Betsy Ross and the Making of America by Marla R. Miller

Author:Marla R. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805082975
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

By General Subscription,

For the Free Quakers, erected,

In the year of our Lord, 1783,

Of the Empire 8.

Hardware, plastering, glazing and painting—the construction of the new meetinghouse engaged artisans around the city. Terrence Smith plastered the walls; John Long glazed the second-floor windows—some 140 lights in all—while his counterpart Joseph Wirt completed the ground floor.29 Wirt also painted the cornices and Long the rest of the building. The blacksmith Jacob Elkfeldt installed a stove. And, on June 17, 1784, Betsy’s uncle and cousins—as the firm Abel James & Sons—accepted payment for lead, possibly for flashing, or to protect the floor beneath the stove from sparks.30 The final building, the historian Bernard L. Herman has observed, “complete with giant engaged pilasters . . . tapped into the worldly and academic language of classicism.” The stylish elements the meeting chose conformed to both an aesthetic of restraint and contemporary architectural fashion, and so (Herman continues) were “consistent with a Quaker doctrine that emphasizes the importance of the practice of living in the world.”31

When the building was at last ready—or ready enough—for a meeting, a “large and solemn” gathering was attended by some two hundred people, including “most of the members of our Society who resided in this city,” as well as “divers of our fellow Christians of other denominations.”32 But the interior was not yet finished. The house carpenter Evan Evans still had benches to make in August; as fall went on, the building was further improved when the meeting decided to purchase a small table for the structure and to have Venetian blinds made for the back windows—tall ones on the western wall to block out the afternoon sun. This latter job went to the upholsterer John Davis, who submitted a bill of £8 for “mounting 2 Vanicion [Venetian] blines 11 feet 3 inches long.”33 Timothy Matlack bought a folio book of the “best paper, all bound in the best leather” for the recording of marriages, and the new meeting was good to go.34

From the beginning, the design of the building included revenue-generating space in the cellar, which was rented out immediately to a wine merchant. But when the congregation did not grow as fast or as large as its founders envisioned, plans were made to create a second floor which could also be rented out for additional income. Brick piers were installed in the cellar and wooden columns above to support another floor, and stairs built along Arch Street to reach the new door that had to be cut through the not-so-old brickwork. Soon, the schoolmaster John Poor alerted potential students to his new “Accommodations for the Instruction of Young Ladies”; some one hundred students had enrolled by the end of the year. Poor claimed that his academy was the “first in the United States, and perhaps in the world”—maybe so, for it outgrew these quarters. In Poor’s wake, the upper room of the meetinghouse was rented by the Masonic Lodge, which took a nine-year lease. For those years, the meeting space was particularly convenient to John Claypoole, if he continued to attend meetings.

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