Name/Title
Pennsylvania Hospital. Book of Subscribers' Promissory Notes, 1754-1761Description
67 bonds on pages 1 to 84, with two blank forms at page 31. Front matter of six index leaves lettered A to Z, the last with "Notes Remaining in this Book March 10 1763" on its verso. Original front and back boards, both now detached.
The second subscription, gathered as the Managers bought the Pine Street ground and prepared to build. Most of the notes date from a few weeks in August 1754, when the Managers went through the city street by street. Hugh Roberts, Franklin's friend from the Junto, and Samuel Rhoads, who designed the building, witnessed one run of signatures. Evan Morgan and Joseph Morris witnessed another. A third group was signed on a single day, 2 May 1757, before William Bradford, Franklin's rival printer, and Daniel Roberdeau.
The founders' book was a book of merchants. This one reaches the whole working city: potters, smiths, coopers, a watchmaker, a ship carver, a chairmaker's neighbors, and farmers from Lower Merion, Horsham and West Nottingham. It holds the note of William Franklin, signed at twenty-four while he was clerk of the Assembly and his father's postmaster, and those of two other printers, James Chattin and William Dunlap, who pledged twenty shillings a year for life. The potter William Young bound himself to give thirty shillings' worth of earthenware every year in place of money. One bond is not a gift at all but an investment of the Hospital's capital: Benjamin Kendall's for six hundred pounds in 1761, secured by a mortgage on his house. Against the name of John Groves the Treasurer wrote "Dyed insolvent."Other Names and Numbers
Other Numbers
Number Type
ReferencesOther Number
Printed forms: Miller 598 (1754) and Miller 724 (1760).General Notes
Note Type
Cataloging NoteNote
NOTABLE NAMES
William Franklin (c. 1730-1813). Page 14. Franklin's son, later the last royal governor of New Jersey and a Loyalist exile.
James Chattin (fl. 1752-1771). Page 8. Quaker printer who in this same year printed Woolman's Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes.
John Roberts (c. 1721-1778). Page 30. Miller of Lower Merion, hanged for treason in 1778.
John Baynton (1726-1773). Page 52. Of Baynton, Wharton and Morgan, whose western land claims Franklin pressed in London.
Thomas Wharton (1731-1784). Page 65. Probably Thomas Wharton the elder, Franklin's correspondent and later Treasurer of the Hospital.
Plunkett Fleeson (1712-1791). Page 69. Upholsterer to the State House and first American maker of paper hangings.
William Logan of Stenton (1718-1776). Page 72. Son of James Logan. His pledge was made in gold, fifty pistoles.
John Lukens (c. 1720-1789). Page 82. Of Horsham. Surveyor General of Pennsylvania and observer of the 1769 transit of Venus.
William Dunlap (c. 1727-1779). Page 84. Printer, husband of Deborah Franklin's niece, and Franklin's postmaster of Philadelphia.
Anthony Benezet (1713-1784). Witness, page 59. The schoolmaster and abolitionist whom Rush revered.Note Type
Cataloging NoteNote
The note of James Clewlow, potter, 21 August 1754 (page 15), is catalogued separately with BF-2023.051 and is listed in the table of contents at its original page. See also the founders' book of 1751-1754 and the companion book of 1754-1766.
