Carpenters’ Hall, the home of the Carpenters’ Company of Philadelphia since 1774. Photo courtesy of Carpenters’ Hall.
This week, on the Alley Cast, we start our exploration of the story of building houses in Philadelphia over the past three centuries. In Part I, we talk with Alex Palma of Carpenters’ Hall and Rachel Schade, architect and professor at Drexel University, about early construction in Philadelphia. How did master builders learn their trade? Who else was involved in construction? How did the threat of fire and financial concerns such as insurance influence the design and building of houses?
As we mentioned in the episode, here’s the Philadelphia Rowhouse Manual which Rachel Schade and her team put together: https://www.phila.gov/media/20190521124726/Philadelphia_Rowhouse_Manual.pdf
Our lead sponsor is Linode. Linode is the largest independent open cloud provider in the world, and its Headquarters is located just around the corner from Elfreth’s Alley on the Northeast corner of 3rd and Arch Streets, right next to the Betsy Ross House Museum. The tech company moved into the former Corn Exchange Building in 2018 and employees have relished the juxtaposition of old and new: Outside, concealed LEDs light up the historic facade, inside are flexible server rooms but also a library with a sliding ladder, and a former bank vault is now a conference room. Linode is committed to a culture that creates a sense of inclusion and belonging and is always looking for new team members. Learn more about job opportunities at linode.com/careers.
This episode of the Alley Cast is supported by the Carpenters’ Company of the City and County of Philadelphia. From the 18th-century members who erected Independence Hall, the steeple of Christ Church, and Carpenters' Hall to the members of today, innovation in design and technical achievement have contributed to the Company’s pre-eminent reputation. The Company’s mission includes preserving and maintaining Carpenters' Hall and interpreting the significant events that took place there including the First Continental Congress. The Company also works to provide encouragement, education, and support for people entering the construction industry. You can learn more about the Carpenters’ Company at carpentershall.org.
This season is also sponsored by the History Department and the Center for Public History at Temple University. Many of the people who have worked on this podcast over the past two years have been alumni or graduate students at Temple University. A special thanks to Dr. Hilary Iris Lowe and the students in her “Managing History” course during the Fall of 2020 who did preliminary research and scriptwork for several episodes this season. Learn more about the department at www.cla.temple.edu/history/ and the Center at sites.temple.edu/centerforpublichistory/
Support also comes from the Philadelphia Cultural Fund and the Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia.
SOURCES
Fayen, Sarah Neale, “Bringing Refinement to the Walls: Philadelphia Interiors on Elfreth' s Alley” (manuscript, 2000)
Herman, Bernard L., “A Brief History of Elfreth’s Alley,” (manuscript)
Murtagh, William John, “The Philadelphia Row House,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Dec., 1957), pp. 8-13.
Moss, Roger, “Isaac Zane, Jr., a ‘Quaker for the Times,’” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 77, no. 3 (1969): 292.
Moss, Roger, “Master Builders: A History of the Colonial Philadelphia Building Trades,” (dissertation, 1972)
Rilling, Donna J., Making Houses, Crafting Capitalism Builders in Philadelphia, 1790-1850, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Salinger, Sharon V., “Artisans, Journeymen, and the Transformation of Labor in Late Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 40.1, 1983, pp. 62-84.
Salinger, Sharon V., “Spaces, inside and outside, in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Summer, 1995), pp. 1-31
“The Elfreth Necrology,” Publications of the Genealogical Society Volume 2, Numbers 1-3, page 172.
TRANSCRIPT
In 1681, when King Charles II gave William Penn a charter for 45,000 square miles of "American real estate", Penn imagined a rural paradise.
Jonathan Stewart, performing the words of William Penn: “Let every house be placed, if the person pleases, in the middle of its platt, as to the breadth way of it so that there may be ground on each side for gardens, orchards or fields, that it may be a greene country towne which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome.”
Penn wanted Philadelphia to be a refuge from the congested cityscape of 17th century London, which was a city of small, irregular blocks, packed with rows of houses fronting narrow streets. However, population growth affected the physical characteristics of Philadelphia more than any other factor. So, Penn's dream of a city of single homes and open gardens slowly dissolved. Colonial Philadelphia began to mirror London with its crowded red brick buildings of 3 or 4 stories closely packed together (Murtagh).
