson departed for Great Britain, allegedly to conduct family business with his brother in Scotland. Whether his decision to leave Pennsylvania was influenced by his feelings about the growing war in the colonies is unclear, but Elizabeth implored him to remain abroad until the conflict was over. His absence, however, quickly became problematic for Elizabeth. She struggled to make the farm at Graeme Park profitable, and she still owed several debts, including the legacy payment to John Young and his children. She petitioned Fergusson for power of attorney to again attempt to sell Graeme Park. Receiving such power in the summer of 1776, Elizabeth sold a portion of the land to satisfy the legacy payment and outstanding debts.

Graeme Park is the only surviving residence of a colonial-era governor and remains largely unchanged, save for the renovations undertaken by Thomas Graeme in the 1750s. The property was donated to the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission in 1958.
Photo, Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission

Fergusson remained abroad until 1777, arriving unbeknownst to Elizabeth in New York the night before the British fleet sailed for Philadelphia. Attempting to return to Graeme Park, Fergusson accompanied the fleet and marched inland with the British army as far as Brandywine Creek. There, he was prevented from completing his journey by colonial forces because of his association with the British, and so he rejoined the army. Word of his return reached Elizabeth on September 25, the day before the British army entered Philadelphia. Unable to return to Graeme Park, Fergusson remained with the British army during their occupation of the city, serving as commissary of prisoners and lodging with loyalist friends Charles and Ann Stedman.

In October 1777 Fergusson persuaded Elizabeth to carry a letter from Rev. Jacob Duché, a longtime friend of Elizabeth’s, to Gen. George Washington. Duché, once a committed patriot and chaplain to the Continental Congress, had become disaffected with the violence of the colonial rebellion and penned a letter to Washington urging him to sue for peace with the British. Whether Elizabeth knew the contents of Duché’s letter is unclear. Nevertheless, she agreed to deliver it and did so on October 15.

Washington read the letter in Elizabeth’s presence, and horrified by its contents, informed her that if the letter was discovered, he would be labeled a traitor. He allowed Elizabeth to leave but told her that he will immediately deliver the letter to the Continental Congress. Washington’s response accompanying the Duché letter called Elizabeth’s participation in its transmittal “ridiculous – and illiberal,” thus rendering her guilty of participating in potentially treasonous activity.

Word of the Duché scandal and Elizabeth’s role in it quickly spread throughout the colonies. At the same time, the Pennsylvania Assembly enacted legislation to seize the property of people who did or had the potential to defect to the British. When news of the act reached Elizabeth, she feared that authorities would seize Graeme Park because of Henry Fergusson’s — and now her own — actions.

Facing the possibility of ruin, Elizabeth wrote to her friends in great distress. Her plight so moved Benjamin Rush that he offered to speak on her behalf to the Executive Council responsible for executing confiscations. Throughout 1777, despite the possibility of losing her home because of Fergusson’s obvious ties to the British, Elizabeth obtained a pass to visit him in Philadelphia as much as she could, obeying the strict orders outlined in her pass.

On May 18, 1778, the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania published Fergusson’s name on a list of men suspected of having joined the British and demanded they appear for a treason trial before June 25 or have their property confiscated by the state. Desperate to retain Graeme Park, her sole source of income, Elizabeth begged Fergusson to report for trial, which he adamantly refused. Believing that she ought to be allowed to retain her property because it had been willed to her by her father and that Fergusson was incapable of committing treason because he was Scottish and not an American citizen, Elizabeth prepared to argue her case to the Supreme Executive Council in Lancaster.

At the same time, a delegation of British peace commissioners including George Johnstone (1730–87) arrived in Pennsylvania, hoping to convince colonial officials to negotiate with Great Britain. Johnstone also lodged with Fergusson at the Stedman home, and hearing of Elizabeth’s planned trip, asked her to convey a letter to Joseph Reed (1741–85), then a member of the Continental Congress, on her way to Lancaster. Elizabeth met with Reed on June 18, hoping he would intercede on her behalf with the Supreme Executive Council. During that meeting, she also conveyed Johnstone’s message, which promised Reed a substantial reward if he would negotiate peace with Great Britain. Reed refused to assist Elizabeth in her attempt to retain her property and rebuffed Johnstone’s offer, stating he “was not worth purchasing, but such as [he] was, the king of England was not rich enough to do it.”

Elizabeth hastened on to Lancaster, where she was unsuccessful at making her case to retain Graeme Park. Compounding her distress, Johnstone’s letter to Joseph Reed and Reed’s account of his meeting with her were published in The Pennsylvania Evening Post on July 26, 1778. Though Reed did not identify Elizabeth, the details of his account made her readily known. Horrified that Reed had implicated her in the transmittal of a bribe attempt, Elizabeth composed a long letter to Reed attempting to exonerate herself, asserting that Reed had already been aware of Johnstone’s mission and wondering, “How far, at this critical juncture of time, this affair may injure my property is uncertain.”

One of the first women to be published in the American colonies, Annis Boudinot Stockton was a member of Elizabeth Graeme’s literary circle. In 1787 Elizabeth compiled a commonplace book for Stockton that contained transcriptions of letters, commentary, and poems by Elizabeth, Henry Hugh Fergusson, her niece Anna Young Smith, and Francis Hopkinson.
Princeton University Art Museum (Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Landon K. Thorne, for the Boudinot Collection)

Having now been implicated in two treasonous scandals at the encouragement of her husband, who was working for the British army, Elizabeth’s ability to retain Graeme Park was in serious jeopardy. She again petitioned colonial authorities, arguing that it had been willed to her by her father in fee simple, meaning that while the property could be sold in her lifetime, upon her death it still passed to her heirs. As such, the colonial government would be unable to make a profitable sale of the property.

Elizabeth was unsuccessful. Pennsylvania’s Agents for Confiscated Estates sold the contents of Graeme Park at auction on October 15, 1778. Though she retained the estate itself and was able to live there so long as she paid rent and taxes, the property remained under threat of sale by the colonial government. Elizabeth made several more petitions to the Assembly, again asserting that Graeme Park was her property and Fergusson was a foreigner. Aided in her plea by several friends including Elias Boudinot, Thomas Franklin and Francis Hopkinson, Elizabeth successfully regained control of Graeme Park in 1781.

Aggravating Elizabeth’s strife, Henry Fergusson went to New York when the British evacuated Philadelphia in June 1778 under suspicion of having fathered a child with the Stedman family’s servant, Jenny. Though Fergusson adamantly denied the allegations and urged Elizabeth to join him in New York where they could depart for a new life in England, Elizabeth demanded proof of his innocence. Throughout the fall, she interrogated Jenny and investigated every possible lead to disprove the child’s paternity without success, all the while pleading with Fergusson to return to Philadelphia to answer the charges of treason and paternity against him. The couple had one final meeting in New Jersey in January 1779 before he departed for England.

Though Elizabeth refused to leave her home, she could not accept her husband’s betrayal and for the next several years hounded him and her friends for evidence to prove or disprove his infidelity. She wrote to Fergusson, begging him to swear an oath of his innocence, which he claimed he did but that it was lost in transit to America. He refused to swear another oath and eventually refused to communicate with Elizabeth about the matter at all. He wrote her in July 1783, issuing an ultimatum to join him in England or he would consider her refusal a “renunciation” of their marriage.

Similarly, many of Elizabeth’s friends tired of hearing her marital woes and eventually stopped communicating with her as well. Elizabeth channeled her woes into a long poem entitled “The Deserted Wife.” Written between 1780 and 1782, the four-part work chronicled how Elizabeth moved from “Hope” to “Doubt” through “Solitude” and “Adversity,” as she struggled to accept her husband’s betrayal.

Following the end of the Revolutionary War, Fergusson filed a claim in England for reimbursement of his losses during the war, including Graeme Park and its contents, claiming that Elizabeth had turned the estate over to him in fee simple before he left Pennsylvania and that he could not return to claim the estate because he was estranged from Elizabeth. English authorities required proof of the value of the estate and Fergusson’s loyalty to Great Britain. Elizabeth provided documentation establishing the value of the estate, but not of Fergusson’s ownership, and he attested to his involvement aiding the British during the war. In 1785 he received compensation totaling £2,304 and had no further contact with his wife. Of the 28 years he and Elizabeth were married, they spent only two and a half of them together. Sources suggest that Henry Fergusson joined the British army in 1793 and was receiving a small allowance from the British government until 1801, after which he disappears from the historical record.

