Sheriff's return endorsed on a writ, Philadelphia, 1738, signed by Joseph Breintnall

A sheriff's return endorsed on the back of a writ of venditioni exponas. Breintnall certifies that, by virtue of the writ directed to him and after due and legal notice, he exposed to sale the messuage, tenement and lot of ground on High Street in Philadelphia belonging to the late John Rutter, remaining since his death in the hands of Samuel Nutt and Mary Rutter as administrators; that on the twenty-fourth day of April 1738 he bargained, sold and delivered it with all hereditaments and appurtenances to John Ross of the City of Philadelphia, attorney at law, for the sum of two hundred and forty-two pounds lawful money of Pennsylvania, to hold to him and his heirs and assigns for ever; and that he has the money ready before the justices at the day and place within mentioned.

Joseph Breintnall was the closest of Franklin's early collaborators. A scrivener by trade, he was one of the original members of the Junto in 1727, the first secretary of the Library Company in 1731, and Franklin's partner in the Busy-Body essays printed in Andrew Bradford's Mercury in 1729. He and Franklin together made the nature prints of leaves used on Pennsylvania and New Jersey currency as a device against counterfeiters, among the earliest applications of nature printing anywhere. He served as Sheriff of Philadelphia from 1735 to 1738, so this return falls in the last months of his term. He drowned in 1746 and left no family archive, and his hand survives chiefly in institutional minute books.

The document is therefore a Junto signature on the ordinary paper of an office, of a kind that reaches the market catalogued as a colonial deed rather than as an association piece. It also records the sale of a High Street property a short distance from the New Printing-Office, to an attorney who became one of the city's leading lawyers.

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