HERE LIES
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
As you may recall from our visit to John Hancock’s grave (page 332), he’s buried in the Old Granary. In 1830 some Bostonians tried to change its name to Franklin Cemetery, in honor of Boston-born Benjamin Franklin. They might have gotten their wish if Franklin had actually been buried at the Old Granary. Here’s part III of our story about the Founding Fathers’ graves.
RENAISSANCE MAN
Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) began his career as a humble printer, but he accomplished a lot more in his 84 years—including cowriting and signing the Declaration of Independence, discovering new properties of electricity (via the famous lightning experiment with the kite and the key), and publishing several influential works (most notably Poor Richard’s Almanack). Franklin also invented the first library where books could be checked out, the volunteer fire station, the lightning rod, swimming fins, bifocals, the Franklin stove, the “long arm” (for retrieving books from a high shelf), the glass armonica, and, surprisingly, crowdsourcing.
Unlike most of the Founding Fathers, who were just reaching middle age when the American Revolution began, Franklin was already an old man. And he was already one of the most famous people in the Western world. As his end was approaching, it was a big deal to Philadelphians that he be laid to rest there. True, he was born in Boston, and even though he ran away as a young man and settled in Philadelphia, he still had ties to Beantown—including a spot in the Franklin family plot at the Old Granary if he wanted one. But there wasn’t much to debate; Franklin had decided decades earlier that he would spend eternity with his wife and children in his adopted hometown of Philadelphia.
A STATE FUNERAL FOR A COMMON MAN
After a long illness, Franklin succumbed to empyema on April 17, 1790, and the world mourned. Count Mirabeau of the French National Assembly said, “He was able to restrain thunderbolts and tyrants.” Back in Philadelphia, more than 20,000 people attended Franklin’s funeral (the city’s population at the time was 28,000). Sixty years earlier, he’d written his own epitaph:
The Body of B. Franklin, Printer; like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost; For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended By the Author
But as Franklin grew older and wiser, his last wishes became more modest. Where most other Founding Fathers wanted massive obelisks to mark their graves, Franklin’s will stipulated that he be buried under a flat marble ledger tablet “6 feet long, 4 feet wide, plain, with only a small moulding round the upper edge.” He wanted his marker to say only “Benjamin Franklin, Printer.”
Place on earth farthest from any sea: the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility (northern China).
LAID TO REST
After his coffin was carried from the State House to Christ Church (where George Washington worshipped while in Philadelphia), Franklin was buried in the church’s adjacent burial ground beneath a 1,000-pound stone slab, inscribed with the words “Benjamin and Deborah Franklin – 1790.” Deborah had died 25 years earlier. Their son Francis, who died of smallpox at age four, was also buried there. Their daughter Sarah would complete the quartet in 1808.
The Christ Church Burial Ground was established in 1719, but it’s only in the last century or so that graveyards have become tourist attractions, which is why few people visited Franklin’s grave for the first 70 years after his death. Another reason: there was a tall stone wall separating his slab from the sidewalk. In the mid-1800s, Philadelphia’s leaders decided to capitalize on Franklin’s fame by tearing down the wall and replacing it with a steel fence, so that people walking along Arch Street could view his grave site.
The Christ Church Preservation Trust was set up in 1858 to raise the money for the project. To make Franklin’s slab more visible, workers lifted it out of the ground and raised it up a few feet. The plan worked. Ever since the steel fence went in, millions of people have paid homage to the man who coined the phrase “a penny saved is a penny earned” by throwing pennies onto his grave. (Uncle John’s note: If you’d like to pay homage to the actual coiner of that phrase, you’d have better luck visiting the grave of George Herbert at St. Andrew’s Church in Bemerton, Wiltshire, England; in his 1633 book Outlandish Proverbs, Herbert wrote, “A penny spar’d is twice got.”)
WWW.GOFUNDME.COM/SAVEBENFRANKLIN
Have you ever heard the phrase “nibbled to death by ducks”? That’s what was happening to the Franklin family’s marble slab, only instead of ducks it was pennies. The Preservation Trust, which is still active today, wishes people would throw hundred-dollar bills instead (also known as “Benjamins”). That would cause far less damage and help pay for the costly work required to seal the huge crack that stretches from one end of the rock to the other. The pennies didn’t cause the crack—blame that on the improper setting of the stone when it was raised in 1858—but the pennies were slowly eroding the stone, one pockmark at a time. And the crack was getting a little wider each year.
