For eighteen years, Benjamin Franklin, the great American inventor, diplomat, and signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a tenant in a four-story Georgian house at 36 Craven Street in London. Nearly 225 years later a group called “Friends of Benjamin Franklin House” decided to renovate the building and turn it into a museum.
A month into the renovation the remains of fifteen different people were found in a pit, in the basement, six of them were children.
They all showed dissection marks made by 18th-century surgical instruments. Skull fragments showed drill holes likely made by a trepanning device.
What were human bones doing in Ben Franklin’s basement?
No records or letters were left behind to tell us why. What we do know is that the bodies were a secret.
Tests revealed the bones to be around 200 years old. Historians and the Institute of Archaeology agreed that the bones had been buried in the basement at the same time Franklin was living in the house.
We do have a few quotes from Ben Franklin:
Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
Benjamin Franklin
Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.
Benjamin Franklin
Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.
Benjamin Franklin
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
Benjamin Franklin
It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.
Benjamin Franklin
WOW! I can’t even…! Maybe the bodies were surgical anatomy specimens. It was tricky to obtain bodies legally to study anatomy then I recon. I don’t know much about ol’ Franklin.
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I thought about that myself but then there is the total disregard for those children deserving proper burial. They just threw the bodies in a pit.
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I would say that that does seem like what happened here, and I truly hope so… for the sake of the dignity of our founding fathers if nothing else.
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Most Interesting , and did Ben assign his body likewise to be a cadaver , to be dissected and discarded as refuse .
I write on Twitter ” Yahweh_is_Love ”
I would imagine that not all was right with this guy , as much as some would like to think .
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Everyone has secrets, ever-y-one!
…some of them are even dark.
With today’s forensics, we could find out if the bodies we “worked” on before OR after they died, but that costs money.
Like I said before, “Everyone has secrets… ever-y-one!”
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So true and more will come out over time.
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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-was-benjamin-franklins-basement-filled-with-skeletons-524521/
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https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/30448/time-they-found-those-bodies-ben-franklins-basement
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Don’t you dare go digging around in my backyard.… or my closet either. 😉
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Gosh, what does one say about this???????
I read a lot of History and this is something I never knew.
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That’s the thing about time, it reveals everything.
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I heard about this a few years ago. I think they found several animal remains as well.
It certainly doesn’t reflect well on Mr Franklin.
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And yet people still revere him Oo
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