Why Were There So Many Skeletons Hidden in Benjamin Franklin’s Basement?

For nearly two decades leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin was a boarder in a house at 36 Craven Street in London. The future founding father left his English home and returned to America in 1775. Two centuries later, bones from more than a dozen bodies were found in the basement, where they had been buried in a mysterious, windowless room beneath the garden.

The skeletons had gone unnoticed until the 1990s, when historians decided to turn Franklin’s old haunt into a museum. Conservationists were carefully repairing the structure when they stumbled upon a human bone. “From a one-meter-wide, one-meter-deep pit, over 1,200 pieces of bone were retrieved,” according to the Benjamin Franklin House. They belonged to at least 15 people, some of whom had been children.

The team called in the coroner, but forensic investigations suggested that the bones were quite old. In fact, they had likely been buried in the home some 200 years ago—around the time that Franklin resided in it.

Franklin was a storied revolutionary and high-ranking Freemason, so it’s easy to wonder what dark secrets he may have hidden in his basement chamber. But the truth, it turns out, isn’t quite so dark.

“The most plausible explanation is not mass murder, but an anatomy school run by Benjamin Franklin’s young friend and protégé, William Hewson,” as the Guardian’s Maev Kennedy wrote in 2003.

Hewson was an anatomist who began his career as a student of William Hunter, a famous obstetrician who also studied anatomy. Following a dispute, Hewson parted ways with his teacher and started his own anatomy school at 36 Craven, where his mother-in-law, Margaret Stevenson, was the landlady.

Franklin just so happened to be one of her boarders. He is known to have developed a friendship with Stevenson’s daughter, Polly, who would become Hewson’s wife. Later, he appears to have advocated for Hewson professionally.

“[Franklin] thought [Hewson] was a polite and promising young man,” Márcia Balisciano, director of the Benjamin Franklin House, told Discover magazine’s Joshua Rapp Learn in 2023. “He tried to mediate this dispute between Hewson and William Hunter to get some of his preparations and samples back into his possession.”

In Franklin’s time, the study of anatomy was an ethically ambiguous business. Per Mental Floss’ Matt Soniak:

Anatomy was still in its infancy, but the day’s social and ethical mores frowned upon it. … A steady supply of human bodies was hard to come by legally, so Hewson, Hunter and the field’s other pioneers had to turn to grave robbing—either paying professional “resurrection men” to procure cadavers or digging them up themselves—to get their hands on specimens.

Researchers think that 36 Craven was an irresistible spot for Hewson to establish his own anatomy lab. The tenant was a trusted friend, the landlady was his mother-in-law, and he was flanked by convenient sources for corpses. Bodies could be smuggled from graveyards and delivered to the wharf at one end of the street, or snatched from the gallows at the other end. When he was done with them, Hewson simply buried whatever was left of the bodies in the basement, rather than sneak them out for disposal elsewhere and risk getting caught and prosecuted for dissection and grave robbing.

Franklin was probably aware of the illegal studies going on in his building, though he likely wasn’t involved himself. Still, it’s difficult to imagine that, curious man that he was, he didn’t sneak down and check out the proceedings at least once or twice.

“[Franklin] was a champion of science—he was supportive of young researchers and others that could exemplify his passion for knowledge and innovation,” Balisciano told Discover magazine. “He probably loved the idea that this scientific work would be going on.”

Ethics aside, conducting dissections was actually quite dangerous in the 18th century. In 1774, a 34-year-old Hewson died of sepsis, which he had contracted by accidentally cutting himself during a procedure. The disaster shocked the anatomist’s inner circle, including Franklin, who described the affair in a letter to his wife.

“Our family here is in great distress,” he wrote. “[Hewson] died last Sunday morning of a fever which baffled the skill of our best physicians. He was an excellent young man, ingenious, industrious, useful and belov’d by all that knew him.”

Colin Schultz | | READ MORE

Colin Schultz is a freelance science writer and editor based in Toronto, Canada. He blogs for Smart News and contributes to the American Geophysical Union. He has a B.Sc. in physical science and philosophy, and a M.A. in journalism.

Ellen Wexler | | READ MORE

Ellen Wexler is Smithsonian magazine’s assistant digital editor, humanities.