Correcting History:
Philly’s Carpenters’ Hall not 1st to use
Robert Smiths’ plans; it was the 2nd!
This picture made me realize how similar the first Northampton County Courthouse and Philadelphia’s Carpenters’ Hall looked. I saw this 1845 image online, then in-person at the Historical Marx Room of the Easton Area Public Library, where I took a photo. Unfortunately, the building, located on Easton’s Centre Square, was torn down in 1861.
Carpenters’ Hall is wrongly thought to have been the model for the Northampton County Courthouse. Turns out it was the other way around. Photo by Jim Murphy, author of Real Philly History, Real Fast.
During the 11 years it took me to research and write my book, “Real Philly History, Real Fast,” I tried several times to understand the connection between Philadelphia’s famed Carpenters’ Hall and the Northampton County Courthouse in Easton, Pa.
Each time I became thoroughly confused.
I kept reading that the Northampton Courthouse at Centre Square in Easton was based on the building at Carpenters’ Hall, 320 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia.
But that didn’t make sense to me.
Why? For years I’d been seeing hints that the Northampton Court House was built years before Carpenters’ Hall.
So which building influenced which? Which was the chicken and which was the egg?
It turns out the courthouse
in Easton, Pa. came first!
But because of a 250+-year misinformation campaign, almost no one knows this today.
The Northampton County Courthouse opened on March 6, 1766, four full years before construction even began on Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia.
These numbers don’t lie!
Northampton Carpenters’
County Courthouse Hall
Started: 1765 Started: 1770
Completed: 1766 Completed: 1775
Yet the first source I saw, from the Northampton County Court of Common Pleas’ site, got the story wrong.
While acknowledging that the courthouse opened in 1766, it incorrectly says: “The complete two story limestone structure was fashioned after the plan of Carpenters (sic) Hall in Philadelphia and was erected in the center of Public Square in Easton.”
Even the Society of Architectural Historians SAH Archipedia repeats this myth, as does the History of Northampton County.
The Carpenters’ Hall website includes the same misleading info in a story titled, “A Walk with Robert Smith.”
Author Carl G. Karsh, now deceased, says, “Robert Smith, overloaded with projects during the 1760s, is believed to have recycled the design for a rural county courthouse, where it highlighted the town square. He was too busy even to oversee construction.” Well, he didn’t oversee the work at Carpenters’ Hall either.
Interesting oddity:
Easton locals got the story wrong, too! Amazingly, even the Sigal Museum and Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society perpetuates the mistake. In a room devoted to the original courthouse, text on the wall says: “Builders modeled their courthouse on Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia - a stately structure in the center of town - at a cost of $4,458.67.” Wrong!
Finally … the true story
Fortunately Charles E. Peterson, a historian of the Carpenters’ Company, the first resident architect at Independence Historical National Park, and author of “Robert Smith: Architect, Builder, Patriot, 1722-1777” clarifies some of the myths and misinformation that have prevailed for over 250 years.
Peterson says Smith exhibited a sketch for Carpenters’ Hall at a meeting on April 18, 1768, and construction began Feb. 5, 1770.
In 1774, the Carpenters’ Company, aware of hostilities in Boston, hurried to get Carpenters’ Hall finished. Plastering was done by April and stairs installed in August. The First Continental Congress met in Carpenters’ Hall the following month.
So Carpenters’ Hall really opened about eight years after the courthouse in Easton. Even then, as I say in my book, “Today’s building is far more finished than it was in 1774.” An insurance survey says the interior was “very plain.” And both the building’s frontispiece and arch for the fanlight would not be completed for about 18 more years.
In a story first written for the American Philosophical Society in 1953, Peterson says this about Carpenters’ Hall: “Architecturally, the building never seems to have attracted much attention, probably because of its ‘somewhat retired’ location.
Clearly, Northampton’s courthouse
predated Philly’s Carpenters’ Hall
Peterson agrees the Northampton County Courthouse has often been compared to it and that even the History of Northampton County says it was modeled after Carpenters’ Hall. “However,” Peterson notes: “the Philadelphia building was built later and it is possible that the reverse was true–that an up-state courthouse design was re-used by the Carpenters’ Company.”
“Certainly the Hall, with four equal gables, would be less surprising found in a public square approached from four sides than heading up the narrow courtyard where it was actually built.”
