Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 February 1914 — WILL HONOR BEN FRANKLIN [ARTICLE]

WILL HONOR BEN FRANKLIN

Figure May Be Erected in Nichee of Church Where He Once Worked. London. —Few people would connect romance with the name of Benjamin Franklin, but there Is a chance that he may be commemorated in the most romantic of England’s few mediaeval churches, St. Bartholomew’s, Smithfield. As has been cabled briefly, some one his discovered from the parish rate hooks that, he once worked at- the ease in an office housed in his day In the Lady chapel of the chprch. Franklin records in his autobiography that he worked ih Bartholomew Close, but he says nothing about the place. He mentioned that he was employed on setting up the second edition of Woolaston’s "Religion of Nature,” and in that book there is a quaint little engraving show the top flood of the factory with the compositors’ racks. The posts of these racks were still there in 18)35 before the Lady chapel was cleared of Its workaday fittings and prepared for worship again. In the wall over the Lady chapel altar (and in Franklin's day actually In the printing room) are five tall niches, probably filled with figures of saints before the Reformation. It is now proposed to commemorate Franklin by placing one or more “female saints" in these niches.