Jefferson's Rented Rooms

Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in two rented rooms on the second floor of a new brick house at Seventh and Market Streets, the house now called Declaration House. Jacob Graff, from a family of building contractors, bought the corner lot on 1 June 1775 and built a house three and a half stories high, moving in with his wife Maria and their infant son Frederick in April 1776. About a month later Jefferson, a delegate from Virginia who had found his lodgings with Benjamin Randolph on Chestnut Street unsatisfactory and wanted to be away from the city's bustle, rented the second floor. He lived there from 23 May to 3 September 1776 with Robert Hemmings, an enslaved valet, who most likely slept in the garret.

On 11 June Congress named Jefferson to a committee to draft a declaration of independence, and the other members pressed him to write it alone. He wrote it in the parlour and showed it to Benjamin Franklin and John Adams before reporting it to the committee. In 1825 he described the place in a letter to Dr. James Mease: he had lodged with a Mr. Graaf, in a new brick house three stories high, and rented the second floor, a parlour and bedroom, already furnished.

Graff sold the house in 1777. Simon Gratz, who bought it with his brother Hyman in 1801, added a fourth floor. The Gratz family sold it in 1881 and it was torn down in 1883. A granite bank by Frank Furness and, by the 1940s, a Tom Thumb restaurant later stood on the corner. The National Park Service rebuilt the house to its 1776 appearance in 1975 for the Bicentennial, with the parlour and bedroom furnished in period style, including reproductions of Jefferson's swivel chair and lap desk.