History
The museum was founded in 1961 as the Philadelphia Maritime Museum by J. Welles Henderson. The museum consisted of Henderson's own personal collection and was housed in a rented room in the Athenaeum on Washington Square. Henderson founded the museum because he felt that Philadelphia's maritime history had been forgotten, and was frustrated that there wasn't a maritime museum in the city like many cities in New England had.
The museum later moved to Third and Chestnut Streets, and then moved again to Penn's Landing along the Delaware River. The museum moved to its current location at Penn's Landing in 1995, when it was renamed the Independence Seaport Museum.
In June 2007 former Independence Seaport Museum president John S. Carter pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and tax evasion from misappropriating approximately US$2.5 million in funds from the museum. He received a fifteen-year sentence in federal prison. Carter, who was president of the museum from 1989 to March 2006, was accused of using money from the museum to buy numerous personal items, including two boats, an espresso machine and a carriage house for his home in Cape Cod between 1997 and 2006.
Read more about this topic: Independence Seaport Museum
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)