At the end of November 1683, Penn estimated that there were 600 residents in 100 houses, but by 1700, the number of houses had grown to 700. On the eve of the American Revolution, Philadelphia had 3,000 to 5,000 residences and was the largest city in British North America (Salinger). Rather than move westward, buildings were crowded into smaller spaces. The increasing number of alleys became a familiar sight in Philadelphia.
But who was building these houses? How were they built? Why did the city develop the way that it did?
Intro
Welcome to the Alley Cast, a podcast from the Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace the stories of people who worked, lived, and encountered this special street for over 300 years. While the stories we tell often center on Elfreth’s Alley and the surrounding Old City neighborhood, we also explore threads which take us across the city and around the globe.
In this episode of The Alley Cast and the episode next week, we’re going to talk about houses in Philadelphia and the people who constructed them, from improvised dwellings in the city’s earliest days to a boom and bust building economy as Philadelphia stretched outward from the Delaware River, and to trends as neighborhoods get reshaped by recent waves of investment. In this installment we’re talking about early building methods in Philadelphia and the construction of houses on Elfreth’s Alley itself.
Episode 2: Building Houses, Part 1
The first flood of immigrants who came with William Penn needed housing immediately, and they improvised it however they could. Some of these early residents of Philadelphia found dwellings which had been built by Native populations, such as the Lenni-Lenape, and took shelter in them, shaping these structures to their needs. Others found caves in the banks along the Delaware River and improvised housing in them.Still others built houses dug into the earth. Many of these early houses later became the foundations and basements of more modern buildings, but sadly, few, if any survive to this day, largely due to the construction of highway I-95 along the waterfront.
But in the years that followed that initial phase of shelter construction, Philadelphia bloomed into a city, built by skilled craftspeople. As they did so, these builders implemented lessons learned from the rebuilding after the Great Fire of London in 1666, fresh in their memories.
We talked to Alex Palma, who discussed early building in colonial Philadelphia.
Alex Palma: Hey everybody, I am Alex Palma, I am the Assistant Director at carpenters Hall, which is a historic site in Old City, Philadelphia, and just a couple blocks away from Elfreth's Alley. And our institution was founded by the carpenters company, which is the oldest continually continually operating trade guilt in the United States.
Palma: ...the carpenters company was founded in 1724. As a trade Guild, for a specific subset of, of carpenters. The carpenters company was originally for master carpenters or Master Builders. And this was an important distinction because these guys were usually the ones that owned the shops that they were operating, right. And they were also like, kind of the auteurs, if you like, of the Philadelphia built landscape, so they, you know, the master builder in the 18th century, when the company was originally founded, coordinated and designed buildings as much as they did carpentry work.
Palma: But importantly, I'd like to note, I'd like to note that the carpenters company is in a lot of ways a descendent organization of a much older carpenters company in London, and this organization also still exists today, there is an organization called the Worshipful Company of carpenters, sort of informally known as the London company. And this this London company, the Worshipful Company of carpenters had a massive influence over London as a as a built space.
Palma: a couple of decades before the founding of the carpenter's company here in the new world, the London company had a pretty big role in reconstructing London after the London fire of 1666.
The Great Fire of 1666 was a devastating fire that swept through London destroying about 13,000 houses. The hot, dry summer weather caused the flames to blow through the city of densely packed wooden houses. After the fire was put out, London had to be reinvented and rebuilt. New building regulations were created to prevent future fires. Brick replaced flammable timber, and casements gave way to double-hung windows. Houses had to be separated by thicker walls, and streets had to be wider.
Palma: when the carpenters company was founded in 1724, that was still a pretty significant echo in the psyche, of the founding members of, of the carpenters company. And so that they were aware, and in some cases, some of the founding members of the of the American carpenters company, were also previously members of the London company.
London's new regulated and ordered approach to building after the Great Fire of 1666 outside England soon spread to America as immigrant carpenters brought what skills they knew across the ocean. Now the rows of two and three story townhouses could be found on both sides of the Atlantic . Professor Peter Borsay called this cultural exchange the "English Urban Renaissance."
Palma: And we still, today maintain a symbolic traditional relationship with the Worshipful Company of carpenters in London....we do a member exchange where every couple of years, we alternate between sending, you know, 20 members to London to visit the London company. And then they send you know, a couple dozen people here to America to Philadelphia to visit carpenters Hall. It's a cute little tradition.
Palma: In the 18th century, I would say, the vast majority of construction that was happening in Philadelphia was done by carpenters company members. Because of how large and powerful the organization was at that time, and construction that wasn't done by carpenters company members still had the company sort of haunt the process through which those buildings got built because the company literally set standard like building codes and labor standards.
