Day 2- Franklin's Privy and Printshop

Franklin Court was in the heart of the city in Benjamin Franklin’s day.  There I was able to see where Franklin’s house was, his printing shop, and his privy.

Are you wondering what a privy is? Well a privy was a bathroom.  A privy would be dug about forty feet deep and lined with stone so that it wouldn’t cave in upon itself.  Chamber pots would be emptied into it, but also it was a common trash area.  For example, say I was working one day and I dropped a tea pot on the ground and it shattered. I would sweep up the pieces and go dump them into the privy.

Over time the privy would fill up and be filled in.

As time goes on, all of the human waste disintegrates and all that is left is the garbage.  When archeologists find a privy, they get very excited.  From here, they can tell what daily life was like for whichever family lived there.  For instance, remember that tea pot? Well an archeologist would find the shattered pieces, try reassembling them together, and maybe find a stamp on the bottom telling where it was bought.  From here, they would be able to figure out if we could afford “x amount of money” for a tea pot then we were probably a lower, middle, or upper class family. 

Who knew a privy could tell the future so much?!

As a side note, there was also a capped off water well near the privy? Guess how far away???  Only about 10-20 feet away!  That tells you what people back then did NOT know about disease.

What did Benjamin Franklin do?  Most of us think of Franklin as an inventor? Diplomat? Scientist?  But, did you know that Franklin was actually a printer?

Franklin grew up in Boston, and was apprenticed to his older brother as a printer.  Ben didn’t like that though, and he ran away to Philadelphia, which was a growing city.  He worked as an apprentice in a print shop there, later went to England, and then came back to open up his own print shop. 

For the first 30 years of Ben’s life, he was a “leather apron guy” and always thought of himself as a tradesman.  Franklin retired since most people died of an early age at 42, and then began is life as a scientist, and then eventually as a diplomat.  He ended up living until the age of 84, but still considered himself a printmaker.  While we were here, I was able to see a demonstration of how printmaking was done in Ben Franklin’s time.