"Ourang Outang"

In 1799 the government of Pennsylvania followed the movement of the state's population westward to Lancaster. A year later the federal government left Philadelphia for Washington. After over half a century, the complex on Independence Square was no longer the hub of political life for state or nation. Although state and city courts continued to sit in the Supreme Court Room, the Assembly Room and second floor of Independence Hall stood empty and unused. In an early example of what is now called adaptive use, the Pennsylvania legislature in 1802 granted the painter Charles Willson Peale permission to occupy these spaces as a museum. One of his sons, Rembrandt Peale, set up his studio in the Assembly Room. The elder Peale fitted up the second floor to display his portraits of prominent national figures and his natural history collection. This included such awe-inspiring specimens as a stuffed grizzly bear and an "Ourang Outang," and the skeleton of a mammoth, as well as 760 varieties of birds and 4,000 insects. To house them Peale carried out one of the first "restorations" of the building, returning the Long Gallery and the southern rooms to their original arrangement.

Peale was a sympathetic tenant for the building, but he also supported the first, and most destructive, of the major nineteenth-century alterations. In 1812 the Pennsylvania legislature authorized the Philadelphia County Commissioners to demolish the wing buildings and their connecting piazzas, or arcades, in order to erect fireproof buildings for the storage of records. Because the fireproof buildings were considerably larger than the old wings, their construction necessitated razing the library and committee rooms and the colossal clock case on the west wall of the old State House. Meanwhile, the state government, having once again moved west, this time to Harrisburg, and needing to pay for the construction of a new capitol, determined to sell the State House Square and the buildings on it. A proposal to subdivide the land into building lots met with howls from the citizens of Philadelphia. The bill that finally cleared the legislature in 1816 offered an alternative: the City of Philadelphia could purchase the property for $70,000. On June 29, 1818, the city took possession of its new property.