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
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“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Free from public debt, at peace with all the world, and with no complicated interests to consult in our intercourse with foreign powers, the present may be hailed as the epoch in our history the most favorable for the settlement of those principles in our domestic policy which shall be best calculated to give stability to our Republic and secure the blessings of freedom to our citizens.”
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“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)