Palma: I would say, the easiest way to see the influence of the carpenters company in the 18th century is to just look at what buildings still exist today, right? In Old City and and looking at who they were built by. So for example, carpenters company members built the steeple of Christ Church, people who would eventually become carpenters company members, built Gloria Dei, people who were carpenters company members built Independence Hall, the second bank, St. George's church, for example, old St. Joe's, Franklin court.
The carpenters were at the heart of construction in the new city of Philadelphia because even buildings which used brick and stone relied on a wooden framework. The carpenters, by assembling these frames acted as the 17th- and 18th-century architects and engineers, as well as the general contractors, marshalling crews of workers.
Palma: Well, so it's interesting, because you know, I mentioned before that the master builder or the master carpenter had a pretty significant role throughout the construction of the building. And one of the reasons that was was because every building and it didn't matter if it was a wood construction house, or if it was a brick construction house, or perhaps it's just stone there were some stone construction buildings in the 18th century. But every every house, every building needed a timber frame. And that timber frame basically defined how Everything else would go throughout the construction of the building. And so you wanted to have that, like, if you own that property and you were having that building built, you wanted to have that frame be as good as possible. So that's, that's where the carpenters company kind of gets a lot of their power. And that's where the master carpenter gets a lot of their power because the building does not get built without the carpenter being there, you know.
Palma: So, what's interesting, too, is actually, the way these buildings in the 18th century get built. Um, so wood construction in 18th century America has very little use of nails. Before the Industrial Revolution, nails have to be hand forged. So they're fairly expensive and difficult. And they're not as standard right, as, like contemporary nails would be. So you know, there's some question as to how useful like how effective they would be in comparison to modern nails.
So, most timber framing is literally fit together, like Legos, right? So there's lots of pegs, there's lots of fitting, there's lots of green wood and dried wood being fit together. And so, there are a lot of different techniques developed to create these temporary structures in a way that use like as little joining substance, whether it be glue, whether it be nails as possible.
And then, you know, at that point, you would bring in the Masons of the bricklayer and the roofer, and the master builder would remain to coordinate that process. Um, yeah, so that's, that's the actual basic process of constructing a building in 18th century America.
This type of construction required training, which for most carpenters began when they were apprenticed to a master builder. The term of indenture was usually about seven years, and when it ended, the young builder would become a journeyman, working for other builders in order to build professional relationships and accumulate the funds needed to go out on their own. This seemingly linear progression wasn’t always so simple. Sometimes journeymen would work for other carpenters while taking on side jobs under their own name. When the housing market shifted, some master builders might have taken on work as journeymen to earn money while not taking on the financial risk of the construction. Individual innovation was sometimes actively encouraged. In 1806, an indenture agreement between a 16-year-old Thomas Whitsel and carpenter Alphonso C. Ireland contained the proviso that during the duration, Whitsel would be allowed the use of his master's shop and tools after work, given freedom to do what he liked.
We can look at the career of one member of the Carpenters’ Company to see how the apprenticeship system worked for some builders. Isaac Zane was born around 1710 and grew up along Newton Creek in New Jersey and apprenticed as a carpenter. In 1734, he married Sarah Elfreth.
We don’t know much about Isaac Zane’s early career, but one of the ledgers he used beginning in 1748, survives and provides a really detailed picture of what his business looked like day to day and year to year and how labor practices changed over the 18th century.
Zane had been a fully-fledged carpenter for about 15 years at that point, but in 1748, his fellow carpenter James Davis, Sr. died and Zane was made the executor of his will. This left Zane not only in charge of Davis’ active construction projects--four houses in progress--but also responsible for his four apprentices in addition to the two apprentices already in Zane’s home. In order to tackle all of the work ahead of him, Zane hired two laborers, offering them a yearly contract.
