This document and the two which immediately follow record the first transactions in the drawn-out process by which Franklin put together the various parcels of land on the south side of Market Street (also called High Street) between Third and Fourth Streets which became the site of his home.7 The plot involved here, corresponding to the later No. 318 Market Street, was granted by William Penn to Henry Hayes, April 7, 1707.8 It was 33 ft. broad and 306 deep and lay between a lot on the west which Penn had granted to Samuel Carpenter and others in 1705 and one on the east he had granted to William Boulding in 1706,9 parts of both of which Franklin later acquired. Hayes sold the eastern half of his lot (16½ ft.) to William Davis, April 12, 1711, and on May 24 of the same year Davis transferred it to John Read, carpenter, father of Franklin’s future wife, Deborah.1 By two documents dated December 10 and 11, 1716, Hayes sold the western half (16½ ft.) to John Read,2 and, because Davis’ transfer of the eastern half to Read had been insufficient in legal form, Hayes confirmed Read’s possession by an instrument dated December 12, 1716.3

On February 18, 1723/4, John Read mortgaged the entire property to the Trustees of the General Loan Office for £56 5s. in bills of credit of the first Pennsylvania issue (see above, p. 139) with surety in double the amount of the loan. He died September 2 of the same year without having paid the loan; in time the Trustees brought an action in the Court of Common Pleas for the default against his administratrix and widow, Sarah Read, and secured execution on the property for £115 1s. 1d., representing principal, interest, and damages. At the sheriff’s auction sale which followed, Sarah Read bought the property in for £354 and received a sheriff’s deed dated September 3, 1729. She now had clear title to what had been her husband’s land, on each half of which there apparently stood at the time a small house near the street.4

On April 9–11, 1734, Mrs. Read entered into a series of transactions with her son John and her two sons-in-law and daughters, Benjamin and Deborah Franklin and John and Frances Croker, by which she transferred title to the western half-lot and its dwelling house to John Read, Junior,5 and title to the eastern half-lot and its dwelling house in equal undivided half-interest to the Franklins and Crokers, but received back from the latter couples a lease for 99 years or life at the nominal annual rental of “one Pepper corn only if demanded.” The first two documents here printed record the transfer of one half-interest to the Franklins; similar documents, not here printed, conveyed the other half-interest to the Crokers.6 These indentures follow the cumbersome form of conveyancing commonly used in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An indenture of “bargain and sale,” leasing the property for a specific term, often one year, placed the lessee in actual possession, as permitted by the Statute of Uses of 1535. The lessor, who now had only a reversionary interest, could sign, ostensibly on the next day, an indenture of “release,” which operated at common law to convey that interest, and with it the freehold, to the lessee. This procedure of “lease and release,” awkward as it seems today, became popular because it avoided the costly medieval requirement of livery of seisin.7

The third document here printed, dated April 11, 1734, is a lease from the Franklins and Crokers to Mrs. Read restoring to her the life use of their half-lot and dwelling house.