Elizabeth remained at Graeme Park until 1791 when overwhelming debt forced her to sell the estate, which was purchased by William Smith, the widower of her niece Anny, who died in childbirth in 1780. Though Smith offered to allow her to remain at Graeme Park indefinitely, Elizabeth chose to move in 1793, living the remainder of her life in rented rooms. She lived a life of semi-seclusion, largely refusing invitations to visit her remaining friends in Philadelphia, as she feared her husband’s infidelity still made her the subject of vicious gossip.

Throughout her life, Elizabeth compiled several commonplace books, personal notebooks containing poetry, quotes, letters, observations, recipes and references. These works were shared among writers or compiled specifically for a recipient. Elizabeth compiled this book between 1787 and 1788 for the five sisters of the Willing family. It is now in the collection of Graeme Park.
Photo, Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission

Having lost Graeme Park and with her finances in shambles, Elizabeth sought to rehabilitate her reputation, which had been tarnished by her marriage to Henry Hugh Fergusson and the treasonous actions with which he was associated, by engaging in the intellectual pursuits that earned her so much esteem in her youth. She revised and annotated her earlier writings, wrote endlessly, and submitted her works for publication as new periodicals sprang up in Philadelphia. Though she succeeded in publishing numerous pieces, Elizabeth’s financial situation remained precarious as her health declined. Elizabeth took to her bed and died on February 23, 1801.

Though Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s life was marked by heartbreak and loss, her contributions to early American literature remain invaluable today. Her poetry and commonplace books capture the heart-rending experiences of a woman whose life was upended by a disastrous marriage and the chaos of revolution. Further, her attic evenings and correspondence with other female writers in Philadelphia fostered an environment in which women honed their literary voice and shared their experiences, producing a body of work that chronicles the importance of women’s contributions to the Revolution and how that event shaped and reshaped their lives.

Further Reading

Fatherly, Sarah E. “‘The Sweet Recourse of Reason’: Elite Women’s Education in Colonial Philadelphia.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 128, no. 3 (July 2004): 229–56. / Gratz, Simon. “Some Material for a Biography of Mrs. Elizabeth Fergusson, née Graeme.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 39, no. 4 (1915): 385–409. / Mader, Rodney. “Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s ‘The Deserted Wife.’” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 135, no. 2 (April 2011): 151–90. / Nath, Kimberly. “Left Behind: Loyalist Women in Philadelphia During the American Revolution.” In: Oberg, Barbara B., ed. Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019: 211–28. / Ousterhout, Anne M. The Most Learned Woman in America: A Life of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. / Reed, Joseph. Remarks on Governor Johnstone’s Speech in Parliament. Philadelphia: Francis Bailey, 1779. / Slotten, Martha C. “Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson: A Poet in ‘The Athens of North America.’” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108, no. 3 (July 1984): 259–88. / Tillman, Kacy Dowd. Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. / Treese, Lorett. Graeme Park: Pennsylvania Trail of History Guide. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books; Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, 2003.

Jennifer Eaton Barndt is the curator at the Pennsylvania Military Museum in Boalsburg. Her other articles for Pennsylvania Heritage on women and the American Revolution include “Hastening the Deliverance of Her Country: Esther DeBerdt Reed and the Ladies Association of Philadelphia” (Spring 2024), “Elizabeth Drinker and the Quaker Exile” (Spring 2023), and “Two Faces of Molly Pitcher” (Spring 2022).

Rock Ford was the home of Revolutionary War general Edward Hand. In 1802 one of his enslaved farm workers, Frank, escaped from the estate, never to return. Frank was to remain in bondage for life according to the stipulations of the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, so he fled from Rock Ford, emancipating himself.
Rock Ford Foundation

In March 1802, an enslaved man named Frank slipped away from his enslaver in Lancaster County. Prior to his escape, Frank had served as both a chauffeur and a laborer, moving between roads and fields that he would now use as a route to freedom. He fled on a Sunday night wearing a beaver hat and a pair of light-colored pants. Most importantly, he carried a freedom certificate that once belonged to a deceased free Black man named Prince Wheel. Frank intended to pass under that name.

Frank was about 30 years old, born either in 1771 or 1772, and described as “stout made but not corpulent,” according to the runaway advertisement placed by his enslaver, Edward Hand (1744–1802), a prominent Lancaster physician, Revolutionary War officer, and former adjutant general of the Continental Army. The notice ran for nearly six months in the Lancaster Intelligencer, offering $30 for Frank’s capture and return. Then, abruptly, the pursuit ended when Hand died on September 2, 1802. To this day, Frank’s fate remains unknown.

Frank’s self-emancipation came at a particular moment of danger. By the spring of 1802, Hand was in debt, and his estate faced formal settlement. That made Frank a liquid asset in the sale. The fact that Hand’s runaway notice warned that Frank might be sold “south” suggests a circumstance in which creditors were pressing and cash was needed quickly. Whether or not a sale had been already arranged is unknown. What mattered was the risk.

Frank fled 22 years after Pennsylvania passed the nation’s first abolition law. The problem was that the law did not apply to him. And for enslaved people excluded from its protection, an enslaver’s debt could be as binding as an abolition law was freeing. It is possible that Frank was aware of Hand’s debt and chose not to wait to learn how it would be resolved.

The Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, formally titled An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, is often remembered as a moral breakthrough; however, in practice, it was more complicated. Although the act curtailed lifetime chattel slavery for some, it preserved it for others, replacing permanent, inherited bondage with a layered legal system of unfreedom that left thousands of Black Pennsylvanians, Frank among them, trapped in slavery.

To understand what gradual abolition actually meant on the ground, we must see how Frank remained enslaved for life under Pennsylvania law, not because he fled too late but because he had been born too early.

***

African slavery arrived in the Delaware Valley in 1639, 140 years before Pennsylvania enacted the nation’s groundbreaking gradual abolition law and nearly a century and a half before it became a state. By 1681, when Pennsylvania was founded as an English colony, enslaved Africans were living and working in Philadelphia and Chester counties. William Penn himself acknowledged their presence in official colonial records. Philadelphia merchants were instrumental in bringing slavery into the colony, having worked to import African labor from the West Indies, trading grain, lumber and flour for human cargo.

By the eve of the American Revolution, no more than 2 percent of an aggregate population of roughly 300,000 in Pennsylvania held Africans in bondage. Yet chattel slavery remained sufficiently entrenched to shape household economies and labor systems from Philadelphia’s shipyards to the farms and ironworks of the interior.

In reality, Philadelphia stood at the center of the colony’s slave system. According to historians, the city alone held roughly 540 enslaved people who worked as domestic servants, dock workers and skilled tradespeople, including blacksmiths, coopers, sailors and distillers. In wealthier households, owning two or three enslaved people was common; in rare cases, elite Philadelphians held dozens.

The city’s enslaved African population was visible and, as national discourse moved toward Enlightenment principles, more mobile. According to historian Edmund Raymond Turner, slaveholders increasingly complained about enslaved people gathering at night, engaging in disorderly conduct, and “gadding” around town “without written permission from a master.”

Beyond Philadelphia, slavery took on a different but no less significant form. In Lancaster County, where Edward Hand enslaved three people in his city home and Frank at his rural Rock Ford plantation, enslaved people worked on farms, in households, and at iron furnaces. These were sites where slavery was especially valued for its permanence and perceived necessity. Chester and York counties similarly held enslaved populations. Tax documents, inventory lists and runaway advertisements suggest that the average enslaver owned one or two people rather than large gangs.

Slavery in Pennsylvania was thus dispersed rather than concentrated. At minimum, the state’s slavery system could be described as personal rather than plantation based.

