On 16 July 1790 an act for establishing the temporary and permanent seat of government passed by the Congress and was signed by the President of the United States. This act reads in part:
That a district or territory, not exceeding ten miles square to be located as hereafter directed, on the river Potomac, at some place between the mouths of the Eastern Branch and Connogochegue, be, and the same is hereby, accepted for the permanent seat of Government of the United States. . . That prior to the first Monday in December next, all offices attached to the seat of government of the United States, shall be removed to and until the said first Monday in December, in the year one thousand eight hundred, shall remain at the city of Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania, at which place the session of Congress next ensuing the present shall be held.1
This was a defeat for the two-year Senator from the State of Pennsylvania. lt had been his hope to bring the permanent seat of Government of the United States to a site along the Susquehanna River at Wright's ferry or at future Lemoyne, Cumberland County.2 The senator was William Maclay. The defeat was the result of political maneuvering by many people including his senatorial colleague from Pennsylvania, Robert Morris and of an inflexible attitude by Maclay on the subject of the assumption by the national government of state debts incurred in financing the war for independence.
William Maclay was not a national figure when he was elected to the Senate in September of 1788 by the Pennsylvania Legislature. The Pennsylvania Assembly elected him because of his ties to the land, his agrarian outlook and his location. His home before moving to what became Front and South Streets, Harrisburg, was in Sunbury, Northumberland county, the frontier section of Pennsylvania which had suffered so much from the French and Indian war and British and Indian terror. Maclay was elected to serve in a Senate among men who were better educated, more well-known and much more experienced in national politics.3
Born in Chester County in 1737, three years after his parents arrived from Ulster, he was the second of five children. He grew up in Lurgan Township, then pan of Cumberland County. His education began at the Reverend John Blair's Academy in Chester County and continued at the classical preparation school of Samuel Findley, also in Chester County.
On April 6, 1784, in the county courthouse in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the Board of Trustees of the fledgling Dickinson College met and asked two of its members, John Dickinson and Benjamin Rush, to devise a seal for the college.