Category Archives: Society Hill Treasure Map

To summarize, we have a 1716 treasure map from Philadelphia that leads to a particular small brick building in Cherry Garden, leading downwards from the southeastern corner of Society Hill to the Delaware River.

In the early 18th century, Cherry Garden was (as its name suggests) gardens, apart from a single building: while in the 21st century, the whole area East of South Front Street is now empty, save car parks and grass verges that were cleared during the construction of the Interstate I-95. All of which might possibly trick you into thinking that this land has always been empty of buildings.

But if you did, you’d (of course) be wrong. And here’s why…

The 601 Block

In the previous post, we saw how Commodore Stephen Decatur (1779-1820) grew up on what is now South Front Street’s 600 block. According to this 1935 source, Stephen Decatur’s “father’s home in 1801 was No. 261, now No. 611 South Front Street”. (p.137)

More recently, there was also the (now long-demolished) John Hart House at 601 South Front Street:

The same source also has a nice picture of 603 South Front Street:

The 701 block

As late as the 1840 map of Philadelphia, Shippen Street only went as far East as Front Street:

But by the time the area block appears in Ernest Hexamer’s 1860 map of Philadelphia, the long block has been divided into the 601 block and the 701 block. Here, the 701 block is – just like the 601 block a few feet to the North – full of tightly packed houses:

Hence we can see that this is not a nice Roman villa under an undisturbed field scenario: rather, there is already a nice load of archaeology to potentially be contended with here.

The Franklin Sugar Refinery

When a sea-change in business hit Philadelphia in the second half of the 19th century, this part of the city was transformed: and the incoming tide was one of white sugar, or (rather) the need to build a refinery to produce white sugar. This was the Franklin Steam Sugar Refinery (later the Franklin Sugar Refinery): there’s a nice 2013 article on the company courtesy of The Inquirer (philly.com), which includes details of how the company kept its refining tricks secret:

[…] in order to mystify New York refiners eager to learn its trade secrets, it was equipped with a Willy Wonkalike room crammed with pipes and valves that was entirely a sham; the valves would regularly be opened and closed to no actual purpose, their job simply to throw industrial spies off the scent.

In the 1872 map, we can see the changes to the building on Front Street, together with the Widow Maloby’s Tavern on the opposite corner (700 South Front Street):

We can also see clearly the relative offset between Widow Maloby’s Tavern (at 700 South Front Street) and the northwestern corner of the Franklin Sugar Refinery building complex:

By 1886, we can see (again, thanks to Ernest Hexamer) the sugar refinery’s building sprawl:

Here’s the matching ground plan, which includes lots of cellarage because the site was built upon a slope going down to the Delaware:

And here’s a closeup of the 701 block in 1886, with South Front Street on the left:

When The Molasses Run Dry…

Of course, despite the sugar rush, all good things must come to an end: and so the buildings on South Front Street became warehouses in the 20th century:

The building itself was demolished in 1967, and the by-now-more-than-somewhat-run-down area was flattened and cleared to make way for Interstate I-95: which is the state in which we find it now.

So, Where Do We Start The Geophys?

From my perspective, it seems as though the 701 (top left) corner of the site goes right over the site of the building facing Shippen Street in the early maps. So it looks to me as though the 701 block was built right on top of the cottage we’re looking for. There may just be a small piece of the original sticking out to the North, but this is perhaps a little unlikely.

So there doesn’t seem to be much hope of finding the cottage. However, locating the top-left corner of the factory building would be a nice confirmation of where things were (though note that we also know that South Front Street was 50′ wide at this point).

As a reminder of the original letter:

9 – Measure exactly 45 foot from that Porch along the lane due South
10 – there you will find a Stone post in the ground if not moved which may
11 – be easily done by accident or perhaps by makeing a Neu fence : 3 foot
12 – or perhaps 4 foot west from the s[ai]d stone is a Chist 4 and a half foot long 2 foot
13 – broad and half foot and the same depth accordingly being about 6 foot from the
14 – bottom of the Chist to the surface of the Ground.