***

Pennsylvania’s early antislavery reputation owes much to the Society of Friends. But that reputation can be misleading. From the late 1600s to the early 1700s, Quakers were among the colony’s most significant enslavers, particularly in and around Philadelphia. Moral unease existed early, but it did not immediately translate into abolition.

What some Quakers opposed first was not slavery itself but the slave trade — and, more pointedly, the hypocrisy of fellow Friends who profited from it. In 1688 a small group of German-speaking Quakers in Germantown, many of whom had settled outside Philadelphia in part to distance themselves from slaveholding Friends, issued what is widely regarded as the first formal antislavery protest in British North America. The Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery was less an appeal to distant empires than a rebuke directed inward, aimed at Quakers in Philadelphia who trafficked in human beings.

Addressed to the “Monthly Meeting held at Richard Worrell’s,” the petition depicted the transatlantic slave trade as a direct violation of Christian ethics and the Golden Rule. “Is there any that would be done or handled at this manner?” the authors asked, “to be sold or made a slave for all the time of his life?” The question was deliberately universal. “Now, tho they are black,” the petition continued, “we cannot conceive there is more liberty to have them slaves, as it is to have other white ones.”

The petition draws parallels between Quaker slave traders and the very forms of captivity Europeans feared most. Many, they noted, trembled at the thought of being seized by “Turks” and sold into slavery abroad — yet Quaker enslavers did precisely that to Africans, who were “brought hither against their will and consent, and that many of them are stolen.” That Quakers would engage in such piracy, the petition insisted, made the offense worse, not better.

Most poignantly, the petition linked slavery to family destruction. Enslavers, it charged, committed “adultery” by separating wives from husbands, giving them to others, and selling children away from their parents. Such practices, the authors warned, could not be reconciled within Quaker practice.

Despite its moral warning, the petition was neither acted upon nor enforced. Its argument deferred to a later generation.

***

Irish-born Philadelphia politician George Bryan introduced the legislation that would eventually morph into the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780.
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Capitol Preservation Committee

It was the American Revolution that intensified the call for legislation designed to restrict the slave trade and slavery itself. Pennsylvania’s Constitution of 1776 was among the most radical political documents produced in the Revolutionary Era. It declared that “all men are born equally free and independent” and grounded legitimate government in popular sovereignty rather than inherited authority.

Although it exceeded the democratic reach of most other state constitutions ratified that year, Pennsylvania’s document remained silent on abolishing slavery.

In fact, it can be argued that the 1776 constitution protected slavery. The same declaration that exalted freedom also affirmed the right to “acquiring, possessing and protecting property.” In a society where enslaved people were legally defined as property, the constitution left slavery intact.

This was the world into which Frank was born. He was chattel, excluded from the promise of constitutional liberty and vulnerable to sale decades after the Revolution began.

In September 1778 — roughly one year after Frank’s birth — a single line buried among war news in The Pennsylvania Evening Post announced something extraordinary. “A member,” the paper reported, “presented to the house a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery, which being read the first time, was ordered to lie on the table for consideration and a second reading.”

That member was likely George Bryan (1731–91), an Irish-born assemblyman from Philadelphia and one of the most radical lawmakers of the revolutionary generation. In 1778 Bryan served as acting president of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council — the state’s collective executive body under the Constitution of 1776, which deliberately replaced a single governor with 12 counselors and a president they selected annually to prevent the concentration of power.

On November 3, The Pennsylvania Evening Post reported Bryan had formed a three-man committee charged “to bring in a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery.” Its members included Bryan, Joseph McClean and Thomas Fitzsimons (1741–1811). Although it remains unclear whether McClean was a slaveholder, Fitzsimons would later list two enslaved people on his 1790 census return. The committee, then, represented a coalition with overlapping moral concerns but differing material interests, making compromise inevitable. The bill that eventually emerged reflected intense negotiations.

The first compromise might be described as legislative gradualism. Rather than abolishing slavery outright and immediately, the committee agreed on a phased approach that postponed emancipation across time. Gradualism eased enslavers’ economic anxieties while postponing the social consequences of integrating formerly enslaved Africans into civic life. The men agreed that emancipation would arrive at one’s 28th birthday.

The second compromise was a form of reproductive deferment. By tying emancipation to a distant birthday and making one’s freedom dependent on the status of the mother, the law ensured that enslaved women remained bound through most of their childbearing years. Therefore, children born to them would supply decades of coerced labor before freedom arrived.

When the bill reached its third General Assembly reading on November 18, 1779, eight members voted against putting it up for engrossment. Surprisingly, the dissenters came not from defenders of slavery, but from radical reformers in the Bryan faction of the Assembly who argued the bill did too little. Two opponents objected that binding children until age 28 postponed freedom “unreasonably long.” Their arguments split between immediate emancipation and reducing the age of freedom to 18 or 21.

Their protest revealed that the legislative debate was greater than proslavery versus antislavery factions. It was a struggle over how quickly liberty should arrive, and for whom.

The record fails to give us an exact tally; however, based on quorum estimates reported in The Pennsylvania Packet, or the General Advertiser, between 30 and 52 legislators likely supported moving the bill forward. It provided a commanding majority because wartime conditions usually placed active attendance at fewer than 60 members. Pennsylvania had crossed a threshold, and the final vote was set for February.

***

For the first time in any American legislature, slavery was discussed as a statutory problem, subject to repeal by law. Aware of the firestorm that awaited them if an engrossment vote were taken up without public comment, legislators sent the issue to the public arena.

On December 23, 1779, The Pennsylvania Packet, or the General Advertiser printed the draft of the bill in full on its front page. It was a transparent step designed to invite Pennsylvanians far beyond the Assembly chamber to voice their concerns. Two days later, on Christmas morning, the paper published a long, unsigned letter to the editor from an anonymous clergyman writing under the initials “C.D.” Addressed to fellow ministers in the countryside of York, Lancaster, Cumberland and Berks counties, where slavery remained economically entangled with agriculture and household labor, C.D. brushed aside standard proslavery claims that abolition would bring economic ruin.

Property, he argued, could not be claimed in human beings without violating the “natural, inherent and unalienable rights” on which Pennsylvania’s Constitution rested, turning republican government into a contradiction in practice. A government that claimed its authority from the consent of the governed could not, in the same breath, deny personhood to any group of people living in the commonwealth. When the law turned human beings into property, he wrote, representation lost its moral high ground, making citizenship a privilege to some rather than a right owed to all. (This was a debate about republican legitimacy, not yet apportionment; the federal Constitution, with its Three-fifths Compromise, still lay years in the future.)

In 1792 native Philadelphia artist Samuel Jennings (active 1789–1834) created what is known as the first antislavery painting by an American, Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, or The Genius of America Encouraging the Emancipation of the Blacks. The allegorical scene was commissioned by the Library Company of Philadelphia and features a personification of Liberty presenting symbols of knowledge and learning to formerly enslaved Black people.
Library Company of Philadelphia (Gift of the artist, 1792)

C.D. also took aim at biblical defenses of slavery, especially claims that enslaved Africans required Christian “saving.” Mosaic law, he explained, had permitted slavery due to greed — “the hardness of men’s hearts,” he wrote. If the Gospel could be invoked to justify chattel slavery, C.D. warned, it forfeited its moral authority altogether. To postpone abolition under Christian pretenses was not prudence, but hypocrisy. “If Christianity can allow of this,” he argued, “what shall we say is done evil?”

On January 27, another anonymous writer warned that the law’s success would depend not on its principles, but on its enforcement. “By the operation of this Act,” the writer observed, “a number of persons will in the course of time become free subjects, and have to provide for themselves.” The danger, he argued, was not freedom itself, but freedom without preparation for full participation in economic and civic life. If enslavers yielded “severe service” (slavery) while neglecting to educate the enslaved with reading, trades and moral instruction, those set free would become free without the skills of citizenship — and then bear the blame for consequences they did not create.

***

After the airing of public views, the final vote on the bill fell on Tuesday, February 15, 1780.

Although an exact tally is unknown, the abolition bill “passed by a great majority of voices,” according to the February 17, 1780, edition of The Pennsylvania Packet, or the General Advertiser. The law, hailed its supporters, was a great “effort in behalf of liberty.”

