CHAPTER V
THE FIRST ASSEMBLY OF PENNSYLVANIA, AND THE HOUSE WHEREIN IT MET
On the 18th day of November, 1682, three weeks after his arrival in the colony, William Penn issued his writs requiring the sheriffs of the several counties, in their respective bailiwicks, “to summon all the freeholders to meet on the 20th inst and elect out of themselves seven persons of the most note for wisdom, sobriety and integrity to serve as their deputies and representatives in General Assembly to be held at Upland, in Pennsylvania, December 6th (4th) next.”
In pursuance of this proclamation the Assembly met at Chester on the day designated, Dec. 4, 1682, and organized by the election of Nicholas Moore, of Philadelphia County, president of the “Free Society of Traders,” as chairman of that body. After the appointment of committees, four of the members were selected to apprise the Governor that the Assembly “humbly desired him to honor the House with a transmission of his constitutes.”
It is an interesting historical fact that the very first record in the commonwealth regarding the meeting of a legislative body discloses that then, as now, “ways that are dark” were resorted to in the effort to secure the election of members in the interest of particular individuals. On that occasion Edmund Cantwell, the sheriff of New Castle County, was charged with “undue electing a member to serve in Assembly from that county,” in which effort he was ultimately thwarted, for the Committee on Elections and Privileges reported adversely to Abraham Mann, the sheriff’s candidate, and in favor of John Moll, who was contesting his seat, in which conclusion the House concurred.
The first two days of the session were consumed in hearing the case of contested election just mentioned, the adoption of rules governing the meeting, passing the act of union, which annexed “the three lower counties” (those comprising the present State of Delaware), and providing for the naturalization of the inhabitants thereof, as well as the Swedes, Finns, and Dutch settlers in Pennsylvania. On the third day they received from William Penn the “Printed Laws” and the “Written Laws, or Constitutions.” The “Printed Laws” were “the laws agreed upon in England,” which had been prepared by learned counsel there, at Penn’s desire, and printed in that country, and the “Written Laws, or Constitutions,” were the ninety bills presented to the Assembly by the proprietary, out of which the meeting passed the sixty-one chapters of “the great body of the laws.”** A strange fact is that not one of those enactments, as adopted, is now in force in this commonwealth. As soon as the statutes had been acted on, the members from the lower counties particularly became anxious to return to their homes, and so intimated to the Assembly. The Speaker considered this desire to adjourn as unbecoming in the members, and bordering on an insult to the Governor. A committee of two of the deputies was appointed to wait upon Penn respecting it, and he consented “that the Assembly be adjourned for twenty-one days, which was accordingly ordered by the Speaker.” The body failed to meet again at the time designated by adjournment, and at the next regular Assembly in Philadelphia it is recorded that the Speaker “reproves several members for neglecting to convene at the time appointed when the House last adjourned.”
Nearly forty years ago an old structure stood on the western side of Edgmont Avenue, north of Second Street, which was commonly termed “The Old Assembly House,” because of the popular belief that it was in this building that the first Assembly convened in Pennsylvania, Dec. 4, 1682. Dr. George Smith, in his valuable “History of Delaware County,” conclusively established the fact that this building was the first meeting-house of Friends in Chester, and was not erected until 1698, hence the first Assembly, which held its session more than ten years before that date, could not have met in that structure. We know that on the 6th day of the First month, 1687, Jöran Kyn, or Keen, made a deed conveying a lot in Chester, adjoining his “lot or garding,” to certain persons in trust, “to use and behoof of the said Chester meeting of the people of God called Quakers, and their successors forever,” and on this lot, now included in William P. Eyre’s ground, on Edgmont Avenue, the ancient meeting-house was built.
Dr. Smith thereupon argues that the Assembly must have met in the court-house, or, as it was then known, “The House of Defense,” which stood on the eastern side of Edgmont Avenue, above Second Street, and so projected into the roadway that, when Edgmont Avenue was regularly laid out as a street, it had to be removed. The doctor rightly thinks, “It was the only public building in Upland, at the time, of which we have any knowledge.” Martin, in his “History of Chester,” accepts the doctor’s conclusions as unquestionably accurate. Nevertheless, both of these ab1e historians are in error in this. The thought escaped them that perhaps Penn saw that the “House of Defense” was too small for the purpose intended, and therefore a private dwelling was used for the meeting of the members.***
Mrs. Deborah Logan informs us in her notes to the “Penn and Logan Correspondence,” (4*) that the Assembly convened in the large, or, as then termed, “The Double House,” by way of distinction, which James Sandilands, the elder, had erected for his own dwelling which stood near the creek, and subsequently, when the road to Philadelphia was laid out, near that highway. On an old plan of the borough of Chester, made about 1765, now owned by William B. Broomall, Esq., of that city, the lot on which “The Double House” stood is designated as beginning about one hundred and thirty feet southerly from the intersection of the present Edgmont Avenue and Third Street. The lot itself was about one hundred and twenty feet front on the west side of Edgmont Avenue. This house, which was spacious and pretentious for those times, and would even now be regarded as an unusually large dwelling, had unfortunately been built with mortar made of oyster-shell lime, which proved utterly valueless. In a few years the building showed signs of decay, then became a ruin, and as such continued until the beginning of the present century, when its foundations were removed. In time its very existence was generally forgotten, so much so that, as is mentioned, some of our most accurate and painstaking historians were unacquainted with the fact that it had ever performed the important part it did in our early colonial annals.
