John Durang: Man of the American Stage By Lynn Matluck Brooks

troops and officers, along with much of the Tory community and the brilliant social and cultural life the army had established there.²⁹ This departure made room for the fledgling nation to begin establishing its own identity.

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As soon as the British had evacuated the city, Jacob Durang “purchas’d property in Phlad’a, a house in the center of the city. He sold his property in York and moved the family on to Philad’a” (7). The purchase date and location of this plot is unclear because the only deed found for Jacob Durang’s Philadelphia land purchase dates from 1793.³⁰ In 1782, Jacob made contributions to fund improvements to St. Mary’s Catholic Church. The earliest city directories for Philadelphia, published in 1785, list Jacob Durang, “hairdresser,” at 677 Second Street. Later directories list him variously as a “barber,” “surgeon-barber,” “bleeder,” and “bleeder and tooth drawer” living at different locations around Cedar (South) Street.

Clues in Durang’s Memoir and hints in other documents suggest that the Durangs moved to Philadelphia between the summers of 1778 and 1779, when John was ten or eleven. Durang recalls that his father met up in Philadelphia with former comrades from the French army,³¹ which would place Jacob in the city in late summer 1781. John suggests that he witnessed the French soldiers:

Another clue to dating the Durangs’ return to Philadelphia arises from John’s reminiscences of the French minister to the United States, Conrad Alexandre-Gérard de Rayneval, who was in Philadelphia by July 1778. John describes “Sieur Gerard’s” mansion, carriage, and the lot near his house on Sixth and Chestnut Streets “where occasionally he gave splendid fireworks” (7–8), surely a thrill for the young Durang.