On March 1, 1780, An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery became law. On enforcement day, the press called it an “act of humanity, wisdom and justice.” But what, in practice, did this landmark law actually do?

First, the act ended chattel slavery for children born to enslaved women in Pennsylvania after March 1, 1780. Slavery, thereafter, would no longer reproduce itself indefinitely through birth. In that sense, the law placed slavery on a distant path toward extinction.

Second, the act replaced lifetime slavery with a new form of statutory indentured servitude. Children born to enslaved women after March 1, 1780, were declared neither slaves nor free persons. Instead, they were bound as servants to their mother’s owner, or that owner’s assigns, until the age of 28. During that period, they were subject to the same disciplinary authority as short-term indentured servants, including what the law called “like correction and punishment.” Their freedom was guaranteed only by survival, time and legal compliance by those who controlled them.

Because legal status followed the mother, a child born to an enslaved woman was also born unfree, bound to service until age 28 regardless of their mother’s eventual emancipation. As a result, families could remain legally unfree for decades after 1780, with each generation’s term of bondage resetting at birth and extending coerced labor well into the 19th century.

This is exactly what concerned the Bryan faction. The law preserved a market in African labor long after the law’s passage. For example, advertisements for the sale of statutory servants would appear in Pennsylvania newspapers into the 1800s. In May 1815, more than three decades after the act’s passage, the Adams Centinel advertised “Four Young Servants for Sale,” noting that “copies of their registry, required by the 4th section of the law of 178[0],” would be made available to prospective buyers. The private sale of statutory servants underscores how easily gradual abolition preserved commercial exchange in African labor.

Third, the act preserved pre-existing bondage. No one enslaved at the time of the law’s passage would ever be freed by it. Men and women born before the effective date remained enslaved for life, provided their owners complied with the statute’s requirements. The law drew a firm line at birthdate, and for those on the wrong side of it — even those born on February 29, 1780 — legislative freedom remained out of reach.

Fourth, the act required enslavers to register every enslaved person by name, age, sex and residence with county clerks by November 1, 1780. Failure to register carried a stark consequence: Any enslaved person not properly entered on the rolls would automatically gain freedom. If kept in bondage thereafter, a person could claim unlawful detention or kidnapping.

This new registration requirement raises a larger question: Was gradual abolition a utopian moral gesture, or a reform grounded in the political economy of slavery itself? By placing the burden of compliance on enslavers — and attaching freedom as the penalty for failure — the act quietly transformed slavery from a customary condition into a bureaucratic one, vulnerable to error. For reformers like George Bryan, the registration compromise did not abolish slavery. It was, however, a win for the radicals, as it certainly offered a way out of bondage for chattel slaves like Frank.

The first page of An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.
Pennsylvania State Archives, RG-26

Registration deadlines and clerks’ records now determined who remained enslaved and who did not. And it was this precise legal requirement that drew the earliest and loudest opposition to the law.

Almost immediately, enslavers petitioned the Assembly, claiming ignorance of the law, missed deadlines, and hardship in the countryside where its requirements, they insisted, had never reached them. For instance, in February 1781, according to The Pennsylvania Evening Post, a petition signed by several eastern Pennsylvania farmers had been submitted to the General Assembly, claiming that, “being ignorant of the particular directions of the law for the gradual abolition of slavery, they had omitted to register their Negroes.” While not disputing the act’s authority, the petitioners claimed ignorance of its procedural requirements and therefore sought leniency after missing the deadline. The Assembly ordered the petition “to lie on the table for consideration.”

Public reaction demonstrated little sympathy. In April, a blistering response appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal, or Weekly Advertiser, signed simply “FREEMAN.” The author scoffed at the slaveholders’ request for an extension, calling it a proposal to “resume the punishment of perpetual slavery.” To retroactively strip away freedom from those whom the law had already declared free, he proclaimed, would reduce republican law to a cruel trick. “Like a rogue’s device,” he wrote, “to give a pocket under one hand, and snatch it back with the other.” Freedom, once granted by statute, could not be reclaimed by a petition.

The Freeman’s Journal printed a second public condemnation that June. This one cautioned that any attempt to reopen the registration deadline threatened the rule of law itself. “Can the legislature make a freeman today,” he asked pointedly, “and tomorrow reduce him to slavery again?” To do so would violate not only natural rights but the very principle for which the American Revolution was fought. Once freedom had been vested by law, it could not be withdrawn “without injustice.” Free Black Pennsylvanians, he insisted, were citizens in the eyes of the state constitution. Even as Pennsylvanians debated freedom in constitutional terms, the Revolutionary War itself had produced a situation the law as written could not resolve.

***

From the war’s outset, enslavers from Maryland and Virginia displaced by the fighting had been relocating to Pennsylvania as wartime refugees. The Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 had not anticipated this movement, nor did it say anything about non-Pennsylvania residents who had previously entered the state holding enslaved people. As the flow of refugees increased, lawmakers who had championed gradual abolition confronted a problem of how to reconcile antislavery reform with wartime asylum.

In October 1781, the Assembly responded with a supplementary statute titled An Act to Give Relief to Certain Persons Taking Refuge in This State, with Respect to Their Slaves. Its preamble framed the issue sympathetically. “Many virtuous citizens of America,” driven north by the enemy, had sought safety in Pennsylvania. The question was whether those refugees could retain enslaved people they brought with them.

This 1781 wartime relief statute carved out a temporary exception to chattel slavery in the commonwealth. Refugee slaveholders were permitted to “retain, possess, and hold” enslaved people while residing in Pennsylvania. The act carried three provisions. First, they were required to register those individuals within six months of arrival or of the law’s passage. Second, they could not sell or lease their enslaved people to Pennsylvanians. And third, they were forbidden from retaining slaves in the state more than six months after the conclusion of the war. This statute closed with an explicit safeguard: “Nothing herein contained shall be deemed . . . to enslave any person . . . emancipated or freed” per the 1780 Gradual Abolition Act.

Even after the refugee exemption was carved into law, the pressure on the Assembly did not subside. Enslaver petitions continued to flood the legislature through the fall and winter of 1781. Some enslavers pleaded personal hardship. James White, for example, announced himself as a discharged Continental soldier and prisoner of war. He argued in front of the Assembly that his “captivity with the enemy” had prevented compliance and asked that the people he enslaved not be allowed to “avail themselves” of freedom guaranteed by the 1780 act. Others continued to invoke ignorance of the law or absence from the state as grounds for a registration extension.

Often overlooked in the legislative record is the history of Black Pennsylvanians petitioning in their own names, urging legislators that they “may not be deprived of their liberty by any future act of the house.” And when lawmakers finally voted on the proposal to soften the registration requirements, the measure failed on a tie vote, with 30 in favor and 30 against.

In 1782 the matter of enslavers asking for registration extensions reached the courts. Increasingly, the claim was tested through writs of habeas corpus when enslavers failed to comply with registration. One case in February involved a young man named Alexis, brought into Pennsylvania after the 1781 wartime relief statute’s passage and later sold. The court held that because he was neither registered nor lawfully indentured, he was “wholly without the provisions of the law” and therefore free.

Just two years after the Gradual Abolition Act became law, competing appeals had transformed both the Assembly and the courts into contested legal arenas where enslavers and freepersons pressed opposing claims. In the Assembly, it exposed one truth: Despite relentless petitions and political pressure, legislators kept narrowly refusing to give in to the proslavery contingent.

In the courts, habeas corpus became a formidable legal instrument for abolitionists. It helped turn missed paperwork, delayed registration or unlawful residence into grounds for liberation.

***

In 1785 The Pennsylvania Gazette reported that the number of slaveholders who had effectively forfeited their human property for failure to comply with the registration deadline was in the hundreds. What startled readers was not the registration rule itself, but the degree of ignorance feigned by enslavers. “Notwithstanding the interest all Slave-holders had in complying with this law,” the writer observed, “yet we find many hundreds of them lost their slaves from their ignorance of it.”