“For a long time, people wanted to do a big restoration of the old marker,” said Marco Federico, who oversaw the team that restored the grave site in 2017. “They basically wanted to toss the old stone and put in some glorious, grandiose monument, which [Franklin] never wanted. His will is very specific.” But even a “simple” restoration was estimated at more than $80,000. The trust was able to secure most of the money from universities and historical societies, but they were still $10,000 short. So in 2016, the trust set up a “Save Ben Franklin” GoFundMe page in order to raise the rest of the money.
Odds of survival if you stow away in the wheel well of a jet airplane: 1 in 4.
The campaign stalled at a few thousand dollars. Then Jon Bon Jovi swooped in to save the day. After hearing about the fund-raiser, he and his wife, Dorothea, pitched in $5,000. “It was kind of funny,” observed Christ Church project overseer John Hopkins. “I joked when we received the news, that we were ‘halfway there, living on a prayer,’ and then he kind of put us over the top.” (That’s a reference to Bon Jovi’s 1986 hit song.) Then more people and more groups, including the Philadelphia Eagles, made donations, and the work began.
HISTORY UNDER FIRE
“Most people probably won’t even notice we did anything,” explained Federico, whose team carefully lifted the stone off the ground, sealed the crack, and filled in all the penny-caused pockmarks. The crack is still visible, though. Like the famous crack in the Liberty Bell, it has also been preserved as part of its story.
An odd thing happened during the restoration. The area had been sealed off, the fence was covered up, and signs were erected telling people not to throw pennies. Hopkins was at the site, being interviewed by Hidden City Philadelphia, and just as he was saying, “It’s a tradition, it’s hard to change, but we can try to alter the culture of it,” a barrage of pennies flew over the fence and pelted him. “It’s disrespectful,” he growled. “These [tour] groups come by, they tell them to throw the pennies, and they walk on. They don’t talk about the most important American to ever live!”
YE OLDE GO FUND ME
Not seriously injured by the penny attack, Hopkins added that he is grateful for one thing: “The beauty of the GoFundMe was the donations from regular citizens. Ben Franklin was a man of the people, and he was a fund-raiser in his time. He probably would have invented GoFundMe if he was alive.” In a way, he did. In Colonial times, if money was needed for a project, it always came from the top down (like King Ferdinand funding Columbus’s voyage to America). But Franklin, who believed in democracy, realized that if you can’t get one king to give a whole lot of money, you can get a whole lot of people to donate one pence each. During his lifetime, Franklin organized several successful fund-raising campaigns. That’s how he helped set up the first subscription library and the first volunteer fire department, and when Christ Church’s steeple needed to be replaced in the 1750s, Franklin helped manage a lottery to raise the money for it. He wasn’t much of a churchgoer himself, so why would he be so interested in building a tall steeple? Hopkins believes that Franklin had an ulterior motive “to do some experimenting with the electricity and the height of the building.” (Franklin later decided to do the experiment with a kite instead.)
Age group that gets the most colds: kindergartners, with about 12 a year.
In May 2017, Franklin’s grave site reopened to the public. That day was the culmination of a lot of restoration work that took place at the site in the early 21st century. Twelve years earlier, on the statesman’s 300th birthday in 2005, a new brick path had been installed around the grave. And a plaque was set into the bricks with several quotations about the patriot, in Poor Richard’s Almanack style:
The Last Resting Place of Benjamin Franklin
“Venerated for Benevolence, Admired for Talents, Esteemed for Patriotism, Beloved for Philanthropy.”
—WASHINGTON
“The Sage Whom Two Worlds Claimed as Their Own.”
—MIRABEAU
“He Tore from the Skies the Lightning and From Tyrants the Sceptre.”
—TURGOT
THE GRAVEYARD TODAY
Franklin isn’t the only Founding Father you can find at the Christ Church Burial Ground. Five of the 1,400 graves include signers of the Declaration of Independence. In addition to Franklin, there’s Joseph Hewes, Francis Hopkinson, George Ross, and Dr. Benjamin Rush. There’s also a monument to Commodore Uriah P. Levy, the man who saved Thomas Jefferson’s final resting place from ruin.
The Burial Ground is located at the intersection of 5th and Arch in Old City Philadelphia. It receives about 100,000 visitors annually and offers guided tours, but it’s closed during the winter months, so check before you go. Or, you can always view Franklin’s grave from the sidewalk through the fence. And while the trust always welcomes donations, when you’re visiting Franklin’s slab, they’d rather you throw praise than pennies.
Our next Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton, is buried a few blocks away from where his titular hip-hop Broadway musical opened to rave reviews in 2016. That story is on page 429.
Technical name for nose-picking: rhinotillexis.