Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia: Printer, Postmaster, Lightning Rod

He arrived in Philadelphia in seventeen twenty-three at the age of seventeen, having run away from an apprenticeship to his older brother in Boston, carrying one Dutch dollar and a shilling in copper. He walked off the boat, bought a roll, ate it while walking the street, and began looking for work.

By the time Benjamin Franklin left Philadelphia for France in seventeen seventy-six, fifty-three years later, he had founded the first circulating library in North America, the first volunteer fire company in the colonies, the first American hospital, and the University of Pennsylvania. He had served as the first Postmaster General of the United States. He had proven, using a kite and a key during a thunderstorm, that lightning was electrical, and had designed the lightning rod, which protected buildings across two continents within a decade of his demonstration. He had written one of the most widely read autobiographies in the English language.

He had also enslaved people. He owned two enslaved individuals in his Philadelphia household, King and Bob, who appear in his household accounts. He freed them in his will in seventeen ninety. Whether he freed them earlier or what became of them in the intervening years is not established in the public record.

Franklin is one of those figures whose accomplishments are large enough to obscure his biography if you let them. He was a printer who became a scientist who became a diplomat. He designed the lightning rod, negotiated the French alliance that won the Revolutionary War, and served as the oldest delegate to sign the Constitution at eighty-one. He was also a man of his era in the ways that caused the most harm, and he became one of the era's rare dissenters from those norms only in the final years of his life, when he was president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.

The house he lived in on Market Street was demolished after his death. What stands at Franklin Court today is an architectural ghost, a steel outline suggesting the house's footprint, built where nothing remains.