Franklin's legacy: documented furnishings.(Benjamin Franklin)

No residence closely associated with Benjamin Franklin (PL II) has survived on American or French soil. His family house on Milk Street in Boston, the several houses he rented in Philadelphia, and the mansion house he built there in 1764 (in a courtyard off Market Street between Third and Fourth Streets) have long since been torn down. (1) Likewise the elegant hotel in Passy, near Paris, where Franklin lived for nine years is no longer standing. Only the Georgian house owned by the widower Margaret Stevenson at 56 Craven Street in London, where Franklin lived between 1757 and 1775, remains to represent his domestic environment, and this site--which opens to the public on Franklin's three hundredth birthday, January 17, 2006--contains none of his possessions.

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Franklin's personal belongings were long ago scattered among his descendants or sold to others, beginning with an auction of his household effects within months of his death in 1790. In the intervening two centuries, some of these artifacts have been deposited in public institutions, among them the American Philosophical Society, the Franklin Institute, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, but few are on permanent display. The Franklin Tercentenary project has brought to light and reunited many of these important artifacts for study, inspection, and appreciation.

Benjamin Franklin fathered three children. William (1750/31-1813)--whose mother is unknown--Francis "Franky" Folger (1732-1736), and Sarah "Sally" (Pl. V). The latter two were the children of Franklin's common-law wife. Deborah Read Franklin (Pl. IV). Franky died as a small child, and William, who sorely disappointed his father by siding with the British during the Revolutionary War, was disinherited. (2) Sally married Richard Bache (1737-1811) on October 29, 1767, and moved into her parents' recently completed house. The Baches lived there for twenty-five years and raised their seven children, enjoying the generosity of her parents. Sally served as housekeeper after her mother died and later was hostess and caregiver for her father when he returned from France in 1785.

Franklin died on April 17, 1790, and Sally and Richard Bache were the principal beneficiaries of his considerable estate: his house, his printing office, several other buildings and lots in Philadelphia, and all of his household effects. They seem to have had little attachment to any of his personal effects, however. According to newspaper notices and correspondence, the Baches began to dispose of Franklin's material possessions soon after he died--an auction of "Mr. B. Franklin's household & kitchen furnishings, at his lodgings," was held on October 21, 1790 at "Mr. Bache's, Market, between Third and Fourth-Streets." (3)