Benjamin Franklin National Memorial — located in the rotunda of The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — features a colossal seated statue of Benjamin Franklin. The 20-foot (6.1 m) high memorial, sculpted by James Earle Fraser between 1906 and 1911, honors the writer, inventor and American statesman. The statue weighs 30 short tons (27 t) and sits on a 92-short-ton (83 t) pedestal of white Seravezza marble. The statue is the focal piece of the memorial hall, designed by John T. Windrim after the Pantheon, dedicated in 1938.
Congress designated the national memorial on October 25, 1972 (Public Law 92-551). Unlike most national memorials, the statue is not listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The national memorial is an affiliated area of the National Park Service, assigned to Independence National Historical Park through a Memorandum of Agreement entered into on November 6, 1973. Under the terms of the agreement, the Institute owns and maintains the publicly accessible memorial, and the Park Service includes the memorial in official publications and otherwise cooperates with the Institute in all appropriate and mutually agreeable ways on behalf of the memorial.
Public Law 109-153 (December 30, 2005) authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to make available to the Institute up to $10,000,000 in matching grants for the rehabilitation of the memorial and for the development of related exhibits. This appropriation commemorates the 300th anniversary of Franklin's birth on January 17, 1706.
The memorial prominently appears in the movie National Treasure.
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