Historic Philadelphia

✧
Right: The bust carved nine years after
William Penn’s death by Sylvanus Bevan, a
London apothecary who knew Penn, may be
the best likeness among the rare portraits of
Philadelphia’s founder. Ben Franklin and
eighteenth century historian Robert Proud
both reported that friends of Penn praised
its accuracy.
COURTESY OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA,
DEPARTMENT OF RECORDS, CITY ARCHIVES.
Below: The ruins of Macroom Castle,
twenty-six miles west of Cork in Ireland,
where a wandering Quaker preacher gave
fourteen-year-old William Penn his first
exposure to the new religious ideas of the
Society of Friends. Oliver Cromwell had
presented the Macroom estate, with its
three-story fifteenth century castle, to
Penn’s father when he retired as an admiral
in 1656.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR AND
THE IRISH TOURIST BOARD.
and twelve illegitimate children by seven
different women. He was probably pleased
when William Penn requested land for a
Quaker colony. Maybe those nuisance
Quakers would all move out and leave the
Church of England in peace.
Also, he owed Penn money. Penn’s father
once paid for rations for the Royal Navy out of
his own pocket, when the crown was short on
funds. The debt came to about sixteen
thousand pounds. King Charles was surely
happy that Penn would take land instead
of cash.
On March 4, 1681, Charles II signed
documents giving William Penn forty-five
thousand square miles, their boundaries illdefined.
It was the largest tract of land ever
owned by a private citizen.
Penn set up a real estate sales operation
immediately. His lawyer’s clerks began
drawing up batches of deeds with blanks left
for name, price and number of acres. He had
agents peddling Pennsylvania land in Ireland,
Scotland, Wales, Holland, and Germany.
There were thirty-four sales the first week,
471 by the end of the year.
Penn offered a variety of lot sizes and
payment plans. Buyers of large acreage in the
country were offered bonuses of city lots on
which to build a town house. City purchasers
could get a bonus of liberty land (we would
probably call it free land) in areas just outside
the city; the Northern Liberties ultimately
became the most built-up, and the name
survives as a neighborhood just north of the
original city limits.
A group of “adventurers” (we would say
investors) could buy fifty thousand acres and
operate it under the feudal concept of “manor
of frank.” The group could charter towns, levy
its own taxes, resell land and use natural
resources. This deal brought in a London
investment group called the Free Society of
Traders. Among its holdings was all the land
between Spruce and Pine Streets from river to
river. The hill at the east end of the Society’s
tract became known as Society Hill.
BUILDING A CITY
While William Penn stayed home,
drumming up customers, his cousin, William
Markham, sailed for Pennsylvania to act as
Penn’s deputy governor. With the help of two
men already living along the Delaware,
Thomas Fairman and Lasse Cock, Markham
began inspecting land and measuring the
HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA
12