Poor Richard’s Almanac

Pennies from heaven. August 8, 2010

Our friend Ben, Silence Dogood, our friend and fellow blog contributor Richard Saunders, and his girlfriend, Bridget, decided to soak up a little history yesterday. So we headed to Philadelphia for a tour of Independence Hall and the surrounding historic district.

Independence Hall was the original home of the Liberty Bell and the seat of the Continental Congress, as well as the place where both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were signed into law. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, and the other Founding Fathers, including, of course, Philadelphia’s own Benjamin Franklin, shaped our country here. In other words, for Americans, it’s History Central.

Why Philadelphia? Because, at the time, it was the largest city in America (with a population in 1776 of 25-30,000, compared to New York and Boston’s 5,000 each), and it became the nation’s capital from 1790 to 1800 while Washington, D.C. was built.

Philadelphia is just an hour and a half south of us. Or, I should say, it should be an hour and a half south of us. But yesterday, it was more like 3 hours, thanks to massive traffic congestion. As we crawled along or were forced to come to a full stop, feelings of frustration and disappointment built. We were wasting a gorgeous day sitting in traffic.

Silence pointed out that it hadn’t helped that some of us, who are catatonic in the morning, couldn’t be dragged from the house until 11 a.m., then demanded that we have an early lunch before heading down to Philly. (But, hey, we hadn’t even had breakfast!) In our friend Ben’s defense, I thought we could eat a lot more quickly in the small but scenic town of Topton than in the Big City, where I wanted us to spend all our time seeing the sights. At least the endless traffic and travel delays made us all appreciate living in a beautiful place where we never have to deal with either.

Then, of course, we got lost. By the time we finally arrived at Independence Hall around 3 p.m., we were hot and aggravated, and to make things worse, the tour tickets for the day, which were supposed to be available until 4:30, had all been given out. The tickets are free, but you can’t get into Independence Hall without them. Our hopes of standing in the place where America was born were dashed.

Fortunately, there’s plenty to see in this historic district, and that’s where the pennies come in. First, we went to see the Liberty Bell, which none of us had actually seen before. Our friend Ben was happy to see it but not especially excited at the prospect—it’s a bell, for mercy’s sake—but it was really a pretty awesome experience. The bell itself is quite impressive, and then there’s the rather mysterious inscription: PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL INHABITANTS THEREOF LEV XXV X [inspired by Leviticus 25:10 in the Old Testament] BY ORDER OF THE ASSEMBLY OF THE PROVINCE OF PENSYLVANIA [sic] FOR THE STATE HOUSE OF PHILADA PASS AND STOW MDCCLIII [1753, the year the bell was recast, having cracked on first use in 1752]

PASS AND STOW. Our friend Ben took this to be some sort of arcane directive; maybe it meant that those who saw the bell should pass the concept of liberty on to all they met and stow it in their hearts. Or maybe it was a prophetic statement about the need to hide the bell from enemy hands (as actually happened in 1777, when the British captured Philadelphia and the Liberty Bell was hidden in Bethlehem, PA, just a half-hour from our friend Ben and Silence’s home, Hawk’s Haven, for safekeeping). But our blog historian Richard Saunders quickly quashed my theorizing by pointing out that the comment that had gotten me so excited was actually nothing more than the surnames of John Pass and John Stow, the men who’d recast the bell after it cracked. Well, rats. I liked my version better.

But let’s get back to those pennies. And a number of coincidences surrounding them. First, when Pass and Stow recast the cracked Liberty Bell, they added copper—from which pennies were made—to the mix of metal alloy that had been used for the original bell. But when the new bell was tested, though the sides were strengthened, the sound was off. So Pass and Stow cast the bell for a third time without the copper. This time, the sound was restored. But eventually, the bell cracked again and was permanently retired from use.

Next, near Independence Hall is Christ Church graveyard, where, among many other notables, our hero and blog mentor, the great Benjamin Franklin, is buried. So of course we went to pay our respects. Ben’s gravestone is a simple flat rectangle, with his choice of plain inscription, “Benjamin and Deborah Franklin 1790″ inscribed on the covering slab. Family relatives, including his daughter Sally Bache and her husband Richard, are buried around Ben and his wife, with equally restrained inscriptions. The sole exception is the stone of Ben’s beloved son, Frankie, who died of smallpox at age 4 1/2. For his gravestone, the heartbroken Ben had “Beloved of all who knew him” inscribed along with the basic information.

This all sounds very somber and sad, hardly a fitting tribute to the lively, laughing, larger-than-life Ben Franklin we all know and love. But of course you can’t keep a good man down. From Ben’s death in 1790, people have been leaving pennies on the grave of the man who famously wrote “A penny saved is a penny earned” to bring themselves good luck. The tradition continues to this day, with allowances, as our friend Ben discovered, for inflation.

Our friend Ben left the traditional penny, but noted that, among the sea of change scattered across the grave, plenty of nickels, dimes, and quarters also figured prominently. (You’d have thought people would have saved the nickels for Jefferson’s grave and the quarters for Washington’s.) Our friend Ben assumes the curators of the graveyard collect the change each night and contribute it to the site’s upkeep or donate it to the homeless.

Continuing the penny theme, our friend Ben and Richard Saunders are both avid coin collectors, aka numismatists, and when we saw that the Philadelphia Mint—America’s first—was just a block away, we dragged the reluctant and complaining (“That building is hideous!”) Silence and Bridget along in hope of a tour.

Turns out, the ladies had it right. Far from the guided tour, the trip into a museum of priceless historical coins, the endless opportunities to buy vintage proof and circulation sets of coins that OFB and Richard envisioned (we’d actually both been waiting for the 2010 silver proof coinage set to become available and were hoping to get a jump on them at the Mint so we didn’t have to pay for postage), it was basically a self-guided rush through a factory operation.

You looked down through glass windows at machines moving blanks (the circular blank disks from which coins are made) and coins along to be bagged and shipped. Wall displays showed plaster replicas of coins and medals rather than the real things. Our friend Ben thought Silence summed it up best when she said, “They didn’t even give out free samples!”  But the coins being made and moved along the conveyor belts when we happened to be there were shiny copper-clad pennies, continuing our penny theme.

Finally, the four of us left the Mint and took a stroll around Independence Hall and the buildings surrounding it, soaking up the history along with the heat and humidity. Along with the priceless view of a statue of old Ben Franlin, clad in a toga with a chubby calf bare for the world’s inspection, on the library building (Ben founded America’s first lending library), we saw the First  and Second Bank of America.

The First Bank was notable because it was founded by one of our other favorite Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton. The Second Bank was notable for its elegant Classical Greek Doric architecture. It was a gorgeous building, designed, it turned out, by William Strickland, who also designed the Tennessee State Capitol in our friend Ben’s and Silence’s hometown, Nashville.

So, you have pennies on Ben Franklin’s grave, pennies being made in the Philadelphia Mint, the copper used in pennies being added to the Liberty Bell, and the bank, the ultimate repository for pennies, being founded by Alexander Hamilton. In a final and fitting link, the Liberty Bell was rung on Hamilton’s death (after an ill-fated duel with the notorious Aaron Burr) in 1804. It was only rung seven times in the 19th century—including on the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on July 4, 1826, on George Washington’s 100th birthday celebration in 1832, and on the Marquis de Lafayette’s death in 1834—before being retired.

What goes around comes around. Our friend Ben encourages you to visit the historic Independence Hall area if you find yourself in Philadelphia. We hope to return and tour Independence Hall and some of the other historic buildings this fall, when there will be less traffic and fewer crowds. If you’re American and love early American history, it’s a must-see.