Philly recreates the 300th anniversary of Ben Franklin’s arrival with a boat, puffy rolls, and a 17-year-old Ben

How does a city commemorate the day one of its most beloved and influential citizens decided to call it home?

If you’re Philadelphia, you do it in style — colonial style.

On Friday morning, 17-year-old actor Benjamin Snyder, wearing a tricorn hat and breeches, hopped onto a boat on the Delaware River and got into character as Benjamin Franklin to recreate the Founding Father’s arrival here 300 years ago, on Oct. 6, 1723.

A crowd of about 75 people gathered on the docks of the Independence Seaport Museum and cheered as young Ben disembarked and made his way towards land.

“Welcome to Philadelphia!” the crowd shouted.

“You made the right decision!” one man yelled.

Like Franklin — who was 17 when he left Boston and came to Philly by way of New York and New Jersey — one of the first things Snyder did was procure “three great puffy rolls.” He put one under each arm, while keeping the third in hand for eating (per Franklin’s autobiography). Then, he began walking through Philadelphia, with the crowd tagging behind him.

What followed was a Franklin love fest and procession through Old City. Young Ben stared down horseless carriages to traverse Columbus Boulevard (at the crosswalk) and made his way to cobblestoned Dock Street, where he walked over some spilled Chinese food and passed by the Ritz 5 and Positano Coast.

At one point in the journey, as it happened in real life, young Ben passed his future wife, Deborah Read, here played by a young actress in colonial garb.

“...she, standing at the door, saw me and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward, ridiculous appearance,” Franklin wrote in his autobiography.

Recreating the scene, the two young actors stared silently at each other for a half minute, then young Ben continued on his way.

The procession ended outside the Second Bank of the United States, where a commemoration event emceed by retired 6ABC anchor Jim Gardner was held. There, before the crowd, Snyder, in character as Franklin, recited the portion of Franklin’s autobiography about his arrival in Philadelphia, right up to the point where he fell asleep in a Quaker meeting house.

“This was, therefore, the first house I was in, or slept in, in Philadelphia,” young Ben said, and old Ben wrote.

Snyder, a senior at Lower Merion High School, is one of the youngest actors ever to play Franklin, who’s typically portrayed in his elder statesmen years. Staff at the Arden Theatre, where Snyder has performed, recommended him for the role to Historic Philadelphia, which was searching for an actor who is the same age Franklin was when he arrived in Philadelphia.

“I was immediately on board, no questions asked,” Snyder said earlier this week. “This is a different experience, this is not something actors normally get to do. You’re totally in character the whole time and it’s a great experience for a good cause.”

Snyder said he prepared for the role by reading Franklin’s autobiography.

“He never struck me as a sarcastic, goofy person but he’s very charming and he’s clearly trying to make his audience laugh,” Snyder said.

During the commemoration ceremony, proclamations from the Mayor’s and Governor’s Offices were read, officially marking Oct. 6 as Benjamin Franklin Day in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania.

This is the first time Philadelphia has celebrated Franklin’s arrival because until 1980, the exact date wasn’t known, according to Jessica Frankenfield, American Philosophical Society spokesperson. Historian Claude-Anne Lopez, who worked on “The Papers of Benjamin Franklin” project, discovered Franklin wrote the date he came here on the back of a letter, which is owned by the APS and was on display Friday.

At the ceremony, Franklin’s accomplishments were lauded by state and local officials, who talked of the faith the Philly transplant had in our city and the hope he had for us and our country (“A republic, if you can keep it”).

Knowing his audience, Gardner leaned into Franklin’s Philly optimism.

“Franklin was so overwhelmingly positive about Philadelphia that he would have no doubt that the Phillies will trounce the Atlanta Braves,” Gardner said to great applause.

Also on hand were the Philadelphia Boys Choir and representatives from many of the surviving institutions Franklin founded, including the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Hospital, and the Pennsylvania National Guard, which traces its roots back to the Associators, a militia group Franklin founded in 1747.

But nobody undertook a journey to be there Friday quite like cousins Alex Greenberg, 18, of Princeton, and Max Steinberg, 36, of Pittsburgh. The two walked about 50 miles on foot through New Jersey, just as Franklin did on his journey to Philadelphia, to raise funds for the Eagles Autism Challenge.

They began their trek Tuesday, taking an approximate route Franklin did, and got over the Ben Franklin Bridge Friday morning in time for the ceremony. Following the events, they set off on foot to Lincoln Financial Field, so they could donate the more than $10,000 they raised to the Eagles Autism Foundation.

“I viewed this as a great opportunity to contribute to Franklin’s idea that the good we can do together exceeds the good we can do alone,” Greenberg said. “And as we walked across the Ben Franklin Bridge into Philadelphia, I was just overwhelmed by the sense of importance of what happened 300 years ago to the day.”

The ceremony ended at the American Philosophical Society’s Library Hall, where guests viewed Franklin-related documents and dined on “great puffy rolls” from High Street.