Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell

Independence Hall was built in the 1730s and 1740s as the statehouse of the Province of Pennsylvania, a handsome brick building meant to house the colony's assembly. When the tensions between the American colonies and Britain came to a head, its central location and its large assembly room made it the natural meeting place for the Continental Congress, the body of delegates from the thirteen colonies. In that room in 1776 the Congress debated and adopted the Declaration of Independence, largely drafted by Thomas Jefferson, breaking formally with Britain and setting out the idea that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. After the Revolutionary War was won, the same room hosted the Constitutional Convention of 1787, where delegates including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison argued through a long, hot summer and produced the framework of government the country still uses today. The Assembly Room is preserved much as it was, with the delegates' tables and Washington's chair, its rising-sun carving that Franklin famously read as a good omen for the young republic.

A ranger's talk fills the quiet room with the voices and arguments of those debates, and reminds visitors that the founding was not inevitable but hard-fought, imperfect, and carried out by fallible people who left much of the work of liberty to those who came after.

The Liberty Bell was cast in the middle of the eighteenth century to hang in the tower of the statehouse, and it cracked and had to be recast more than once even in its early years, leaving the famous fracture that runs up its side. It bears an inscription drawn from the Bible, calling to proclaim liberty throughout all the land, a line chosen long before the Revolution but which came to seem prophetic.

Its fame as a symbol grew in the nineteenth century, when abolitionists seeking to end slavery embraced it and gave it the name Liberty Bell, casting it as a call for freedom that the founding had not yet delivered to enslaved people. In the years since, suffragists, civil rights marchers, and movements for freedom around the world have all invoked the bell, so that the cracked object in its glass pavilion carries far more meaning than its size or age would suggest.

Philadelphia was founded in the 1680s by William Penn as the capital of his Quaker colony, planned as a green and orderly city between two rivers, and it grew into the largest city in the colonies and, for a time, the capital of the new United States. The compact historic district around Independence Hall preserves an unusual density of founding sites, from Franklin's grave to the first bank of the nation.

The land beneath the city was the ancestral homeland of the Lenape, also called the Delaware, who lived along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers long before Penn arrived and who signed early treaties with him. Pressured off their homeland through the eighteenth century by land dealings including the notorious Walking Purchase, the Lenape are not federally recognized in Pennsylvania today, and their descendant nations continue elsewhere. The city of liberty rose on land taken from a people who were not free to keep it.

Spring and fall are the finest times to visit, with mild weather for walking the historic district and lighter crowds than the peak of summer. The trees of the park green up in spring and turn color in fall, framing the old brick buildings.

Summer, and especially the days around the Fourth of July, brings the largest crowds and the fullest program of ceremonies and reenactments, a stirring time to visit but a busy one, so timed passes and early arrival matter most then. Winter is the quietest, cold but uncrowded, when the historic buildings and the bell can be seen at an easy pace, and the city dresses up for the holidays.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.