This first courthouse in the square, was razed around 1804-1805. It was also here on July 29, 1776, that the recently adopted Declaration of Independence proclaimed three weeks earlier by the Second Continental Congress at the old Pennsylvania State House (now renamed Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, was read to the townfolk along the Patapsco River  The second courthouse of Georgian style was constructed on the southwest corner of then North Calvert and East Lexington streets, opposite the old "Courthouse Square" in which the Battle Monument was erected. The latter was designed by French architect Maximilian Godefroy, (1765-1838), to commemorate "Defenders' Day" (a city, county, and state official holiday) of the British attack on Baltimore. The "rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air" were lines of a poem, titled "The Defence of Fort McHenry", that soon appeared on printed broadsheets and handbills (from the offices of the "Baltimore American") all around town and was soon published in the "Baltimore Patriot". It was written by the noted poet and lawyer Francis Scott Key (1779–1843), of Frederick and Georgetown, who had witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry from the truce ship "Minden" anchored downriver on the Patapsco River (probably off Sparrows Point on the north side near the river entrance or the Royal Navy's invasion fleet's landing site at North Point). Key had been invited by officials and neighbors to try to negotiate the release of doctor William Beanes of Prince George's County, who had been captured by the British. Key's poem was set to music in a few days at a local well-known Baltimore theatre and neighboring tavern on Holliday Street. It quickly became known as the "Star-Spangled Banner" and in 1931 was designated by Congress as the National Anthem. After considerable discussion and agitation for several decades, going back as far as 1835, prompted by a fire of several arsons that year during the economic recession and panic begun with the "Baltimore bank riot" which damaged the downtown second Baltimore County/City Courthouse (then only 20 years old, at the southwest corner of North Calvert and East Lexington Streets). After more recent debates, and votes, with the adoption by statewide referendum of the new second Maryland Constitution of 1851, it contained the provisions for elevating the City of Baltimore to the status of an "independent city" on the same status of all of the other counties of the state and increasing its representation and number of votes/members in each chamber of the state legislature—in the House of Delegates and the State Senate in the General Assembly of Maryland.