The WPA Guide to Pennsylvania: The Keystone State

By Federal Writers' Project

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authorsmany of whom would later become celebrated literary figureswere commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor.

The Keystone State is well represented in the WPA Guide to Pennsylvania. The essays explore the rich descriptions of the states historically significant citiessuch as Pittsburgh and Philadelphiaas well as the diversity of the state which also includes many farms and small mining communities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781595342362

Book preview

PART I

The General Background

Pennsylvania Today

They are there, there, there with earth immortal,

(Citizens, I give you friendly warning).

The things that truly last, when men and time have passed.

They are all in Pennsylvania this morning.

RUDYARD KIPLING

THE striking characteristic of Pennsylvania today, as in the past, is its remarkable diversity. Landscape and natural resources and people, their dialects, manners, customs, and traditions, their religious beliefs, mental and social attitudes, and occupations, all display a seemingly endless variety.

Today the mention of Pennsylvania probably calls up, first of all, a picture of an industrial commonwealth, with belching blast furnaces, labor problems, and all the spectacular features of an industrialized civilization. This is a one-sided impression. Pennsylvania’s fertile farm lands, with the quiet rural homesteads of Quaker and Pennsylvania Dutch bordering the congested anthracite district, are among the richest and most productive in the Union.

There are regions, it is true, where the plow no longer turns the furrow but has been permanently laid aside for the hydraulic drill. Fields no longer tilled have been gutted by quarry or mine shaft, and mountains have surrendered their wealth of coal and iron. Yet such counties as Lancaster, York, Berks, Bucks, and Chester, out of their rich loam or limestone silt, continue to yield year after year abundant crops of corn, wheat, potatoes, and tobacco, with no dust storms or drought, as ‘out West,’ and no hard stony subsoil, as in New England, to combat.

The person with a predilection for history may think of such treasured shrines as Independence Hall, Valley Forge Park, and the Gettysburg Battlefield; the Keystone State always has played, and still plays, a leading role in the Nation’s drama. Or there may arise a vision of drab-colored garments and broad-brimmed hats and the peaceful ways of Quaker folk. There may even exist in some quarters the impression that it is the Quakers who still set the general tone for life, not alone in the ‘Quaker City,’ but throughout a good part of the State as well. This needs correction. Much of the moral influence and spirit of the Society of Friends remains, and the Society always has been a force for good in Pennsylvania life. But just as the Quaker farmer today not infrequently lives within earshot of mine or factory siren, so do the lingering vestiges of dignity and gentleness that marked the sect of William Penn now stand in sharp contrast with a civilization in many ways more ruggedly competitive than that of Colonial times.

Today, Pennsylvania is dotted with countless communities, small and large, each astir with the unceasing life of industry, commerce, and agriculture. Forest lands of pine and hemlock, of oak and maple, and lakes and mountain streams, such as are to be found on the Pocono Plateau, add to the scenic beauty. There is the lovely Eagles Mere, for example, which lies like a blue jewel near the summit of Prospect Hill on the northern slope of the Alleghenies in Sullivan County. There are the back-country reaches, the ‘hinterland,’ where life is in some respects like that of the southern Appalachian mountains, where dour inhabitants distil their own ‘corn likker’ and look askance upon the ‘furriner.’ Or again, as in Pike County, there are stretches of primitive country where wild game and rattlesnakes abound.

In the Pennsylvania Dutch sections, by contrast, the visitor will meet with strange Old World ways and customs, with a speech—the famous ‘schoenste lengevitch’—that is like no other living idiom, with a wealth of native folklore, and occasionally with a body of dark and gloomy super-stitution such as that which centers about the ‘Hex-woman.’ If he goes on to the mining and steel districts, he will encounter immigrants from virtually every country of Europe, drawn thither by the lure of employment in the mines and mills and the hope of a high wage, inevitably bringing with them much that is distinctive of their homelands to add rich chords to the State’s great social symphony.