The first page of An Act to Explain and Amend an Act Entitled, An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, commonly known as the Explanatory Act of 1788.
Pennsylvania State Archives, RG-26

Even more damning was the geography. Some of these slaveholders lived “within twelve miles of the city of Philadelphia,” the Pennsylvania Gazette reported. These were not isolated frontier farmers or recent arrivals on the margins of the state. They lived near the seat of government, close to courts, printers and lawmakers. The paper seemed to confirm enslavers’ longstanding argument: “the newspapers at that time circulated only in the city.”

Nevertheless, protests against the 1780 act remained relentless throughout the decade. By that time, the law’s most vocal opponents may have been non-slaveholding white Pennsylvanians stuck paying public costs of emancipation. For example, in March 1788, residents of Bucks County petitioned the Assembly to revise Section 4 of the 1780 act, objecting to the provision that required they bear financial responsibility to “support and maintain negro children born” under the law’s gradual framework. The petitioners argued that these freepersons were not enslaved in the traditional sense and that, as statutory indentured servants, they should have acquired sufficient trade skills to sustain themselves upon entering freedom. Specifically, they objected to the fact that tax revenue from city and township residents paid for the upkeep of 28-year-old people made free by the law.

Section 4 had been designed to prevent precisely the outcome petitioners now sought — abandonment. It made local governments financially responsible for a former enslaved person’s freedom. What the Bucks County petition made plain was that gradual abolition had shifted costs away from individual slaveholders to a portion of the public that had never enslaved anyone. The idea of subsidizing an institution they neither participated in nor supported is irrational, they maintained. Their request to lawmakers: Have the perpetrators of slavery pay the cost to its victims.

The Assembly neglected to respond to the Bucks County petition by reopening debate on Section 4. Instead, it responded by clarifying and reinforcing the statute itself. That month, lawmakers passed An Act to Explain and Amend an Act Entitled, An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, commonly known as the Explanatory Act of 1788. In addition to clarifying details about the 1780 act, this new law restricted the “sale, transfer, and removal out of this state” of both chattel slaves and statutory servants. Its purpose was to prevent enslavers from cashing out on people whose freedom was near by selling servants into regions where lifetime chattel slavery still prevailed.

The Explanatory Act kept Section 4 of the 1780 law intact. Local governments remained responsible for supporting free Black Pennsylvanians once statutory servitude ended. To the Bucks County petitioners’ dismay, emancipation would impose public costs.

Historians estimate that roughly 6,855 enslaved people lived in Pennsylvania at the time of the Gradual Abolition Act’s passage. Within a decade, that number had been cut nearly in half. At the end of the 18th century, slavery lingered across the commonwealth while being “all but dead in Philadelphia.” For lawmakers like George Bryan, gradual abolition appeared to work. When he died, that achievement defined his public memory. His headstone praised him as “equally an opponent of domestic slavery” and credited him as the man from whose pen “the Act of Abolition, which laid the foundation of their liberation, issued.”

***

By the time this watercolor was created around 1812, Philadelphia had the largest free Black population of any city in the United States, approximately 9,000. The painting, Black Sawyers Working in Front of the Bank of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, is attributed to John Lewis Krimmel (1786–1821), who painted scenes of everyday life around the city.
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Understanding implications of the Gradual Abolition Act brings us back to the story of Frank.

Frank’s flight from bondage in March 1802 exposes what the law actually did and did not accomplish. According to Edward Hand’s runaway advertisement, Frank was about 30 years old, placing his birth around 1771 or 1772. He had been born too early to benefit from the law’s core promise of freedom upon one’s 28th birthday. Freedom was never reserved for him.

The law required enslavers to register the people they claimed to own. Hand properly registered Frank, so the official paperwork affirmed Hand’s control over Frank. In the eyes of the commonwealth, Frank remained chattel, meaning he was saleable property. Hand’s advertisement made that danger clear. If captured, Frank might be sold south to satisfy Hand’s debts, despite Pennsylvania’s 1788 restriction. It can be surmised that Frank ran because the 1780 act left him exposed.

Because the Gradual Abolition Act also required enslavers to register slaves with the county clerk, statutory servants eventually received formal certificates of freedom. These papers identified them as legally free and protected, at least in theory, from re-enslavement. When he fled, Frank possessed a freedom certificate that had once belonged to Prince Wheel, a deceased free Black man.

Ironically, where in one instance the Gradual Abolition Act trapped Frank into eternal bondage, in another sense, it effectively presented him with the means to escape. Frank fled enslavement because abolition in the commonwealth was as flawed as it was conditional. It created a world in which freedom depended on timing and paperwork.

Pennsylvania crossed a legal threshold in 1780. Self-emancipation offered a physical one, available at any moment. For Frank in 1802, only one of those crossings offered a chance at freedom.

Further Reading

Brunhouse, Robert L. The Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1776–1790. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, 1942. / Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. / Nash, Gary B., and Jean R. Soderlund. Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Todd M. Mealy, Ph.D., is an award-winning historian, educator and curriculum designer with 25-plus years of experience teaching in public schools and higher education. He serves as curriculum director for the Witness Stones Project and has supervised student research and community-wide commemoration projects on enslaved individuals in Lancaster. His previous articles for Pennsylvania Heritage include “Shall Liberty Dwell: James Forten and the Struggle for Black Rights in Early Pennsylvania” (Winter 2024) and “Breaking the Color Line: The Trial That Led to the End of Legal Segregation in Pennsylvania’s Schools” (Summer 2016).

This is a story about the search for an architectural fragment of the second governor’s residence in Harrisburg, purchased in 1864 and first occupied by Gov. Andrew Gregg Curtin. Prior to this, most governors had lived in rented houses throughout the city, many of them less than ideal. In 1858 the legislature declined to build a governor’s house but purchased one on South Second Street below Chestnut, and it became the home of Gov. William F. Packer. Upon his election, Curtin lived there for a short time until a recently built house at 313 North Front Street was purchased from a prominent Harrisburg citizen. The house overlooked the mile-wide Susquehanna River in an area of the city that was safe from flooding.

After Curtin left office and Gov. John Geary moved into the “Executive Mansion,” plans were made to increase the house’s size by building a “twin house” addition, resulting in what would appear to be two identical town houses side by side. The rear portion of the addition was slightly shorter to allow for a small garden space. The address changed to 311–313 North Front Street.

Left, This single house at 313 North Front Street in Harrisburg was purchased by the state legislature as the governor’s residence in 1864. Right, The governor’s house doubled in size with the addition of a twin house and an address change to 311–313 North Front Street.
Left, The Daily Graphic; Right, The State Museum of Pennsylvania

Eventually, the two houses were joined on the interior by removing the wall between them. In the years that followed, many changes and additions were made, creating what was never really a satisfactory residence for governors and their families nor an ideal space for official meetings and receptions.

But it was Gov. James A. Beaver who made one of the greatest (and then generally popular) changes to the Executive Mansion when he took up residence in 1887. At a cost of $15,000 he added a fourth story and a massive Queen Anne–style façade made of brownstone quarried at nearby Hummelstown. The ornate design disguised the “twin house” effect. In place of the center downspout that visually divided the mansion in two, Beaver installed two carved stones, one with the date of the façade installation, 1887, and below it elements of the coat of arms of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania — a shield with an eagle atop it, displaying a ship, a plow and three sheaves of wheat flanked by a corn stalk and olive branch.

Keystone Hall as it appeared after Gov. James A. Beaver’s 1887 renovation. The date stone and shield stone are visible in the center of the building at street level.
Pennsylvania State Archives, MG-213

Beaver was no doubt happy with his new creation and dubbed the house “Keystone Hall.” He spent an equal amount of money on the interior of the house, complete with new furnishings. “My hobby,” Beaver told a friend, “is my home, my state, and my country.”

When Gov. Samuel W. Pennypacker arrived from Philadelphia to take up residence in Keystone Hall in 1903, he was not pleased with what he found. “There was not a single feature about it which had the slightest attractiveness for me. All over it were the manifestations of great outlay, awkwardness, and bad taste,” Pennypacker declared.

