Image: Receipt for a Library Company share, 1733.

We continue our monthly “Shareholder Spotlight” series by taking a closer look at Share #295 and its first owner, Cadwalader Morris (1741-1795).

Shareholders have always been the backbone of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Starting with the first group of fifty tradesmen who formed the library in 1731, shareholders have provided crucial financial support each year for our mission to “pour forth benefits for the common good.”

We keep careful track of who has owned each historic share, and our list of 9,800+ shareholders includes signers of the Declaration and Constitution, merchants, doctors, soldiers, scientists, artists, philanthropists, politicians, and much more.

Share #295

This share was first issued to Cadwalader Morris (1741-1795) on April 6, 1769. Like a number of previously profiled shares, that puts him among the shareholders of the Union Library Company, which merged into the Library Company on this date.

Morris continued as a Library Company shareholder for the next twenty-four years.

During that time, he helped establish the Bank of Pennsylvania in 1780 and was one of the founders and a director of the Bank of North America in 1781. He also served as a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1783 and 1784. He apparently resigned in March 1785.[i]

Image: Artist/maker unknown, Cadwalader Morris (1741-1795) (1779). Watercolor on ivory, gold frame. Anonymous gift in memory of Elizabeth Wheatley Bendiner, 1991. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Library Company records show that Morris’ share was forfeited in May 1793. The share then remained dormant for the next 146 years.

The Library Company’s board eventually re-issued it as share #1533 on March 2, 1939 and issued it to Elizabeth (Betty) Wheatley Sutro Bendiner (1904-1991).

Before becoming a shareholder, Betty had studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1920s, when women were not yet awarded a degree in that field. There, she met her husband Alfred Bendiner (1899-1964), who became a noted architect and artist. She accompanied him on several archaeological expeditions for the University of Pennsylvania Museum and assisted with his measured drawings.[ii]

Image: Shareholder Betty Bendiner (left) was drawn by her husband Alfred Bendiner (right) carrying a “drafting room of gear, and perspiring in the burning sun” as they climbed up and down Tikal’s Temple I “four times daily.” Alfred Bendiner, “An Archaeologist’s Sketchbook,” Expedition Magazine 3, No. 1 (September 1960), 14. Courtesy of the Penn Museum.

In fact, Betty was more than just a guest on those expeditions. Her husband wrote that Penn Museum Director Froehlich Rainey (1907-1992) had “asked my wife [Betty] and I to go to Tikal and make an architectural survey of the Acropolis.” Betty appears in several illustrations about the couple’s work in her husband’s article, “An Archaeologist’s Sketchbook,” published in Expedition Magazine in 1960.[iii]

After her husband’s death in 1964, Betty spent some time as a volunteer at the Library Company, cataloging photographs, and later donated some of her husband’s drawings to the Library Company.

Share #295 has been owned by four people total in its history.

Not yet a shareholder?

Share #295 is currently available. We work hard to match potential shareholders with historic shares that match their interests, and we would love to match you with Cadwalader Morris’s share or another option.

You can become a Library Company shareholder with an initial gift of $500. To learn more, visit our website or reach out to our Development Office at [email protected].

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[i] Office of the Historian and Clerk of the House’s Office of Art and Archives, “Morris, Cadwalader,” History Art & Archives United States House of Representatives, https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/M/MORRIS,-Cadwalader-(M000972)/ (accessed April 17, 2025). “Minutes of the Second Session of the Ninth General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania…”, The Pennsylvania Mercury and Universal Advertiser, March 18, 1785.

[ii] Sandra L. Tatman, “Bendiner, Elizabeth S. (1904-1991),” Philadelphia Architects and Buildings, https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/733345 (accessed April 17, 2025). Marian Mitchell, “Alfred Bendiner: The Man and the Artist,” paper read at the Cosmopolitan Club, March 1, 1989.

[iii] Alfred Bendiner, “An Archaeologist’s Sketchbook,” Expedition Magazine 3, No. 1 (September 1960), 13.