Carpenters Hall

320 Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA

Pennsylvania

state

PA - Philadelphia

county

PA - Philadelphia

city

MUSEUM

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Carpenters' Hall, in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is the official birthplace of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and a key meeting place in the early history of the United States. Completed in 1775, the two-story brick meeting hall was built for and still privately owned by the Carpenters' Company of the City and County of Philadelphia, the country's oldest extant craft guild. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark on April 15, 1970.

SITE FEATURES

Surviving Structures, Exhibits

On this site...

The land on which Carpenters' Hall is built was purchased on behalf of the Carpenters' Company of Philadelphia in 1768 by Benjamin Loxley, Robert Smith, and Thomas Nevell. The hall was designed by Robert Smith in the Georgian style based on both the town halls of Scotland, where Smith was born, and the villas of Palladio in Italy. The carpenters' guild held their first meeting there on January 21, 1771, and continued to do so until 1777 when the British Army captured Philadelphia.

STATE HOUSE

EST. 1771

The First Continental Congress of the Thirteen Colonies of North America met at Carpenters Hall from September 5 to October 26, 1774, as the Pennsylvania State House, later renamed Independence Hall, was being used by the moderate Provincial Assembly of Pennsylvania. It was here that Congress resolved to ban further imports of slaves and to discontinue the slave trade within the colonies, a step toward phasing out slavery in British North America. It also passed and signed the Continental Association.

In June, 1776, it was where the Pennsylvania Provincial Conference officially declared the Province of Pennsylvania's independence from the British Empire and established the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, mobilized the Pennsylvania militia for the American Revolutionary War, set up the machinery for the Pennsylvania Provincial Convention from July 15 to September 28 in 1776, which framed the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 and enabled the Declaration of Independence to be written and ultimately adopted. It was briefly occupied in 1777 by the British Army during the war.

The meeting hall served as a hospital for both British and American troops in the American Revolutionary War, and other Philadelphia institutions have held meetings in Carpenters' Hall, including Ben Franklin's Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, and the First and Second Banks of the United States.