A few years later, with most of those apprentices’ terms ended, Zane turned to journeymen, and while he hired some on a yearly basis, others he hired at a daily rate. While the daily rate was higher, it brought more insecurity for the journeyman carpenter--poor weather, illness or injury, and a dip in the economy could all cost them precious working days and they were often responsible for their room and board. Zane also bought the services of indentured labor, and in 1754 placed an advertisement in the Philadelphia Gazette:
Justine Maust, performing the advertisement: "RUN away yesterday morning, from the subscriber, A servant man, named Abraham Steward, not quite 20 years old, of a middle size as to height and thickness, has a smooth fresh colour skin, high cheek bones, he says he was born in the North of England, has short black hair: Had on when he went away, A brown nap coat, with flat metal buttons, tufted fustian jacket, and breeches much the same sort of stuff, old check shirt, fine hat, much worn, old bluish yarn stockings, and old shoes, he is sometimes of an impudent, bold behaviour, and other times appears sullen. Whoever secures the said servant, so has his master may have him again, shall have Forty Shillings reward, if taken in town; and, if 10 miles off, Three Pounds, if 50 miles, Four Pounds; and if 100 miles, Five Pounds, and reasonable charges, paid by ISAAC ZANE , in Market street.”
Whether Abraham Steward was a worker in Zane’s household or his work crew, his flight from indenture highlights that this era was rife with deep systemic inequalities which were reflected within the community of builders and associations such as the Carpenters’ Company. Here’s Alex Palma again.
Palma: And as you might guess, because these guys were Master Builders in the 18th century, they had climbed through the ranks of what was considered a skilled trade, right, so they'd worked their way up from apprentice to journeyman to master. And so as such, they were of a certain economic class, certainly, right.
there were, unspoken, obvious, obviously, institutional, racial barriers and gender barriers, right, that the company inherited, sort of, from the dominant culture of the 18th and 19th century.
So, the company was, for most of its history, entirely white males really.
the company as much as it existed as a means to enrich the built trade, the building trades, and, you know, for for, for a long time, it also kind of served as a as a gate to keep certain kinds of folks out of that skilled trade world.
While Isaac Zane was able to build a profitable career from humble origins, not all of the apprentices, journeymen, laborers, and other employees who were part of his crew were able to do so. Though we know that one of those journeymen, Silas Engles, went on to become a member of the Carpenters’ Company, many more did not.
Zane was able to send his son, Isaac Zane, Jr., off to learn the highly profitable trade of a merchant, traveling to Barbados and London to establish connections throughout the British Atlantic. Zane, Jr. parlayed his father’s success into wealth for himself, which he then invested into plantations in Virginia worked by enslaved people, plantations on land that had been the homeland of indigenous people before he got there.
Building Houses on Elfreth’s Alley
Let’s re-center on Philadelphia and Elfreth’s Alley. If your ears perked up a little bit when you heard “Sarah Elfreth'' a few minutes ago, give yourself a pat on the back! When Isaac Zane married Sarah, she had already inherited a parcel of land from her grandfather John Gilbert, one of the landowners who had created Elfreth’s Alley. By the 1740s, Zane had built the house that still stands at #139.
The neighborhood around Elfreth’s Alley was home to many carpenters in the 18th century. According to Roger Moss, historian and preservationist, the Mulberry Ward, running from Arch Street to Vine Street west of Front Street, was home to the second-highest number of carpenters out of the city’s initial 10 wards. Mulberry Ward was also home to many bricklayers, joiners, plasterers and other craftspeople involved in the home-building business. It’s likely that many of the homes constructed along the Alley were built by workers from the neighborhood.
The first house or houses of Elfreth's Alley, were built around 1713. The oldest surviving houses on the street are #120 and #122, built in the mid 1720s. From the time of their construction to the 1770s, most of the houses on the South side of the Alley were built. There were also houses on the North side, but many of them would be demolished and rebuilt in the early 19th century. There were also still working buildings on the North side. The late 18th century and the early 19th century saw many of the 3-story houses built, with the most recent one being #125, which is basically 4 stories tall.
Different styles of row houses began to emerge that continue to define Philadelphia's architectural identity, such as the Trinity house, or bandbox house, which is a three-story row house that contains one room on each floor. These homes were built out of necessity for quick and affordable housing as Philadelphia's population growth no longer could sustain Penn's dream of green space and superblocks were broken up. Such houses still exist on Bladen's Court off of Elfreth's Alley.
The Trinity houses were enlarged and modified into what is called the “City house” by a series of backbuilidings. These houses were constructed in three sections. The front section or room takes up the full width of the lot. The second section is the piazza, linking the front section and the backbuilding. The last section is the backbuilding, which also sometimes takes up the full width of the lot, creating a long yard or alley beside the piazza. Because one side of the building is not touching its neighboring building, builders can construct windows along that side of the building, providing natural light and ventilation. House number 113, 115, 130, and 132 on Elfreth's Alley are perfect examples (Murtagh). However, #130 and a few other examples had backbuilding that used to take up the full width of the lot at one point, but now it no longer does.