Standing silently apart from all this are the monuments of a historic and more other-worldly past, such as the Old Swedes’ (Gloria Dei) Church in Philadelphia. And there are living memorials, too, of that other-worldly past in the surviving representatives of the various quaint religious sects that have flourished at one time or another on Pennsylvania soil—Mennonites, Dunkards, Moravians, Schwenkfelders, and others. Unique in dress and manners, one of these sectarians may now and again be sighted in a crowded metropolitan thoroughfare. Many of their communities still exist, though others have long since disappeared.

Out of this welter of peoples, faiths, customs, and influences, Pennsylvania has somehow wrought the miracle of a homogeneous and, in a large sense, a truly indigenous culture. Colleges, universities, medical schools, and law schools are conspicuous throughout the State. Pennsylvania, from the declining years of the eighteenth century, has held an extremely important place in the fields of medicine and scientific research, and the old phrase ‘Philadelphia lawyer’ meant a good lawyer, a learned one. From early days attention has also been paid to music and the arts. The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra are widely known; museums and art schools are numerous; the State has distinguished itself in the little theater movement; and it has made contributions to literature of which the Nation may well be proud.

Surely Kipling was right when he averred that ‘they are all in Pennsylvania this morning.’ From the wildly beautiful Wissahickon to the placid Perkiomen, from the brick houses and narrow streets of the southern towns to the spacious lawns and white frame houses of the north, from the oil country of the west to the flaming steel foundries of the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania—America’s great and original melting pot, home of Revolutionary patriot and stouthearted pioneer—exhibits a topographic and human variety perhaps unequaled in any other portion of America.

The Physical State

PENNSYLVANIA received its name from Charles II of England, who in 1681 deeded to William Penn virtually all the land area now forming the Commonwealth. The name, signifying ‘Penn’s Woods,’ was adopted by King Charles after the Quaker’s modest protestations had been silenced by the explanation that Penn’s family name was derived from the Welsh word ‘penn,’ meaning mountain top or highland, and Pennsylvania would therefore be an appropriate designation for the colony.

GEOGRAPHY AND TOPOGRAPHY

Except for the erratic course of the Delaware River, which forms its eastern boundary, Pennsylvania is almost rectangular in shape. On the north it is bounded by Lake Erie and New York; on the west by Ohio and West Virginia; on the south by West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, while New Jersey and the southern extremity of New York lie beyond the Delaware River on the east. Along the line of its greatest length, from the western border to the Delaware River opposite Bordentown, the State is 302 miles long; except at its northwest corner, which projects upward to Lake Erie, its width is 158 miles; and it has a total area of 45,126 square miles. In size it ranks thirty-second in the Union; in population it ranks second, with 9,631,350 inhabitants in 1930, and 9,891,709 in 1940, according to the preliminary census figures. One of the Thirteen Original States, it is also one of the Nation’s four commonwealths—the others being Massachusetts, Virginia, and Kentucky.

Pennsylvania’s western and eastern boundaries have been unchanged since the time of Penn’s original grant. The southern boundary was a source of dispute with Maryland until the Mason-Dixon line was run in 1767, and with Virginia until settlement of territorial limits after the Revolution. The northern boundary likewise became modified by action of the British Privy Council in fixing the 42nd degree of latitude as Pennsylvania’s northern limit, by agreement with New York in 1789 over additional details, and by purchase of the Erie Triangle in 1792.

With 67 counties, containing more cities and towns than any other State, Pennsylvania belongs to the Middle Atlantic group and lies in the heart of the great Appalachian chain, occupying a keystone position in the Nation’s most important industrial section. Two mountain ranges, the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny, divide the Commonwealth into three distinct topographical sections. The eastern section stretches from the Delaware River to the Blue Ridge Mountains; known as the Piedmont Plateau, it embraces an area 60 miles wide, ranging from lowland country to an altitude of 800 feet. The central section, between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains, is rugged and heavily forested, with scattered centers of population. West of the Alleghenies is a broad rolling plateau that in the northwest dwindles into plains along the shores of Lake Erie.