Peterson did not stop there. In his book, “Robert Smith: Architect, Builder, Patriot, 1722-1777,” he’s quite clear: “Nineteenth and early twentieth-century histories of the area acknowledge the resemblance of the Courthouse at Easton to Carpenters’ Hall, but they fail to realize that the Easton building predated its Philadelphia counterpart. Carpenters’ Hall may even have been designed in a hurry based on the existing plan for Northampton Courthouse.” He also says while Carpenters’ Hall was built of brick and the Courthouse of limestone, there is a “similarity of form and basic architectural detail.”
So I’m willing to take Peterson’s word on this. I love visiting Carpenters’ Hall, and seeing the beautiful model inside detailing the Carpenters’ Company’s wonderful craftsmanship. But I’m still not sure why some people went to such great lengths for so many years to mislead the public about which building came first. I don’t know who did it, or why. But it obviously worked, until now.
Looking … on the bright side:
I’m most impressed that Robert Smith, described by Peterson as “among the most important and skilled architect-builders in Colonial America,” created a building in rural Pennsylvania in 1765 that’s some 80 miles away from Philadelphia. I know the distance, because I drove it both ways on Saturday, June 11, 2022 to finish researching this story.
Easton was not a university town, like Princeton, N.J., where Smith designed Nassau Hall. Or an old established town like Williamsburg, Va., where he designed a building to treat the mentally ill. No, while it sits on the confluence of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers, Easton, a tiny country town, was not even founded until 1752.
Northampton County’s Guide describes the area this way:
“Although the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers provided direct access into Indian country, few settlers ventured very far north. This was mostly because there were not that many settlers early in the 18th century, and there was such an abundance of fine agricultural land near Philadelphia that there was little reason to go out into the wilderness of Penn’s Woods.”
It continues: “Frankly, Pennsylvania was a huge and inhospitable place; rivers, primeval forests and daunting mountains created obstacles that took settlers close to a century to slowly overcome.”
So I’m amazed that a building that paved the way for Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia was basically created in the Pennsylvania wilderness.
I just wish people had been willing to tell this story before – instead of the myth that Carpenters’ Hall was the model for the Northampton County Courthouse.
To me, the lesson is: Tell the truth. It’s refreshing. And much easier to defend.
Some Sources
http://eaplmarx.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2015-12-09T11:31:00-05:00&max-results=7&start=70&by-date=false
https://archive.org/details/collectionofpape05buck/page/106/mode/2up
http://eastoneccentric.blogspot.com/2012/07/two-easton-patriots-robert-levers-and.html
http://npshistory.com/brochures/inde/1962ch.pdf
http://paheritage.wpengine.com/article/preserving-philadelphia-conversation-charles-e-peterson/
https://archive.carpentershall.org/tribute-to-charles-e-peterson
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t4rj4qp4b&view=1up&seq=10
https://www.carpentershall.org/a-walk-with-robert-smith
http://www.courthouses.co/us-states/o-u/pennsylvania/northampton-county/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easton,_Pennsylvania
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Taylor_(Pennsylvania_politician)
https://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-15C
https://info.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek04/tw0827/0827obit_peterson.htm
https://pubs.nps.gov/eTIC/HOSP-INDU/INDE_391_134861_0001_of_0036.pdf
https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/PA-02-NO10
https://sigalmuseum.org/about/
https://www.carpentershall.org/story
http://www.csm.uwe.ac.uk/~rstephen/livingeaston/local_history/Penn/Penn_family_part_1.html
https://www.dsdi1776.com/george-taylor/?unapproved=777773&moderation-hash=43568f2fc0cd8871676571da30e60e58#comment-777773
https://www.eastonpl.org
https://www.easton-pa.com/discover-easton/about-us/pages/history-0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easton,_Pennsylvania
https://www.google.com/books/edition/History_of_Northampton_County_Pennsylvan/INEwAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Carpenters%27+Hall+and+Northampton+Courthouse&pg=PA80-IA4&printsec=frontcover
https://info.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek04/tw0827/0827obit_peterson.htm
https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/easton/2015/05/eastons_centre_square_then_and_1.html
https://www.nccpa.org/geninfo/courthouse-history
https://www.northamptoncounty.org/CTYGUIDE/Pages/CTYHistory.aspx
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?type=lcsubc&key=Northampton%20County%20%28Pa%2E%29%20%2D%2D%20History&c=x
https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1326&context=hp_theses
http://www.usgwarchives.net/pa/northampton/1picts/davis/160courthouse.jpg
https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMGXBP_Northampton_Countys_First_Court_House_Easton_PA
Smith, Robert. “Robert Smith: Architect, Builder, Patriot, 1722-1777.” Philadelphia: The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, 2009.