Independence Hall

Independence Hall is a red-brick Georgian building on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Built between the early 1730s and 1753 as the Pennsylvania State House, the seat of the colonial government, it was where the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and where the Constitution of the United States was drafted in 1787. It is the centrepiece of Independence National Historical Park and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979.

In 1729 the colonial legislature of Pennsylvania, whose capital was Philadelphia, set aside about 2,000 pounds for a state house. The lots on Chestnut Street, bought in 1730, lay on the edge of the town and had earlier served as a camp for American Indians. The project was soon caught up in a quarrel between two committee members, the lawyer Andrew Hamilton and the physician-architect John Kearsley, over both the design and the location. In August 1733 the assembly sided with Hamilton and gave him full control, and work began soon after on a plan by Hamilton and the master builder Edmund Woolley.

Because the assembly paid only as funds allowed, the building rose piecemeal and was not finished until 1753. It comprised a central block with a tower and wooden steeple, joined by arcaded passages to two smaller wings. The bell ordered for the steeple, later known as the Liberty Bell, hung in its lowest chamber. The colonial, and then the state, government of Pennsylvania used the building until 1799.

From May 1775 the State House was the main meeting place of the Second Continental Congress, the body of delegates from the thirteen British colonies during the American Revolution. In its Assembly Room on 14 June 1775 Congress created the Continental Army and chose George Washington to command it, and in July it made Benjamin Franklin the first postmaster general. On 2 July 1776 the delegates voted for independence from Great Britain, and on 4 July they adopted the final text of the Declaration, drafted chiefly by Thomas Jefferson; it was read to the public in the square outside.

The war repeatedly drove Congress from the city. It left for Baltimore in December 1776 and, when British troops occupied Philadelphia in September 1777, moved on to Lancaster and York before returning in July 1778. The Congress of the Confederation sat here from 1781 until a mutiny of unpaid soldiers in June 1783 caused it to leave Philadelphia.

From May to September 1787 delegates from twelve states met in the same room for the Constitutional Convention. Called to amend the Articles of Confederation, they chose instead to write a new frame of government, meeting in secret with the windows shut through the summer heat. The Constitution was completed on 17 September 1787 and came into force in 1789. From 1790 to 1800, while Washington, D.C., was being built, Congress met next door in Congress Hall.

After the state government departed, the building found other uses. The painter Charles Willson Peale ran his museum of natural history and portraits in it from 1802 to 1827. In 1816 Pennsylvania sold it to the City of Philadelphia, which still owns it. The rotting wooden steeple had been taken down in 1781, and the original wings were replaced in 1812; a new steeple by William Strickland followed in 1828. During the Marquis de Lafayette's visit in 1824 the Assembly Room was renamed the Hall of Independence, from which the building takes its name. In April 1865 the body of Abraham Lincoln lay in state there, and over 300,000 mourners filed past.

Early restorations, in the 1820s and in 1897 and 1898, were often inaccurate, though the present wings and arcades date from the latter. In 1948 Congress created Independence National Historical Park, and the National Park Service undertook a long, research-based restoration, completing the furnishing of the Assembly Room to its eighteenth-century appearance in 1955. The Liberty Bell, displayed inside from the 1850s until 1976, now stands in its own centre across the street. UNESCO listed the hall in 1979 for its link to ideas of universal significance. The steeple was repaired between 2010 and 2012 and the north facade in 2017 and 2018. The main threats are heavy visitor numbers, air pollution and acid rain, and development nearby.