CLIMATE

Western Pennsylvania’s rainfall averages 42 inches a year. Temperatures vary from a summer mean of 66° in the north and 71° in the south to a winter mean of 28° in the north and 30° in the south. Temperatures of 100° or higher are sometimes recorded during July and August; on an average 15 days annually have temperatures of 90° or higher. The winters are long and moderately cold, records sometimes showing 100 or more days with freezing temperatures; temperatures of 20° or more below zero occasionally occur in the highlands and mountains. Snowfall in the northwest averages 50 inches, invariably causing spring floods when warm rains add their volume to that of melting snows.

In southeastern Pennsylvania rains of torrential character are not infrequent. Precipitation exceeding seven inches in 24 hours has been recorded during passage of a West Indian storm along the Atlantic slope in late summer or early autumn. Although attended by high winds, these storms rarely extend beyond the first ridge of mountains. Temperatures of 100° or higher are rare, but the prevailing high humidity often renders conditions oppressive. Winters here are mild; the winter mean is about 32° and the snowfall is generally light. The Pocono Mountains in the northeast, however, are subject to low temperatures and have a moderately heavy snowfall. In this northeastern section the winter mean temperature is about 23°, the summer mean about 66°.

Owing chiefly to surface configuration, climatic conditions in the large central part of Pennsylvania differ considerably from those in the eastern part. The north central portion, together with a belt extending part way down the western border, is made up of high rolling terrain rising 1,600 feet above sea level, with rounded mountains rearing their tops in some places as high as 2,500 feet. In this district the average precipitation, when well distributed, is enough for crop-growing seasons.

The valley lands are comparatively free from damaging frosts. Thus the valley of the Susquehanna’s west branch as far north as Lock Haven has an average growing season nearly as long as that of the southern part of the State. Average precipitation for the entire section is 40.74 inches. Snowfall is moderately heavy, averaging about 50 inches in the northern portion and 35 to 40 inches in the southern. Along the western belt the average snowfall is about 60 inches.

In this central section the mean temperature decreases about 6° from south to north. In the northern highlands the summer mean is about 67°, the winter mean about 24°. In the southern counties temperatures of 100° sometimes occur in summer, and winter lows of 20° to 25° sub-zero are recorded not only in the northern portions but in the mountains southward almost to the State line. Maximum temperatures of 90° or higher are recorded for an average of 10 days each summer season, and the average number of days with freezing temperature exceeds 100.

GEOLOGY

The oldest part of Pennsylvania is the Piedmont Plateau, made up chiefly of rocks that became dry land at the beginning of the Paleozoic Era, millions of years ago. This land originally was part of a chain of lofty mountains stretching from a more extensive land mass in the north. During geological ages it was worn down by running water and transformed into a peneplain.

To the west of this mass of old rock there existed throughout most of the Paleozoic Era a vast bay with its western shore in the present State of Ohio, its northern shore the Canadian mass, and the Piedmont Mountains as its eastern boundary.

In this bay were deposited Paleozoic strata, the most important of which became the famous coal beds of western and central Pennsylvania. Subjected to a series of oscillations, the inundated land rose and subsided at varying intervals. These oscillations culminated in a general upheaval; lateral compression along a line running from the northwest to the southeast buckled and folded the bay beds. The old rock formations of the Piedmont Plateau withstood the terrific pressure exerted against them, and there was formed a series of folds, inclines, anticlines, and synclines, running in a northeasterly-southwesterly direction.

The highest folds were created toward the east, immediately adjoining the Piedmont Plateau, while in a westerly direction the folds were less elevated, gradually becoming indistinct. This mountain-creating process terminated toward the end of Paleozoic time and resulted in a system of subparallel chains known as the Alleghenies. Since the Paleozoic Era no important change has occurred in folding or warping, except for occasional periods of elevation and subsidence. Pennsylvania has since remained continental land, its surface subjected to the forces of erosion and denudation.