Augusta Raymond “Gusty” Gale, who served as administrative assistant and social secretary to 14 governors and first ladies over 34 years, described the interior of Keystone Hall when she first saw it in 1926, when the house’s décor had presumably improved. “It had twenty-seven rooms, eleven bathrooms and powder rooms, and eleven closets,” she wrote. “It also had ninety-one doors and one hundred and nineteen windows.”

The Beaver brownstone façade remained intact until 1960, when the house was sold and razed. After that, governors resided some 20 miles away in the fieldstone “State House” at Fort Indiantown Gap, previously used as the governors’ summer home, until the new Governor’s Residence on Front Street in Harrisburg was completed in 1968.

Now let’s advance to the present, when our cooperative venture begins with a search for the “shield stone” from the brownstone façade.

In June 2025 I posted a stock photo of the brownstone façade of Keystone Hall on a local history social media page. It was seen by Anne Morris, president of the Wilkinsburg Historical Society (Allegheny County), owners of the “1887” date stone from the façade. She asked me if I knew where the shield stone now resided, wondering if it had been installed at the current Governor’s Residence. I had never seen the stone there during frequent visits, and I could not find it in any photos of the new residence.

Keystone Hall’s date stone now stands at the Wilkinsburg Borough Building in Allegheny County.
Photo, Anne Elise Morris

At this point, Fuller Runyon, retired operations manager in the Pennsylvania Department of General Services’ Bureau of Facilities Management, joined the conversation with a vintage newspaper clipping advising the public that the house had been sold and was being readied for demolition.

After Gov. David Lawrence signed legislation to sell the house in January 1960, it was soon auctioned to its Front Street neighbor, the Insurance Company of North America, for $85,000. The new owner determined to save the date stone and shield stone when the York Wrecking Company tore out valuable interior features and razed the house.

The date stone soon went to Wilkinsburg, through the influence of a local realtor and insurance agent, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the borough’s incorporation. To be displayed in front of the borough building, the date stone was enclosed in a stone structure and fitted with an accompanying plaque that erroneously referred to it as a “cornerstone of the Governor’s Mansion.” A new plaque is being considered to give a more complete story of the stone’s origin.

My next stop in the search for the shield stone was the Historic Harrisburg Association. Did they have it in their collection? No. How about the Historical Society of Dauphin County? No. Would the Capitol Preservation Committee have any information on the stone? No. The Pennsylvania State Archives? Several photographs but no record of the stone’s whereabouts.

And so, I went to The State Museum of Pennsylvania. Having worked in the museum building and regularly visiting its exhibits, I had never seen anything that mentioned Keystone Hall, and I had never seen the shield stone on display. But I contacted Dr. Curt Miner, chief of interpretation and senior history curator, and asked if the stone was listed among the museum’s collections. He searched a database and found that a door from Keystone Hall, an andiron, a couch and a billiard rack were among the artifacts from the house. But a stone? No.

The shield stone was discovered in the State Museum’s remote storage area and was finally identified as a surviving fragment of the demolished Keystone Hall.
Photo, Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission

Enter Mary Jane Miller, the museum’s collections manager. Curt showed Mary Jane a photo of the shield stone in place on the front of Keystone Hall, provided by State Archivist David Shoff and his staff at the State Archives. Mary Jane did not at first recognize the photo but later had a memory of seeing such a stone in a storage space adjacent to the underground garage of the museum. When she compared a photo in her files, she confirmed with Curt that it was indeed the shield stone. “Part of what I do is matching up objects with descriptions in the files to complete the records of our collection,” Mary Jane says, “so I have developed a good memory in that area. After Curt showed me the photo, the stone eventually came to mind.”

Doing some investigation, Mary Jane discovered that the stone had been sent to the museum by the Department of General Services (DGS), the state’s “property managers,” in the early 1990s — without any identification or history — and was placed in storage. With no identification, it was never entered into the museum’s database. In 2021 it was transferred to an offsite collections storage facility, still unidentified as an artifact from Keystone Hall.

By now, I was frustrated by the fruitless search. One morning, to my surprise and relief, I found an email from Curt in my inbox. Always the wit, he wrote, “Bingo! Thanks for playing, Mr. Robinson. And thank you for helping us connect the dots. In case you’re wondering, the shield stone was hiding out at our offsite storage facility. Thanks to you, it will now be accessioned and cataloged as the missing holy grail from Keystone Hall.”

At last, the mystery was solved. The shield stone was found and identified and would be properly cataloged in the museum’s collections. Will it ever be displayed? Perhaps not, but it is safe in the hands of the state’s official history agency.

To complete my research for this story, I began to search for photos of the interior of Keystone Hall. I thought that DGS might have photos that accompanied the listing of Keystone Hall for sale. I contacted Paul Vezzetti, the DGS communications director. He responded that his department did not have records or photos of the house, copying Jay Losiewicz, his counterpart at the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission. Jay, in turn, contacted the State Archives, and Suzanne Stasiulatis and Wesley Decker of the digital outreach section were successful in sleuthing out some early photos among the Archives’ papers of Governor James A. Beaver.

In addition, Mary Jane Miller provided photos of furnishings removed from the house and now in the museum’s collections. She also discovered negatives of a number of interior photos of Keystone Hall, made in January 1960, just before the sale and demolition. I find them to be invaluable to the record of the house. Additional photos — of several of the house’s fully furnished rooms — were found by Mary Jane in the files of the State Library of Pennsylvania. Finally, Jesse Teitelbaum, director of archives and reporting for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, helped to clarify the elements of the coat of arms of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

I am happy to say that the cooperation among all who helped to solve the mystery of the “missing” shield stone is common among those working in museums, historic sites, preservation offices, archives and other historical organizations. Thanks to each one for their part in saving this relic of one of Harrisburg’s most important houses.

Further Reading

• Gale, Augusta Raymond. Those Incredible Years. Camp Hill, PA: The Gale Family, 1987. / Greene, LeRoy. Shelter for His Excellency: The Story of Pennsylvania’s Executive Mansion and the One Hundred Governors of the Commonwealth. Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1951. / Keating, Cathy. Our Governors’ Mansions. New York: Abrams, 1997.

John K. Robinson is retired from the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, where he served in several positions, including director of the Historical Marker Program and press secretary. He has contributed both articles and book reviews to Pennsylvania Heritage. Robinson is a past president of the Historical Society of Dauphin County and a life-long resident of the Harrisburg area.

William Bartram’s Visual Wonders
The Drawings of an American Naturalist
by Elizabeth A. Athens
University of Pittsburgh Press, 264 pp., paperback $26

The Bartrams’ fascinating place in American natural history is the starting point for Athens’ sumptuous volume. Readers will gain a wide knowledge of the family of painters and how they influenced humans’ increasing understanding of the natural world in the late 1700s and early 1800s. That, however, is not the main thrust of this book. As a specialist in art history, Athens gives a remarkably in-depth analysis of the style and technique of William Bartram that will particularly interest students of visual history. Combined with glorious representations — even color plates! — of many of his works, William Bartram’s Visual Wonders provides readers with much more technical detail than they may need; however, it clearly establishes the artist’s importance in ideas of natural wonders and processes in the Early Republic era. In this fashion, Athens offers a most valuable contribution to our literature.

The fourth son of John Bartram of Philadelphia County, William has attained timeless fame as a writer of travelogues that provide an insightful, detailed record of North America at this early moment. “Writing was not, however, Bartram’s only or even preferred method of recording the world around him,” writes Athens. “Drawing was by all accounts his ‘darling delight,’ even though most of his illustrations remained unpublished.” Kept mainly in private hands and traded among other naturalists of this era, these rarely seen visuals are Athens’ primary sources. In remarkable detail, Athens traces “the roots of Bartram’s natural history to his drawing practice.” To do so, she explores minutiae of technique and practice that searches for consistency and knowledge in each of the images that she analyzes to create a most unique historical source.

