Death Anniversary: Benjamin Franklin — April 17, 1790

Benjamin Franklin died in Philadelphia on 17 April 1790, at eighty-four. Independence Hall, where he sat as a delegate in 1776 and again in 1787, is the one room in America that held him twice at the top of his career — first signing the Declaration that broke from Britain, then helping write the Constitution that decided what came after. Few founders spent that many defining years under the same roof.