The mountains of Pennsylvania, prior to the sinking of Paleozoic formations, were considerably higher than they are today. If the rock strata of eastern and central Pennsylvania were spread out flat as originally laid, and western Pennsylvania stood fast, the Philadelphia region would be shoved across New Jersey and out into the Atlantic Ocean.

There are three principal kinds of rock in Pennsylvania: bedded or sedimentary (sandstones, shales, and limestones), igneous (granite and trap), and metamorphic (marble, slate, and schists). The sedimentary rocks were formerly beds of sand, mud, and decayed vegetable and animal life at the bottoms of lakes, lagoons, rivers, and coastal swamps. These deposits became shale, sandstone, and limestone under the weight of thousands of feet of sand and gravel laid upon them. In the later folding, crushing, and other mountain-creating processes, they were transformed into metamorphic schists, quartzites, marble, and slate. While a close kinship obtains between sedimentary and metamorphic rocks in geologic evolution, igneous rocks stand apart as the solidification of a molten mass thrust toward the surface by subterranean forces.

Western Pennsylvania is an almost unbroken bituminous coal field. The eastern part is a labyrinth of parallel and interlocked mountains, valleys of the Devonian and Silurian Ages, and open country of Cambrian and Azoic strata across which runs a broad continuous belt of Triassic or Mesozoic brownstone and trap. Cretaceous rocks underlie a narrow strip along the Delaware River below Trenton, and a mantle of glacial drift covers the surface of many northern counties.

Pennsylvania is of special geologic importance because of its valuable coal deposits in the east and west, products of the Carboniferous Age. The coal beds, sometimes reaching a thickness of 3,500 feet, consist of sandstone, shale, clays, thin limestone, and coal veins. Formation of these veins began at a time when the whole Appalachian region from New York to Alabama was covered with vast forested swamps. In the shallow water rank vegetation grew, died, settled to the swamp floor, and became buried under additional layers of rotted plant life. This mass was compacted into peat which later changed into coal, and the coal itself became overlaid with mud and sand.

Sedimentation raised the land surface until plant life once more covered the area, and after hundreds of years the encroaching waters again reduced it to a swamp; this cycle repeated itself again and again until more than 100 superimposed beds had formed in Pennsylvania. As each swamp accumulation was buried deeper and deeper, the vegetal matter condensed, water was squeezed out, and decomposition ceased, though gaseous products continued to exude. Ultimately it became young coal, or lignite, and in successive geologic periods underwent further changes.

It is estimated that the three periods of the Carboniferous Age spanned almost 400 million years. Then the process of Permian folding and warping began. Gigantic beds of stone were bulged into vertical or sloping strata, sometimes overriding other folds for a distance of several miles before the compression relaxed. In the east the round pebbles in certain conglomerates were flattened; shales were changed to slate and limestone to marble; the water in clay deposits was driven out, changing clays to feldspars and micas. Many rocks changed to schists, while coal beds were distilled as though in a gas retort, forming anthracite. Partial distillation farther west created high-carbon or ‘smokeless’ coal.

In the western part of Pennsylvania, carboniferous beds extended northward, possibly to Lake Erie, until glacial action swept the northern strata to the sea, leaving only isolated patches on the highest land. The anthracite beds of the east have been protected against erosion by the mountains bulking over them. Some geologists assert, however, that by far the greater portion of the anthracite deposits in Pennsylvania has been swept off by denudation, and may now be at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

One of the geologic questions akin to the problem of coal formation is that of the origin of petroleum and natural gas, both found abundantly in western Pennsylvania. Several theories have been advanced to account for these deposits. Some scientists believe that they were derived from vegetable organisms growing in moist places; others, that they derive from marine remains, especially of fish.