Brian C. Black
Penn State Altoona

Andy Warhol’s Mother
The Woman Behind the Artist
by Elaine Rusinko
University of Pittsburgh Press, 528 pp., hardcover $40; paperback $24

Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928, the man better known as Andy Warhol went on to become one of the most enduringly prominent American artists of his generation. Warhol’s legacy has been turned to repeatedly in recent biographies, docuseries and exhibitions aimed at humanizing, queering and otherwise breaking down the barriers of the artist’s inscrutable public persona and the obdurate renown of his best known works of Pop Art. Elaine Rusinko offers another path to insight: the numerous ways in which Warhol’s life and career were profoundly shaped by his mother, Julia Warhola.

Julia was a Carpatho-Rusyn woman, born in the village of Miková (present-day Slovakia) in 1891, who lived most of her life as a migrant to the United States in Pittsburgh and New York. Warhol’s Mother unfolds over eight chapters that move the reader from Julia’s marriage to Warhol’s father, Andrii, in 1909, to their years raising their children in Pittsburgh in the 1920s-1940s. At the midway point, the book takes a turn when Julia moves to New York to join Andy in 1952. The two cohabitated, and collaborated, for many years, with Julia fussing over her son and providing the lettering for many of his illustrations. A portrait of a close, if complicated, relationship emerges. While mother and son became more distant during the 1960s, Rusinko also details Julia’s acquaintance with Warhol’s romantic partners and art world associates. Rusinko credits many aspects of Warhol’s personality to Julia (and to his Carpatho-Rusyn identity): his interest in drawing, penchant for fabulation, superstitions, work ethic, stinginess, and dislike for people who think they’re better than others.

As much as Julia’s story intersects with her son’s, Rusinko’s book centers on Julia herself. Rusinko, who is a scholar of Carpatho-Rusyn literature with Carpatho-Rusyn heritage, writes on Julia less as a straightforward biography subject and more as a microhistorical intermediary to the particularities, and difficulties, of Slavic immigrant experiences in the early to mid-20th century. The book may appeal equally, and at times more so, to those interested in that subject matter as to those interested in Julia’s son.

Deirdre M. Smith
University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Pittsburgh in 50 Maps
by Stentor Danielson
Belt Publishing, 136 pp., hardcover $30

If a picture says a thousand words, what might we say about a map, or more to the point, 50 maps, professing to explore and reveal the patterns and contours of a single city? Based on the specimens gathered together in this highly informative, often surprising, and relentlessly original volume by Stentor Danielson, the answer is quite a lot, and then some.

Danielson, an associate professor of geography at Slippery Rock and self-described “map nerd,” has arranged his collection into four sections: Situating the City, Getting Around, Communities and Neighborhoods, and Places and People. Each single-topic, easily comprehended map is accompanied by a page of engagingly written, refreshingly jargon-free text that provides just enough description and insight to pique readers’ interest without overwhelming with detail.

The subject matter contained in this slim but substantive volume is alternately whimsical and deadly serious — quite literally, in the case of a map documenting the location of old houses and lead paint. Others in this vein include maps on gentrification, tree cover, supermarkets and food deserts, and air quality. (Long after the sulphureous smoke left, asthma levels remained high.) But this is leavened with maps illuminating known and lesser-known Steel City peculiarities: the “Pittsburgh Left,” identifying intersections where motorists are likely to encounter the infamous quirk of Pittsburgh driving culture; Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, locating not only where the long-running children’s program was filmed, but also the places around the city where its namesake host lived, studied and worshipped in real life; and a map dissecting the location of a single ill-placed parking spot that has unnerved residents of the city’s East End for 50 years. Other maps plot the location of the city’s fabled (if inconsistently counted) bridges, its now-crumbling concrete stairways, and both its historic and contemporary funiculars — all pieces of the built environment adapted to the city’s peculiar geography.

Which is to say: what unites all of these maps is their open-minded curiosity about Pittsburgh, that famously enigmatic settlement set up on a lumpy, wedge-shaped landmass formed by the conjoining of two rivers at the Point. An alternate title could easily have been “Mapping the Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” a place known historically and to this day for its physiographic nooks and crannies and what Roy Blount Jr. called the “stout localism” of its residents. If there’s one criticism, it’s that the volume’s compact 8-by-8-inch format constricts a fuller explication of those mysteries. These maps want space to breathe and further reveal their secrets. And it has left open, at least for this reviewer, a desire for a second urban explorer’s guide to this most remarkable and still underappreciated metropolis.

Curtis Miner
The State Museum of Pennsylvania

Americana Insights 2025
edited by Lisa Minardi
Americana Insights, distributed by University of Pennsylvania Press, 321 pp., hardcover $64.95

It’s not often that a monumental tome comes along to update and correct the hundred-year-old record of a folk art form. Devoted exclusively to Pennsylvania German redware pottery, volume three of the Americana Insights series examines the work of the most notable potters working in southeastern Pennsylvania in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and offers new insight and research by 11 leading scholars on the subject.

The book opens with an overview of redware production using Old World techniques and designs, providing readers with detailed illustrations of the potter’s tools.

Following is a series of engaging essays on famous early makers like Georg Hubener, Samuel Troxel, “The Potter Once Known as Solomon Grim,” Conrad Mumbauer, John Monday, Simon Singer, and the Medinger and Neiffer potteries, ending with 20th-century revivalist potter Mildred Keyser. The essays provide biographical information on the potters, consider their position in the evolution of the craft, and note their influence on other potters whose names are unknown. Also included are brief articles on postmaster and potter Nathaniel Sellers, hunting scene inkstands, the Huber pottery in Montgomery County, and the work of Henry Chapman Mercer. Each author provides extensive endnotes.

Each essay is accompanied by eye-popping full-color photographs, some filling the entire 8½-by-11-inch page. The images clearly illustrate a variety of favorite Pennsylvania German motifs, including tulips and other flowers, urns and other vessels, foliage, birds, deer, hearts, geometric shapes, stars, military figures, and patriotic symbols, as well as inscriptions encircling the central motif. Some of the images from private collections are published here for the first time.

The editor has included appendices on signed redware pottery to help collectors and researchers, published studies of Pennsylvania earthenware pottery, and Montgomery County potters. The work concludes with an index.

Americana Insights 2025 is sure to serve far into the future as an invaluable reference on Pennsylvania German redware potters and as a visual treat for the collector and casual reader alike.

John K. Robinson
Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, ret.

Left, A teenaged “little” from Big Brothers Big Sisters of Beaver County learns the fundamentals of food preservation by canning fresh salsa made from garden produce, discovering how self-reliance and shared knowledge once sustained entire communities. Right, At Crafting the Past summer camp, a young maker focuses on cutting with care, gaining confidence through the steady rhythm of basic hand tools and practical skill-building.
Old Economy Village, PHMC

A student runs a hand along the smooth edge of a wooden board, carefully checking for splinters before lifting it onto a workbench in the woodshop at Old Economy Village, a preserved 19th-century Harmonist settlement and National Historic Landmark in Ambridge. For many students, it is the first time they have created something tangible, something that began not on a screen but in their own hands.

Moments like this offer a window into Pennsylvania’s deeper story. At its heart, the commonwealth is shaped by makers. From blacksmiths and carpenters to printers, farmers and industrial innovators, Pennsylvania was built by people who understood that skilled labor sustains communities, drives innovation, and supports shared civic life. As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, these foundational skills provide a powerful lens for understanding both America’s past and its future.

The InHarmony Initiative at Old Economy Village embraces this perspective by exploring how skilled labor, cooperation and shared responsibility formed early American communities and how those same principles can guide the next generation. Rooted in the legacy of the Harmonists and aligned with the goals of America 250, InHarmony positions historic trades not as relics of a pre-industrial world but as engines of innovation and industry that continue to shape civic life today.

Pennsylvania: A Commonwealth Built by Skill

From the earliest days of settlement through the American Revolution and into the rise of American industry, Pennsylvania relied on skilled labor to sustain daily life and fuel growth. Craftspeople made tools, printed ideas, built infrastructure, and maintained food systems that allowed communities, and ultimately the nation, to operate with increasing independence. In doing so, they helped shape enduring ideals of ingenuity, cooperation and shared responsibility.

