Historic Shrines of America

Paul Revere's house, Faneuil Hall, the Craigie House where Longfellow wrote, a hundred more — an American pilgrimage told building by building, when many of these places were still fighting to survive.

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The Keeping Room

The small true details these famous American houses kept hold of.

John T. Faris went house to house through historic America and wrote down what he was told there. The big events are well known; these are the details that stayed in the rooms — each linking to the house it belongs to.

  1. When Christ Church, Alexandria sold its fifty pews, Washington paid £36 10s. for pew number five — a receipt that survives better than most of what was said in it.Read it: Christ Church, Alexandria, Virginia
  2. Philadelphia's Council of Safety asked David Rittenhouse to cast iron clock weights and trade them to citizens for their leaden ones. The lead was needed for bullets, and the city's clocks paid for the Revolution.Read it: Independence Hall, Philadelphia: David
  3. A Tory poet warned Rittenhouse off politics in the Pennsylvania Evening Post of 2 December 1777: “Meddle not with state affairs, / Keep acquaintance with the stars.” He ignored it.Read it: Independence Hall, Philadelphia: David
  4. Rittenhouse surveyed the Delaware–Pennsylvania boundary so accurately that Mason and Dixon simply accepted his results rather than redo the work.Read it: Independence Hall, Philadelphia: David
  5. The first public event ever held in Independence Hall was a banquet in the long room upstairs. The Assembly did not get to sit in its own chamber until 1736, and the room was not finished until 1745.Read it: Independence Hall, Philadelphia: State
  6. The building that housed the Declaration served as Philadelphia's City Hall until 1854, and the Supreme Court of the United States held its very first session inside it.Read it: Independence Hall, Philadelphia: Declaration
  7. Fraunces' Tavern, where Washington said goodbye to his officers in December 1783, was already old: it was built by Etienne de Lancey around 1700.Read it: Fraunces' Tavern, New York City
  8. Whittier's first cheque for Snow-Bound was $1,000, and he did not spend it — he set the whole sum aside as the beginning of a fund to redeem the family farm.Read it: Fernside Farm, Haverhill, Massachusetts
  9. The poet's ancestor Thomas Whittier is introduced, memorably, as “the three-hundred-pound ancestor” — and his first house in America was a log cabin.Read it: Fernside Farm, Haverhill, Massachusetts
  10. Patrick Henry made his first public speech in the Parson's Cause at Hanover Courthouse — and found, in the chair of the presiding magistrate, his own father.Read it: Greenway and Sherwood Forest, Virginia: Henry
  11. President Tyler's horse is buried in a grave at Sherwood Forest, the estate he named for himself after being read out of his own party.Read it: Greenway and Sherwood Forest, Virginia: Whigs
  12. A Tyler dinner-table trick: one attendant carried out a plum pudding, and a second, dressed exactly like the first, immediately brought in another equally hot one at a grave nod from the host.Read it: Greenway and Sherwood Forest, Virginia: Jefferson
  13. The iron works at Saugus, Massachusetts — the first successful iron works in the Colonies — were sited where they were because one yeoman happened to own the right piece of ground.Read it: Broadhearth and the Bennet-Boardman House, Saugus, Massachusetts
  14. George Mason's note to Washington, 9 November 1785, opens with the most neighbourly sentence in the book: “The bearer waits on you with a side of venison (the first we have killed this season).”Read it: Gunston Hall, Virginia: Mason
  15. Mason's verdict on his neighbour: Washington is “the first man upon this continent,” and would have stood comparison with Rome at its meridian glory.Read it: Gunston Hall, Virginia: Mason
  16. Lowell's Elmwood passed through the hands of Elbridge Gerry — Signer of the Declaration, Governor, Vice-President, and the man whose name became gerrymander.Read it: Elmwood, Cambridge, Massachusetts
  17. The Kentucke Gazette, the first newspaper published west of the mountains, used its pages to report “an eloquent oration” by a young lawyer named Henry Clay.Read it: Ashland, Lexington, Kentucky
  18. Kentucky's first brick house went up in 1788, built by a man who had arrived in the wilderness with a brother-in-law and seven others who joined along the way.Read it: Ashland, Lexington, Kentucky: Virginia
  19. Audubon's beginnings were an attic: the room he occupied filled up with birds, animals and specimens preserved in a cabinet of his own devising, with drawings made of many of them.Read it: Mill Grove and Fatlands, Near Philadelphia: Audubon
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