During the night of August 31 and the early hours of September 1, 1798, thieves stole $162,821 from the Bank of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia’s Carpenters’ Hall—an extraordinary sum for the era and one of the earliest major bank thefts in United States history. The robbery would become notorious not only for the money taken, but for the wrongful imprisonment of Patrick Lyon, the blacksmith who had made and installed the bank’s vault locks.
The actual culprits were Isaac Davis, a carpenter who had worked on the bank’s premises, and Thomas Cunningham, a bank porter. Yet investigators focused on Lyon, who had left Philadelphia for Lewes, Delaware, before the theft. Despite his alibi, he was arrested and confined in Walnut Street Prison during Philadelphia’s yellow-fever crisis.
Lyon spent roughly three months imprisoned before evidence established his innocence. Davis eventually confessed, and Lyon sued the bank and its officers for malicious prosecution. He won $12,000 in damages, an important victory against arbitrary confinement and elite institutional power. Decades later, artist John Neagle commemorated Lyon’s vindication in Pat Lyon at the Forge, depicting the blacksmith at work beside the craft that had made him vulnerable to suspicion—and ultimately central to the case.
Image: John Neagle’s celebrated portrait Pat Lyon at the Forge via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
