Marking Pennsylvania History

Do Markers Manage Memory?

Is our history an "official" history? Of course not. But while the historical marker for Rickett's Circus marker near 12th and Market Streets in Center City Philadelphia advances one story, it buries another. Whether we like it or not, when we acknowledge history we manage memory. There will be casualties, and sometimes even the historical equivalent of collateral damage.

About twenty years after Rickett's Circus came and went the Twelfth Street Friends Meeting was built on the site. Philadelphia was growing and spreading westward and the site of the circus was now valuable real estate.

Why should we know and care about the Twelfth Street Meeting today? Elias Hicks, who wrote Observations on Slavery in 1811 and inspired Quakers to take a more radical stand, preached there.~ Through out the 19th century and into the 20th, this Meeting grew to become a fertile center of American political and social activism. The American Friends Service Committee was founded there in 1917 and other groups, the Urban League, SANE (Citizens for a Sane Nuclear Policy), NAACP and Women's Strike for Peace grew there.~

When the Fifteenth Street Meeting subsumed the Twelfth Street Meeting, the bank next door offered $810,000 for the site - without the building.~ What would become of the redundant Meetinghouse? Suggestions included moving it to Independence National Historical Park, to Front and Spruce, to 15th and Race.~ You won't find it on any of these sites. You will find it at the George School in Newtown, Bucks County, between a tennis court and a baseball diamond.

Pedestrians at Twelfth and Market wouldn't have a clue.

- Kenneth FInkel, Executive Director of WHYY's Arts & Culture Service

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