Historic Philadelphia

carpenter, struck for higher wages. It was
1735 before the House met in the Assembly
chamber of the building that would one day
be called Independence Hall. The paneling
was not installed and all the glass was not in
the windows.
John Bartram added a stone wing to his
house in 1731. The house was (and still is) on
the west bank of the Schuylkill about three
miles below Market Street. Bartram was born
in 1699 and grew up on his father’s farm
along the Darby Creek west of Philadelphia.
One day, while sitting under a tree, resting
from plowing, he picked a daisy and plucked
it apart, as farm boys will. That simple
moment led him to study Latin so he could
read the botany books of the day. In 1728,
Bartram bought 102 acres at sheriff’s sale. On
it stood a one and a half story stone house of
two tiny rooms, built before Bartram was born
by Swedish settler Peter Peterson Yocumb.
The fledgling botanist began developing a garden
around it, with specimens of hundreds of
native trees and plants. In 1731, he expanded
the house and made the original part the
kitchen. On the new wing, he carved his
name and his new bride’s. The inscription can
still be seen: “John, Ann Bartram, 1731.” And
he kept collecting those plants.
Benjamin Franklin instigated the start of the
Union Fire Company, the first formal fire
fighting organization, on December 7, 1736.
Each member agreed to have six leather buckets
and two osnaburg bags (coarse linen cloth), and
to respond to cries of fire with at least half his
buckets and bags, where the company would
“exert our best endeavors to extinguish such
fires, and preserve the goods and effects of such
of us as may be in danger,” according to the
written rules. Five more fire companies were
organized in the next sixteen years.
Anthony Palmer, a British sea captain from
Barbados, had bought “several parcels of land,
meadow, swamp and cripple” along the
Delaware above the city about 1704, and
lived on his Hope Farm there until 1729.
Then he sold the place to William Ball,
who renamed the estate Richmond Hall,
providing a name for a future Philadelphia
neighborhood. Palmer bought the Fairman
place down the river at Shackamaxon. Thomas
Fairman had died in 1714. The captain bought
191 adjoining acres, and set to work laying out
streets and selling building lots. He called the
development Kensington. A marketing ploy
was to establish a cemetery, and offer a burial
lot there to each purchaser. Palmer’s daughter,
Thomasine, in her will written soon after her
father’s death in 1749, left the cemetery “to be
freely occupied and enjoyed by all the
inhabitants of Kensington forever.” Inhabitants
of the old, original part of Kensington, now
called Fishtown, continue upon their decease
to occupy the old cemetery; whether any enjoy
it is a metaphysical question beyond the scope
of this book.
From 1738 to 1742, William Whitebread
advertised in Philadelphia that he was an
“operator for the teeth,” presumably our
✧
Working from Hamilton’s plan, master
carpenter Edmund Wooley and his crew
erected the brick State House with its
wooden steeple.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER II
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