Founded in 1824 by the Harmonists, Old Economy Village offers a particularly vivid example of how these principles were put into practice. The Harmonists were a German-speaking religious communal society that understood disciplined work, shared labor and collective investment as expressions of faith and as the foundation of a stable, meaningful life. Their village functioned through an integrated network of trades, including blacksmithing, woodworking, weaving, printing and agriculture, organized to meet communal needs while supporting industrial enterprises that connected the settlement to a rapidly changing nation and positioned it at the forefront of early American industrial innovation.

Within this system, work was never merely about production or profit. Purposeful labor, carried out with skill and intention, was both a spiritual discipline and a civic responsibility. Every object made, every field cultivated, and every structure raised reflected a belief that shared effort strengthened both the individual and the community.

This understanding of craftsmanship offers a broader insight into American development. Skills were passed on, adapted and refined across generations, reinforcing social bonds and mutual responsibility. Craft was not only a means of making a living; it was a way of participating in community life. Viewing work as contribution rather than consumption helps clarify how early American communities functioned and why skilled labor was so deeply entwined with civic identity.

Left, In Makerspaces, students transform raw lumber into handcrafted stools, putting math, patience and teamwork into action as they bring a project to life. Center, Students weave their own water bottle carriers, learning the structure and pattern behind textile traditions while creating something both useful and uniquely their own. Right, With inked type and a careful pull of the press, a Beaver County Rehabilitation Center student experiences how craftsmanship once carried ideas across a young nation and innovation has always started with skilled hands.
Old Economy Village, PHMC

Reframing Craftsmanship for America 250

As America 250 approaches, Old Economy Village is drawing on this legacy to reframe how craftsmanship is interpreted and experienced. The InHarmony Initiative is Old Economy Village’s workforce and civic learning platform, using historic trades to connect youth and families with hands-on skill development, industry awareness and civic engagement.

Rather than operating as a single program, InHarmony brings together a set of complementary learning experiences, including Crafting the Past summer camps; a series of trade-focused America 250 Industry Days that spotlight traditional and modern trades through demonstrations, hands-on activities, and conversations with today’s skilled professionals; and opportunities for students to explore pathways connected to skilled trades. These offerings invite students, families and visitors to explore how cooperation, creativity and skilled labor have long played a central role in American life.

Within these experiences, participants work with traditional tools, materials and practices while developing skills that remain relevant today, such as problem-solving, collaboration and systems thinking. Each program is anchored by a guiding question: How does a community meet its needs responsibly? As participants build, weave or cultivate, they begin to see how individual skills connect to larger systems of production, care and shared effort. History becomes something engaged through action, rather than observed at a distance.

In this way, InHarmony reflects a central America 250 theme: Innovation grows from tradition, and the skills that built the nation continue to shape its future.

Craft as a Civic Act

One of the core ideas behind InHarmony is that craftsmanship is a civic act. In early American communities, skilled labor supported infrastructure, communication, food security and environmental stewardship. These were not individual pursuits but collective endeavors that required trust, cooperation and shared responsibility.

InHarmony invites participants to reflect on how these values persist today. Whether through making, building, growing or preserving, students and visitors are encouraged to consider how their own skills contribute to community well-being. Citizenship is framed not only as a legal or political status but also as active participation in sustaining shared systems.

This perspective resonates strongly in the context of America 250, which calls for inclusive narratives that recognize the many forms of labor, often overlooked, that built and sustained the nation. By centering craftsmanship, InHarmony highlights the contributions of artisans, farmers, printers and makers whose work formed the backbone of American life.

Activating History for the Next 250 Years

As Pennsylvania plays a leading role in commemorating America’s 250th anniversary, the InHarmony Initiative offers a model for connecting commemoration with action. It reminds us that America’s story is not written solely in founding documents or milestone anniversaries but in the hands of those who make, build, grow and care for one another.

By treating craftsmanship as civic life, Old Economy Village ensures that the values of skill, cooperation and ingenuity remain active forces in shaping the future. InHarmony does not simply preserve the past, it activates it, passing on the tools, knowledge and spirit that sustain communities across generations.

As America marks 250 years, InHarmony poses a forward-looking question: How will the values that built the nation continue to guide it? At Old Economy Village, the answer is found in the enduring power of craft, not only as a skill but also as a shared civic practice.

By celebrating craftsmanship as civic life, Old Economy Village honors its past while inviting educators, families and communities to imagine that the next 250 years might be built with one skill, one idea, one community at a time.

To explore upcoming America 250 Industry Days, youth programs, and hands-on learning opportunities through the InHarmony Initiative, visit Old Economy Village at oldeconomyvillage.org.

Heather Hicks is site administrator at Old Economy Village.

Topics in the Summer 2026 Newsletter:

• PHF, PHMC Join Carpenters’ Hall in Commemorating PA Provincial Conference
• PHF at Philadelphia Flower Show
• Second Annual Virtual 5K
• PHF Announces New Board Members

The seeds for the 1926 Sesquicentennial International Exposition were sown by the success of Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition. Philadelphia department store magnate John Wanamaker, the lone survivor of the 1876 Centennial’s Finance Committee, provided the initial push for another exposition to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, he passed away in December 1922 before intensive planning could begin.

Wanamaker’s presence was sorely missed in the coming years as political infighting at both the municipal and statewide levels almost derailed the project. Congress held funding for the celebration until February 1925, which made planning uncertain, causing delays and a scaling back on the fair’s attractions. Finally, Mayor William Freeland Kendrick and U.S. Congressman William Vare took the reins, situating the exposition in a section of far South Philadelphia that was essentially a swamp.

After numerous fits and starts, and with portions of the fair yet to be completed, America’s 150th birthday party opened on May 31, 1926. It was an auspicious opening day, as torrential rains buffeted the city. Only a handful of visitors arrived in the first hour and a scant 20,000 attended opening ceremonies in the newly built Sesquicentennial Stadium, which seated 100,000. Rain would continue throughout the event, as precipitation fell on 107 of the exposition’s 184 days.

A highlight of that first day was the 10 p.m. lighting of the massive Liberty Bell replica, pictured here. The 80-foot bell was one of the most recognizable features of the entire exposition, as it straddled Broad Street at Oregon Avenue, ostensibly serving as the gateway to the festivities. With 26,000 light bulbs, the structure could be seen from City Hall nearly 3 miles away. Built in 47 days at a cost of $100,000, it contained 80 tons of steel and rested on 30-foot wooden pilings.

There were numerous other highlights associated with the Sesquicentennial. The iconic Delaware River Bridge (now the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) was dedicated as part of the celebration. On September 23, 1926, Sesquicentennial Stadium (demolished 1992) hosted one of the exposition’s most famous events — the world heavyweight boxing title fight in which Gene Tunney defeated Jack Dempsey with more than 120,000 people in attendance.

Additionally, five large exhibition halls provided fairgoers with a wide variety of things to see, including pavilions from 31 states, four territories and nine foreign countries. Midway areas integrated into the overall layout of the fairgrounds were filled with concessions, games and various types of entertainment. Displays touted 150 years of American goods and industries and themed areas included the Forum of Founders, the High Street of 1776, and Treasure Island. High Street was a block-long homage to Philadelphia’s Market Street of the Revolutionary era, with reenactors dressed in period costumes, demonstrating what ironworking, printing and home life looked like in the late 18th century.

Overall, Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial celebration was considered a failure. The political squabbles over its organization and location, along with a lack of early funding, made the event something less than it could have been if it were properly planned. Exhibit fabrication continued into July and along with the terrible weather, helped keep many folks away, as only 6.4 million of the expected 30 million-plus visitors materialized. In the wake of the exposition, Philadelphia was left with a multimillion-dollar debt that went unrectified until May 1929.

There was some civic upside to the fair. The event was responsible for developing the southern end of South Philadelphia. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park, Marconi Plaza, the Packer Park neighborhood, and the South Philadelphia Sports Complex were all created on the exposition’s grounds.

Documents pertaining to the Sesquicentennial International Exposition can be found at the Pennsylvania State Archives in Record Group 25: Special Commissions and Manuscript Group 219: Philadelphia Commercial Museum Photograph Collection.

Brett Reigh is an archivist at the Pennsylvania State Archives.