Franklin's memorandum of the road to Philadelphia, 1723

Franklin left Boston in the autumn of 1723, seventeen years old and in breach of his indenture, and reached Philadelphia on a Sunday morning with a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper. The Autobiography gives the route: by sloop to New York, by water across the bay to Perth Amboy, and on foot through the New Jersey pines toward Burlington. It gives almost no dates.

This sheet supplies them. Franklin ruled it with a column of days and, against each, the date. It runs from Monday 23 September through Sunday 29 September, then Monday the 30th, and on into October: Tuesday the 1st, Wednesday the 2nd, Thursday the 3rd, Friday the 4th, Saturday the 5th and Sunday the 6th. Beside the last six days he set down where he was. The bay on Tuesday. Amboy on Wednesday. The Pines on Thursday. Brown's on Friday. A river stop on Saturday, the name hard to make out. Philadelphia on Sunday, the 6th of October. It is Franklin remembering where he was on each day of the journey that began his life in Philadelphia, written down sixty years afterward.

The note is on the back of a letter. The letter is dated 29 November 1783, a Saturday, and comes from the office of Ferdinand Grand, Franklin's banker in Paris, to Franklin at Passy. It concerns shares in the Caisse d'Escompte. Grand's clerk encloses a copy of a decree of the Council and explains that Franklin, holding forty of the old shares, may take ten of the new at 3,500 livres each, payable on 15 December, a total of 35,000 livres. Franklin turned the sheet over and used the blank side for his dates. He took up the Autobiography again at Passy in 1784.

Almost no one writing about Franklin's arrival in Philadelphia knows that he fixed the days of it himself.

Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society, Benjamin Franklin Papers, Mss.B.F85. Reproduced by permission. Rights in these photographs remain with the American Philosophical Society.