Local Stories in Philadelphia County
Pennsylvania·15 places
Military
Agnew's Bloodstain
Brigadier General James Agnew, a British officer, was mortally wounded at the Battle of Germantown on 4 October 1777 while leading his brigade up Germantown Avenue in the British counterattack. During the occupation of Germantown that autumn he had taken John Wister's house, now called Grumblethorpe, as his quarters, and the Wister family had been pushed out.
History
Canby's Flag Story
The story that Betsy Ross sewed the first Stars and Stripes was not told in public until 1870, almost a century after it is supposed to have happened. That year her grandson, William J. Canby, read a paper to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania claiming that George Washington, Robert Morris and George Ross, a member of Congress and the uncle of her late husband, called at her upholstery shop…
History
Fairly Out, Fairly In
On 4 March 1797, in the House of Representatives chamber on the ground floor of Congress Hall, John Adams took the presidential oath from Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth with George Washington looking on, the first time the presidency passed from one person to another. Adams, who arrived in a new carriage he had just bought, was the first president sworn in by a chief justice.
History
Franklin's Ghost House
Two open frames of square steel tubing in Franklin Court trace the shapes of buildings that no longer exist: Benjamin Franklin's house, where he died in 1790, and the print shop he built for his grandson. Designed by the Philadelphia firm of Venturi and Rauch with Denise Scott Brown, and opened on 20 April 1976 for the Bicentennial, these ghost structures were a deliberate choice not to rebuild.
History
Franklin's Penny Toss
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.
History
If You Can Keep It
Elizabeth Willing Powel is the woman in one of the most quoted lines of the founding era: asked whether the Constitutional Convention had produced a republic or a monarchy, Benjamin Franklin is said to have answered, 'A republic, if you can keep it.' The source is the journal of James McHenry, a delegate from Maryland.
History
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.
History
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…
Military
Knox and the Chew House
On 4 October 1777, during the Battle of Germantown, about 120 soldiers of the British 40th Regiment of Foot under Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Musgrave were cut off as the British line fell back, and they barricaded themselves inside Cliveden, the stone country house of Benjamin Chew. They closed the ground floor shutters, blocked the doors and posted marksmen at the upper windows.
History
Old City Hall's Court
Old City Hall, at Fifth and Chestnut Streets, was the main home of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1791 until August 1800, while Philadelphia was the national capital. Finished in 1791 as Philadelphia's city hall, it held the city council on the second floor and a courtroom below, and the city lent that courtroom to the federal judiciary, which shared it with the Mayor's Court.
History
Ona Judge's Escape
Ona Judge, an enslaved seamstress and Martha Washington's personal maid, slipped out of the President's House at Sixth and Market Streets on 21 May 1796 while the Washingtons were at dinner, and never returned.
Military
Private Howe's Cell
William H. Howe, a Union private from Perkiomenville in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, was hanged at Fort Mifflin on 26 August 1864 for desertion and murder, the only prisoner known to have been executed at the fort during the Civil War. During the Civil War the fort held Confederate prisoners of war, Union soldiers and civilians.
History
Southeast Square
Washington Square began as Southeast Square, one of five public squares in William Penn's plan for Philadelphia, and for most of the 18th century it was the city's potter's field. Penn patented it in 1706 as a public graveyard for the poor.
History
The 1688 Slavery Protest
In 1688 four members of the Germantown Quaker meeting, Francis Daniel Pastorius, Garret Hendericks and the brothers Derick and Abraham op den Graeff, wrote and signed a protest against slavery, widely described as the first formal protest against slavery in the English colonies of North America.
History
The General's War Tent
George Washington's sleeping and office tent, the marquee he lived and worked in through the rest of the Revolutionary War, is the centrepiece of the Museum of the American Revolution at Third and Chestnut Streets. His first tents, bought in Philadelphia in May 1776 from the upholsterer Plunkett Fleeson, were worn beyond repair by the Valley Forge winter of 1777 and 1778.
Elsewhere in Pennsylvania
Hear it from the road
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