Isaac Franks's Bill

In November 1793, with Philadelphia under quarantine for yellow fever, President George Washington rented a house on Germantown's main street from Isaac Franks, a former Continental Army officer, and conducted the government's business there. He lived there from 16 to 30 November and held four cabinet meetings in the house with Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox and Edmund Randolph, discussing the war between Britain and France and the neutrality the United States had proclaimed. Franks had bought the house from the heirs of the merchant David Deshler in 1792. Franks billed the President $131.56. Besides the rent, the bill charged for his own travel to and from Bethlehem, for furniture and bedding for his family, and for goods lost or used up during the stay: a flatiron, tableware, poultry, potatoes and hay.

The two men disagreed over the rent and the costs, but Washington came back in 1794 with his family to escape the summer heat of the city. The enslaved people in the Washington household at the house included Ona Judge, Martha Washington's seamstress and personal servant, the cook Hercules, Austin, and Moll, who attended the grandchildren.

Franks, born in New York in 1759, fought at the Battle of Long Island in 1776, was taken prisoner when the British captured New York, and escaped to New Jersey. He served in the army's quartermaster department, was commissioned an ensign in a Massachusetts regiment in 1781 and resigned in 1782. He was prothonotary of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court from 1819 until his death in 1822. The Morris family later owned the house and gave it to the National Park Service in 1948.