There are several examples of residents buying other property on the street and redeveloping them (e.g. Barney Schumo lived in 130, bought 125 and 127, and built a new house at 127, but then died and his family moved back to 130).
While it seems intuitive that buying houses would be restricted to the economic elite, the relationship between renting and owning was hazy in Philadelphia. Jeremiah Elfreth owned four houses and rented his home from Leonard Melchior. He and his landlord were taxed on an equal amount of capital wealth (Salinger).
Rachel Schade: the economic and sort of commercial conditions that made home ownership reasonable in Philadelphia, as opposed to other places like New York, or, you know, going back to the model in England, where factories would build the housing for their workers or coal mines, you know, and then rent them to the workers.
This is Rachel Schade, an architect in Philadelphia and the Associate Teaching Professor at Drexel University in the Department of Architecture and Interiors.
Schade: In Philadelphia, it was quite different. The development was in the hands of the property owners, which were not the company owners, they went way, way back, too. Many of them were originally, you know, Penn’s, tracts, people who had purchased land in England, and for development as an investment.
In the 18th century, as today, there were different scenarios under which a house could be built. Some homes were built specifically for a client, customized to meet their needs. Others were built on behalf of a client for resale. Still others were built speculatively, with builders assuming all of the risk of a volatile market as they constructed homes at their own expense hoping to be able to sell them for a profit.
In Philadelphia, a particular pattern of development, using what was known as “ground rent” made speculative building a better investment for builders, and may have led to the proliferation of single-family homes. Ground rent is a little complicated, but I’m going to take a minute and try to explain it.
Here’s how ground rent worked: Person A would essentially give a parcel of undeveloped land to Person B, with the expectation that they would build a house on the lot within a certain period of time. Then Person B, or whoever they sold the house to, would owe Person A an annual payment worth about 6% of the original value, which would continue indefinitely unless they paid Person A the full amount within a certain period. If whoever then owned the house, so Person B or even a Person C, didn’t pay their annual fee, Person A could seize their house. For instance, in 1773, Isaac and Elizabeth Andrews transferred a property, which included the lot now numbered #135 Elfreth’s Alley, to Aquilla Jones. Jones was expected to build a house there and pay 6 pounds a year indefinitely. In Jones paid the Andrewses the total value of the lot, 100 pounds, he would “release and discharge the rent.”
This allowed carpenters to build speculative houses without really buying land. They took on only the cost of the labor and building materials, and could turn it into a significant sale. For working-class Philadelphians, this also made it easier to buy a house--you could pay off the land over an extended period of time.
The system worked great for the people creating this ground rent, too! They didn’t get the full value of the land up front, but they could get a steady trickle of income off these various rents for years and years, and ensure that their families had some income after they died.
Ok, that was ground rent, which, again, contributed to the many many houses built in Philadelphia in the 18th and early 19th century. Back to our conversation with Rachel Schade:
Schade: The other aspect of the way Philadelphia houses are built and this was a big concern of William Penn's was the fear of fire, and fire damage. And so early on was, was considered required, you couldn't get homeowners insurance, essentially, if your house was not primarily brick or had brick separation between the houses.
Insurance rates depended on the thickness of walls. The thicker the walls, the lower the premium. But the irony was that the best-built houses were often the most valuable. The affluent, who needed insurance the least, were the only ones who could afford insurance. Benjamin Franklin's insurance rate was set at 30 shillings per 100 British sterling for a 500 sterling policy. This was an unusually valuable house, which the working class couldn't afford.
Many of the poorest Philadelphians lived on the edges of the city--North and South along the Delaware River, and westward toward the Schuylkill. In those neighborhoods, wooden construction was more common than brick construction and as late as 1810, frame housing was about 65 percent of all housing in the city.
However, the issue of insurance is not always so clear. Some dwellings were uninsured because they did not meet the insurance company's standards, but many were still uninsured. Was the cost unaffordable or was insurance a service that could be easily disregarded?
Architectural historian Dell Upton argues that the young cities of the United States were shaped by a "systematic landscape". The elites wanted to organize urban society and the urban landscape as a single, centralized, rational order, with prominent people identifiable by their fancy houses, possession, and social engagements. This was also an opportunity for the middle class to rise up in social class.
