Benjamin Franklin's grave in Christ Church Burial Ground, at Fifth and Arch Streets, is a plain marble slab that visitors have pelted with pennies for generations, a nod to the saying that a penny saved is a penny earned. Franklin specified the stone in his will: a marble slab by the mason David Chambers, six feet long and four feet wide, plain, with only a small moulding round the upper edge, inscribed Benjamin and Deborah Franklin and placed over them both. He was buried next to his wife in 1790, in the family plot at the northwest corner of the ground, which Christ Church opened in 1719 when its churchyard filled. The copper coins pitted the marble, damage that cannot be undone.
A crack also ran through the K in Franklin, and John Hopkins, the burial ground's caretaker, watched it grow for years before the slab was repaired in April 2017. The pennies were not the cause. Conservators from Materials Conservation Co. found that a granite frame had held the marble in a muddy pocket where it never dried. They lifted the slab, stitched the crack with stainless steel, patched it with lime mortar, and built a raised base that lets the stone drain. The work cost about $80,000, met partly by a public appeal in November 2016 that reached its goal within a day, helped by a gift from Jon and Dorothea Bon Jovi.
In 2017 Hopkins said he gathered $3,000 to $4,000 in pennies from the grave each year, money that went back into preserving the burial ground. Four other signers of the Declaration of Independence lie in the same ground: Joseph Hewes, Francis Hopkinson, George Ross and Benjamin Rush.
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39.9524, -75.1483
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