Indeed in his more formal statement to the Assembly in 1788, made in his Address to the General Assembly of Pennsylvania in the case of the violated charter of the College, &c., of Pennsylvania, presented to the Assembly 12 March, 1788, he recites:
The College of Philadelphia was a private corporation similar to the Exeter College in Oxford; it had its foundation in the year 1749, from proposals made and published by that great friend of learning, Dr Franklin, with whom were associated the following gentlemen, * * * twenty-four in the whole; and their chief funds were of their own private subscriptions for a number of years, aided by the voluntary benevolence of many of their fellow citizens; it was first stiled an Academy; and before it had a charter, was governed by certain fundamental constitutions agreed upon by the gentlemen above named as a voluntary society of founders.
Robert Proud, when writing his History a few years later, recorded the same date for the beginning of the institution. This date was also maintained by the late Provost Stillé in his Memoir of the Rev. William Smith, D.D., 1869, "my great predecessor." This was, further, officially held down to the printed Catalogue of the University for 1892–3, where the narrative reads:
A pamphlet called Proposals Relative to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania written in 1749 by Dr Franklin, led to an association by certain citizens of Philadelphia for the purpose of founding a School on the lines suggested by that wise counsellor.
This was confirmed in the Biographical Catalogue of the Matriculates of the College, 1749–1893, published in 1894 by the Society of the Alumni. The General Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of the Department of Arts, published in 1849, also by the Society of the Alumni, had recited "from 1749 to 1849." But in the Catalogue for 1893–4 appears the earlier birth-date in the Historical Sketch, viz.:
A pamphlet called Proposals Relative to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, written in 1749 by Dr Franklin, led to an association by certain citizens of Philadelphia, for the purpose of raising to the dignity of an Academy the Charitable School which had been established in 1740, and which was then struggling under a debt upon the building erected for its use and the accommodation of the celebrated preacher Whitefield.
And for the first time the cover of this Catalogue bore the legend,
