Ned,
Latrobe visited the completed or nearly so Walnut Street Penitentiary in the
spring of 1798, while the Virginia State Pen was under construction.  He
went to see what he believed to be cutting edge design
Chris McD

Christopher L. McDaid
REMSA, Inc
Cultural Resources Consultant to HQ TRADOC
(757) 727-4496
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ned Heite [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Friday, November 17, 2000 6:32 AM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      Primacy and idea theft
>
> Lyle Browning wrote:
>
> >snips happen<
>
> >what got the ball rolling with Berkeley was the somewhat arrogant
> >insistence on that typically American need to demonstrate "firstness" of
> the
> >New Englanders, not the Pilgrim mythology with which I agree with Eric
> that the
> >Pilgrim/Puritan images predominate. Lots of firsts are steamrolled by the
> later
> >arrivals.
>
> Lyle's right.
>
> Yesterday, on NPR, some Philadelphia intellectual repeated the erroneous
> claim that the "first penitentiary in America" is located there.
>
> Sorry.
>
> Latrobe's Virginia penitentiary at Richmond was already a quarter-century
> old when the Philadelphia prison was built. But Virginia had the decency
> to
> demolish the first penitentiary in America after it became obsolete. So
> Philadelphia is left with a crumbling old dungeon that until recently
> housed prisoners.
>
> That's not the only Yankee false claim of primacy.
>
> I am constantly annoyed by claims that New England mental hospitals were
> "first," as in the Discovery of the Asylum. I suppose they never heard of
> the one in Williamsburg, which has been reconstructed as a gallery.
>
> Silly Northern claims of primacy generally result from the fact that
> Yankee
> schoolmasters controlled the market for history textbooks during the
> Federal period.
>
> Ned Heite
> Delawarean by birth
> Virginian by curious accident
>
>
>
>                Ned Heite  ([log in to unmask])
> ***************************************************
> *  A young lass with a bucket of waste            *
> *  attempted to hurl it in haste.                 *
> *  Bits of cabbage and pumpkin                    *
> *  blew back on this bumpkin,                     *
> *  missed the compost, and splashed in her face!  *
> ***************************************************