Restoring Independence Hall's Assembly Room, 1948–1965

The Assembly Room of Independence Hall is where the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were debated and signed. Returning it to its historic appearance took historians, architects, archeologists, carpenters and painters years of work. It was the most complex project the National Park Service had undertaken in Philadelphia, and it helped set today's standards for historic preservation.

National Park Service archeologist John Cotter credited the preservationists Lee Nelson and Penelope Hartshorne in particular: "The best break Independence Hall and the NPS ever had was to benefit from the research and scholarship of its best historical, archeological, and architectural investigators. [Preservationists] Lee Nelson and Penelope Hartshorne are tops in their field."

The restored Assembly Room (NPS photo).

A room remade by every generation

By the 1850s, the room looked little like what Benjamin Franklin or George Washington would have known. Each generation seemed to have its own idea of how it should look, and furnishings, wood paneling and paint colors had all been changed. City officials hung portraits of the founding generation and filled the room with relics of the Revolution — the cracked Liberty Bell among them. More changes followed in the 1870s and 1890s.

The Assembly Room in 1856, by Max Rosenthal (NPS photo).

Furnishing it again

When Independence National Historical Park was established in 1948, one of the Park Service's first goals was to restore the Assembly Room to how it looked during the Revolution. What stood in the room when the Second Continental Congress met? What did delegates to the Constitutional Convention see?

Historians turned to letters, diaries, receipts and books, and to the 1780s painting Congress Voting Independence, for details of what the room held. By summer 1955 the first round of furnishing was done — but the architectural work had only just begun.

Detail of Congress Voting Independence by Robert Edge Pine and Edward Savage (NPS photo).

Reading the walls

Preservationists examined every architectural detail. They scraped away decades of paint to find the original colors, and studied nails — wrought-iron nails meant 18th-century work. Eventually they removed all the wooden paneling, exposing the original 1730s brick walls. That work revealed:

• the original cockleshell frieze carving, the last surviving piece of original woodwork on the room's walls, whose paint fragments showed the east wall's original color;
• the original ceiling structure, without its plaster;
• the original positions, shapes and sizes of the windows, doors and fireplace openings;
• nailing blocks on the brick that showed how wide the paneling had been;
• three original floor joists, whose nail patterns revealed the width of the floorboards;
• a single wooden dentil from the original cornice, which gave the measurements needed to rebuild the cornice.

The original cockleshell frieze carving from the Assembly Room (NPS photo).

Putting it back together

As the clues accumulated, carpenters, plasterers and painters rebuilt the room: new paneling, decorative plaster, and walls painted their original color. The room stayed open to visitors as much as possible, so the public could watch the work. The restoration was finished in summer 1965.

Carpenters re-creating the wood paneling, around 1964–1965 (NPS photo).

Decades later, the restoration has held up well, and it is considered one of the most accurate historic restorations in the United States.

Sources

• National Park Service, Independence National Historical Park: "Restoring the Assembly Room."