Constructing an Institution: “The College, Academy, and Charitable School of Philadelphia”

Who Rules the Schools?

This impressive 1755 document is one of two charters granted by the Proprietors of Pennsylvania, the Penn family, establishing the legal foundations of the institution, the “College, Academy, and Charitable School of Philadelphia in the Province of Pennsylvania.” The charter grants the Trustees authority to award academic degrees at the collegiate level and can be said to mark the establishment of the school of higher education that we know as Penn. The school is also charged with giving at least a basic education, both for those who can pay and those who cannot: “as well for Instructing Youth for reward as poor Children on Charity.” The charter required all trustees and faculty to take an oath of allegiance to the Protestant King of Great Britain and Ireland.

The grant of this charter was a political victory for the institution, its wealthy and socially influential trustees, and for Rev. William Smith, its new leader. It soon allied the school with the “Proprietary” Penn family who governed the colony, rather than the Quaker dominated legislature. Smith, Penn’s controversial Provost, would fiercely defend the charter as the legal foundation of the university through the divisive Revolutionary years.^[1]

A “New Building” for a New Academy

This undated pencil sketch is the only known eighteenth-century image of the original buildings occupied by the university. The “New Building” (on the left), proposed by the itinerant evangelical minister George Whitefield in 1740, designed by Edmund Wooley, the builder of Independence Hall, and completed in 1741, was Philadelphia’s largest public building in the period. It served as a hall for visiting preachers and was also intended to house a free or charity school for poor children, although that school was not established. In 1750 the trustees of the indebted New Building negotiated a sale to the new trustees of the Academy, maintaining the requirement for a charity school on the site. The project was led by Franklin, who was, conveniently, a trustee of both groups. Alterations were made to the building to accommodate classes, and a bell-tower designed by Robert Smith was added.^[2]

Eugène du Simitière was an historian, artist, and avid collector of artifacts from around the colonies and the Caribbean. His sketch shows the original “New Building,” constructed in 1741, and the later dormitory building to the north (right), from 1763.^[3] These buildings were demolished in 1844.

1. Herbst, From Crisis to Crisis, 93-94: the Charter established positions for Smith and Alison and was innovative in the colonial colleges because it recognized “the faculty as a separate and duly constituted body with clearly defined governmental functions”(94). Full text of Charter available here. ↑

2. Thomas and Brownlee, Building America’s First University, 28-32. ↑

3. Snyder, City of Independence, 84-85. Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 22-27. ↑