Declaration House

This guide to Declaration House in Philadelphia centers on the summer of seventeen seventy-six, when a young Thomas Jefferson rented two rooms from a bricklayer named Jacob Graff to escape the sweltering city during the Second Continental Congress. It follows his early-morning routine at a portable writing desk, and introduces Robert Hemmings, the fourteen-year-old enslaved boy attending him in those same rooms. You'll hear how Jefferson worked through roughly seventeen days of drafting before handing his pages to Adams and Franklin. Listen with an eye on the reproduction desk upstairs, where the rooms once stood.