The residents of Elfreth's Alley were working artisans, merchants, and laborers trying to make their place in America. On closer look, we can see that they embraced the culture of refinement of the day when examining the neoclassical architectural elements in the parlors and chambers. The architectural elements of the Alley accommodated the activities of refined society, such as tea drinking, card playing, and polite conversation.
The families who lived in these townhomes usually had the best rooms in front of the house on the first and second floors. The interior decorative elements are described in the insurance surveys of the Alley. The decorative elements on the first and second floors always had a surbase and skirting and usually included a chimney breast panel, chimney closets, molded windows and doors, winding stairs, and yellow pine floors. The third floors tended to be divided into smaller rooms with a surbase and skirting, a mantle, and sometimes a chimney breast closet.
However, the ordinary lives of EA residents did not conform to the interiors of houses. While the houses were architecturally equipped for tea drinking, they were in practice used for the more chaotic elements of Alley life, such as crowded meals, artisan work, commercial sales, and unrefined interactions of daily life out of necessity the house served many purposes. The Alley were crowded quarters: residents were renters, builders were landlords, artisans ran businesses at home.
Though the interiors on EA shared similarities with the interiors of wealthy houses, it would be wrong to call these desperate attempts to imitate the wealthy. The middling artisan population had different sets of goods available to them. The interior architectural details available to Alley builders came from companies who served the middling city residents. Immigrant carpenters and artisans in their travels across the Atlantic Ocean came to Philadelphia from England, continental Europe, and other American cities. It was not a top-down flow of information, but direct exchange between immigrant house constructors and immigrant homeowners.
We can see the dichotomy between refined architecture and utilitarian living in House #137 for example. In 1796, the kitchen exhibited the house's lowest level of finish, lacking a surbase and mantle. This lack of refinement challenged the refined front room with its neoclassical chimney breast and butterfly shelves. However, only a thin door separated the kitchen from the front room. Someone drinking tea and playing cards in the front room could smell the cooking smells of the kitchen.
If one was walking down Elfreth's Alley, we could imagine the merchandise of shopkeepers overflowed into the streets. This friendly clutter and consumerism challenged the refined architecture inside. The dressmakers Mary Smith and Sarah Melton from 126 used their front room for their mantua-making enterprise. The furniture maker Daniel Trotter from 114 may have displayed joined chairs outside his shop, disrupting the flow of carriage and foot traffic.
For about 50 years around the turn of the 19th century, this bustling street would also be an active construction site as empty lots were developed into homes and as existing buildings were demolished and replaced by new homes. By 1836, the streetscape looked much as it does today, but the story of construction on the Alley wasn’t over, and around the city, the demand for housing was just beginning to heat up!
Join us next week for Part 2 of our history of house building in Philadelphia!
Credits:
History is a group effort! This episode was researched and written by Enya Xiang and Ted Maust and narrated by Ted Maust. Thanks to Alex Palma and Rachel Schade for sharing so much of their expertise with us--we’ll hear more from them in Part 2. At her old firm, Schade helped literally write the manual on the Philadelphia row house, which is available for free. We’ll include the link to that manual on the episode post on our website.
Thanks again to our sponsors Linode, the History Department of Temple University, and the Carpenters’ Company of Philadelphia. Support is also provided by the Philadelphia Cultural Fund and the Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia.
In addition to the sources cited by name, this episode drew heavily on the work of Donna Rilling, Roger Moss, Bernard Herman, and Sharon V. Salinger, as well as past volunteers and staff of the Elfreth’s Alley Association who have collected various records related to the street’s residents.
A transcript of this episode with sources is available on the episode page at ElfrethsAlley.org/podcast and the link in the show notes.
The music in this episode is the songs “Open Flames” and “An Oddly Formal Dance,” both by Blue Dot Sessions and both used under Creative Commons license. Thanks to Justine Maust for performing the advertisement, in the Pennsylvania Gazette and Jonathan Stewart for performing the William Penn quote.
This podcast is recorded on the unceded indigenous territory of the Lenni-Lenape people, who were and continue to be active stewards of the land. We recognize that words are not enough and we aim to actively uphold indigenous visibility and sovereignty for individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. By offering this Land Acknowledgment, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the Elfreth’s Alley Museum accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Season 2 of The Alley Cast! Remember that one of the best ways you can support our work is by telling other people about this show and rating us on podcast apps such as Apple Podcasts.
You can sustain the work of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum by making a donation at elfrethsalley.org/donate or by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/elfrethsalley.
See you next week for Part 2!
Thank you and take care!