Historic Replicas

…Ben was a born romantic, though, and wanted to be a sailor.  He was enrolled in school for two years, but Josiah, who had seventeen children, could not afford to keep him there any longer and brought him home to work in the shop at age ten- back when colonial costumes were real they hadn’t heard of child labor laws!  Amazingly, that was the end of Franklin’s formal education; from then on, he educated himself through reading and debates with friends.  At 12, Ben became an apprentice in his brother James’ printing shop, and developed a lifelong passion for the written word.  James had started a newspaper, and while Ben longed to express himself in print, he knew his brother would agree.  So Ben began writing letters in the persona of a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood.  In time, he’d written a series of witty and widely read essays on colonial american life, ridiculing everything from drunken locals to the elitists at nearby Harvard.  James discovered the truth, though, and he was so angry Ben fled his apprenticeship to seek a new start in Philadelphia.