The Library Company of Philadelphia
The current Library Company of Philadelphia page is here.
John C. Van Horne, the present (1998) librarian of the Library Company, relates the following about the building pictured in the 1876 Report:
The building in question was the Library Company's first separate
structure, called Library Hall, erected in 1789-90 at Fifth and
Library Streets (just below Chestnut), directly across Fifth Street
from the American Philosophical Society's Philosophical Hall. It was
designed by Dr. William Thornton, better known as one of the architects
of the U.S. Capitol. The building was occupied until 1878, when the
Library Company moved to a much larger building on South Broad Street.
The statue of Franklin visible in the niche above the door is still
with us; it has been restored and now sits behind glass in
a lighted, street-level niche on the facade of our mid-1960s building.
The sculpture was carved in Carrara, Italy by Francesco Lazzarini.
After we vacated Library Hall it was razed to make room for a nondescript
office building. In the 1950s, when Independence Park was being
created, the office building was torn down, and the Philosophical
Society, then in need of a library building, put up a building on
the site whose facade is an exact replica of our original building,
complete with a fiberglass replica of the Franklin statue.
The
fullest account of Library Hall is "Library Hall," by Charles
E. Peterson, in "Historic Philadelphia: From the Founding until the
Early Nineteenth Century (vol. 43, part 1 of the Transactions of
the American Philosophical Society; 1953).
A good chunk of the first article in the Report is devoted to the Library Company, including Ben Franklin's famous reference to the Library Company as "the mother of all the North American subscription libraries." There is another section, written by Lloyd. P. Smith, then director of the Library Company, starting on page 953. In 1876 the Library Company had 104,000 volumes making it the second largest library in Philadelphia, behind the Mercantile Library which held 123,668 volumes.
Library Hall, 1789-1878