As described here, it seems to me that the “Stone post” / “Neu fence” is almost certainly a boundary marker: and it also seems likely to me that the 50′ width of South Front Street is something that was measured out right in the earliest days of the town. As a result, all the building work to the East of South Front Street would have been carried out strictly behind that boundary marker.

Hence I think there is a good chance that the “Chist” described in the letter was buried beneath South Front Street itself, in the days long before tarmac and modern road construction. And who’s to say that it isn’t still there? 😉

Thanks to the help of commenter Thomas, we now have an excellent online source for the brick-built Cherry Garden cottage, courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Museum and the Ghost Gardens, Lost Landscapes? exhibition put together by Erin McLeary.

The cottage in Cherry Garden

This contained not only John Fanning Watson’s drawing of the cottage from about the 1820s (“courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia”)…

…but also its location, 39° 56′ 24.6474″ N, 75° 8′ 37.86″ W : “Now 313 S Front St, vis-a-vis Shippen St”.

Note that modern Philadelphia’s Bainbridge Street was old Philadelphia’s Shippen Street: and that Shippen Street originally stopped at Front Street. Hence the (now archaic) use of vis-a-vis, “in a position facing a specified or implied subject“, i.e. ‘on South Front Street facing Shippen Street’.

So we can see that by 1796, the Cherry Garden plot had been divided into lots and sold (as per the 1756 advertisements in the Pennsylvania Gazette I mentioned before). This was presumably broadly the same state in which John Fanning Watson saw the remains of the site.

As a sidenote, the only online record I found relating to 313 S Front St is from an 1859 letter written by a John McKay in Michigan, who gives the address (presumably) of where one of his sons (also called John McKay) is living in Philadelphia (all courtesy of the Irish Emigration Database). (Oddly, Google seems to find this page only occasionally.). The modern block numbering would be 613 South Front Street.

But before we move on, let’s briefly look a little closer at the (unannotated) 1796 map:

It seems highly likely, then, that John Fanning Watson was talking about the remains of the single house we can see on the 1796 map immediately facing Shippen Street, whose south wall (appears to have) lined up with the north wall of the house on the southwestern corner opposite it.

Google Streetview

In modern-day Philly, Bainbridge Street cuts a little across Front Street, before abruptly screeching to a halt in front of the Interstate I-95.

There are no houses of any sort East of South Front Street, just a small car park, with grassy verges on both sides:

The three houses on the west side south of the crossroads are all from the eighteenth century (all built by Nathaniel Irish), and so weren’t there in 1716 when the letter was written:

700 South Front Street – 1764 – Widow Maloby’s Tavern (on the right)

702 South Front Street – 1767 – Capt. Thomas Moore House (in the middle)

704 South Front Street – 1763-1769 – Nathaniel Irish House (on the left)

A (now long-gone) house on the same block as (old block numbering) 313 S Front St was (new block numbering) 611 South Front Street, which according to the 1909 “Publication No. 5” of the City Historical Society of Philadelphia (it says here) was “the home of early U.S. naval hero [Commodore] Stephen Decatur” (1779-1820), famed for his attacks on Barbary pirates:

Decatur was widely believed to have been the greatest, bravest President the US never quite had (he died in a duel at 41). Here’s the Philadelphia historical marker put up in his honour:

In one of those awful coincidences historians like to both notice and note, Shippen Street was renamed Bainbridge Street in honour of Commodore William Bainbridge (1774-1833), who was also Stephen Decatur’s second in his fatal duel. According to naval historian Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, Bainbridge was so jealous of Decatur’s success that he rigged the rules of the duel (only eight paces!) in order that both duellists were likely to be killed.

Anyway, now you know that here we (virtually) are on Bainbridge Street, within a few feet of where Decatur grew up.

So… Why Don’t We Just Go Dig, Then?

Slow down! I’ve only managed to cover the history of the site around the area. I’ve got lots to write up about the site itself yet (coming up next), which should help inform the whole industrial archaeology thing. Once that’s all in place, perhaps a bit of geophys would indeed be nice. 😉