In considering the location of the house wherein the Assembly convened, it is unnecessary to refer to the first meeting-house of Friends. The fact that it was not built previous to 1693 is proved conclusively from the original minutes of the Society, which takes it entirely out of the controversy. After standing one hundred and fifty-two years it was torn down in April, 1845, by Joshua P. and William Eyre, the there owners of the property.
I believe that the Assembly met in the double house and not the House of Defense, and my reasons for this opinion are briefly these.
The first record we have of the site of the Assembly building will be found in “The Traveller’s Directory,”(5*) wherein it is stated in the notice of Chester that “The first Colonial Assembly for the province was convened in this place on the fourth day of December, 1682. ‘A part of the old wall of the room still remains.’”
This wall could not have been part of the old House of Defense, for July 13, 1728, George McCal and Ann, his wife (Jasper Yeates’ eldest daughter) and John Yeates conveyed to George Ashbridge the house now owned by the heirs of the late Sarah P. Coombs, which dwelling, according to Armstrong, on the north side occupies about eleven feet of the south end of the site of the House of Defense. On May 5 1797, George Ashbridge, the grandson of the grantee just mentioned, sold the property to Dorothy Smith and Zedekiah Wyatt Graham as joint tenants. In 1798, Mrs. Smith and Mr. Graham, brother and sister both died of the yellow fever, and the property passed to their nephew and four nieces in equal shares. A that time the passage-way on the north side of the house was paved, and rose-bushes and other shrubbery grew in a bed alongside of the fence which divide the Smith and Graham property on the north from that of Henry Hale Graham. No part of a wall was to be seen at the point designated several years before the beginning of this century, and it must have been there in 1802 had it been the site of the Assembly House.
Official evidence, however, tells us that almost hundred years before the “Traveller’s Directory was printed, the House of Defense was destroyed, for at the November court, 1703, the grand jury presented “the old Court house, being a nuisance to the town in case of fire, and also the chimney of Henry Hollingsworth, in Chester Town,” and, thereupon, “The Court on deliberate consideracon orders the sd hous to be pulled down, and that Jasper Yeats, chief burges of ye borough of Chester, shall see ye order Pformed.” Martin is of opinion that this order had reference to the House of Defense, and there seems to be no doubt but that the authorities were alarmed lest the great pile of logs, dry as they must be, would burn the small cluster of houses at Chester. The site of the House of Defense subsequently became the property of Jasper Yeates, and he doubtless saw that the order of court was executed. We certainly learn nothing further from the records of the old nuisance, hence the presumption is that it was abated.
On the other hand, it is known that on the double-house lot the ruins of the dwellings remained for several years after the beginning of this century, and as it adjoined the lot to the south, where the Friends’ meeting-house stood when the foundation of Sandeland’s dwelling was removed to be used in other buildings, the tradition that the first Assembly had met there attached itself to the antiquated structure on the adjoining lot, and in time the fact that the double house had ever existed was generally forgotten. So quickly did the tradition link itself to the meeting-house that John F. Watson, in 1827 (only a quarter of a century after the “Traveller’s Directory” had correctly located the place where the Assembly met), refers to it as the “old Assembly House,” and Stephen Day, in 1843, in his “Historical Collections of Pennsylvania,” follows with the same statement, until the error had made permanent lodgment in the popular mind, and is now difficult of eradication.
* Acrelius, “History of New Sweden,” p. 111. That author retarded to Sweden in 1756, and doubtless he might have talked to old persons who could recall the incidents connected with the arrival of the proprietary, as such an event would make a lasting impression on their young minds.
** For a most interesting disquisition on the subject of the laws, the number enacted at the session of the Assembly, and other valuable information in relation thereto, see “Historical Notes, Part II., Appendix to the Duke’s Book of Laws,” pp. 477—482.
*** The “House of Defense,” we are told by Edward Armstrong, in his admirable notes to “The Record of Upland Court,” p. 202, “was rectangular in shape, its size was 14 by 15 feet, and, according to measurement, its S.E. corner stood about 84 feet from the N.E. corner of Front and Filbert. The northern portion of the house of Mrs. Sarah P. Combe occupies about eleven feet of the south end of the site of the House of Defense.”
(4*) Vol. i. p. 46; “Descendants of Jöran Kyn,” the founder of Upland. By Professor Gregory B. Keen, Penna. Mag. of History, vol. ii. p. 446.
(5*) “The Traveller’s Directory or Pocket Companion. By S.S. Moore and T.W. Jones, Philadelphia. Published by Mathew Carey, 1802. An exceedingly rare volume, in library of Pennsylvania Historical Society. Fifteen years subsequent to the publication of the Director a correspondent of the West Chester Federalist visited Chester and records that, “On the bank of Cheater Creek, which passes through the town, there is still shown an old wall, now making a part of a dwelling house, which formed one side of the first hall of justice in Pennsylvania – answering for the sessions of the Legislature and the Court Justice, in both of which Wm Penn occasionally presided.” (Martin “History of Chester,” p. 122.) The extract just quoted is of course full of historical misstatements, the narrative being based on perverted traditions related to the writer by the people of Chester of that day. The old Assembly House is confused with the fourth court-house of Chester County, built by John Hoskins in 1695, and the wall mentioned still remains in the dwelling-house to this day (1884). It shows, however that tradition at that time never located the site of Assembly House the east side of Edgmont Avenue, where the House of Defense stood – a species of negative proof.
Source: Page(s) 22-24, History of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, by Henry Graham Ashmead, Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co. 1884
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