Lancaster County, with its abundance of limestone soil, is considered the State’s garden spot. At one time the surrounding regions must likewise have been covered with limestone, but they became overlaid with Mesozoic sediments. The geology of Adams, York, Lancaster, and Chester Counties is obscure; this is an area of metamorphic rock, mica-schists, chlorite, and gneiss, interrupted by belts of serpentine and marble carrying deposits of kaolin and chrome-iron sand.

Mica-schists, chlorites, and gneisses underlie virtually all of Philadelphia County, the exceptions being the Potsdam sandstone, the Syenite group, and possibly the limestone to the north. The entire gneissic and micaceous series is believed to belong to one geological formation, the pitch of the rock being generally northwestward, except along the northern edge, where a reverse dip is invariably found. The city of Philadelphia is underlaid with rocks dipping toward the Delaware River. They appear to be from 10,000 to 15,000 feet thick, consist of thin-bedded gneiss, mica-schists, and garnets of undetermined age, and are covered with gravels, sands, and brick clays deposited in the Delaware River Valley when it was an estuary of the sea.

Pennsylvania experienced its Glacial Age at a comparatively late period in its geologic history, but uncounted years before man first trod its soil. In fact, there may have been successive periods of glaciation, with temperate conditions intervening. During the glacial period an ice sheet nearly a half mile thick covered a considerable portion of the northern part of the State. Evidences of its long sojourn can readily be noted. A great glacial groove is apparent on Table Rock at the Delaware Water Gap; glacial scratches are found on the southern slope of Godfrey’s Ridge in Monroe County; and a boulder nine feet in one dimension rests upon the crest of Penobscot Knob in Luzerne County—200 feet above sea level.

PALEONTOLOGY

Compared with many other States, Pennsylvania has few fossils. Remains of extinct plants, tree ferns, and other forms are found in most of the coal beds, and the limestones usually carry animal remains. Evidences of frog-like amphibians, some as large as alligators, and of the first reptiles occur in the rocks below the Pittsburgh bed.

In 1884 fossil remains dug up in Westmoreland County revealed the footprints of seven distinct animals, in sandstone belonging to the coal veins. This discovery proved to incredulous paleontologists that air-breathing animals existed in Pennsylvania during the Carboniferous Age. Fragments of mastodons’ teeth have been found along the Schuylkill at Reading, and on Mount Penn near by have been found remains of extinct clamlike animals.

In and about the coal fields are numerous pieces of coal or coal-slate bearing imprints of fern fronds. Easily recognized are the remains of plants resembling ferns, which in reality are of a treelike group representing a transition between the true fern and the present-day cycads. The fossil discoveries in the Pittsburgh coal seam include nine species of trees, thirteen of ferns, and one each of fruit, root, and fungus. Shales of the upper Kittanning coal seam have yielded more than 100 species of plant remains within an area of only a few yards.

A Chester County limestone quarry in 1870 revealed the remains of numerous plants and animals of the Quaternary Period. Represented in the discovery were 34 species of mammals, all but a few now extinct, as well as several species of birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Exploration of a cave near Carlisle some years before had disclosed bones of the lynx, panther, beaver, otter, wild turkey, and wild swan, together with remains of serpents and previously unknown salamanders, scattered among fragments of stone arrows and pottery.

When Crystal Cave, in a limestone ridge about 20 miles southwest of Allentown, was first explored in 1873, the cave floor was found to be covered with black friable earth containing animal and vegetable matter. Siftings revealed the remains of bones, teeth, implements, shells, and pottery. Fragments of bone included those of the woodland reindeer and bison, together with teeth of the peccary and great beaver. The implements were a bone fishhook, a harpoon head, five bone awls, a bone needle, a spear head of brown argillite, and fragments of a knife. There were also bits of brown baked pottery, of clay and shell, with markings of wicker work outside. Another important discovery was made in York County in 1887, when scientists found the tracks of three-toed animals in the Triassic sandstone. Three layers of fossils, with layers of nonfossiliferous sandstone intervening, were unearthed here.

FLORA AND FAUNA

In the extent and variety of its flora and fauna, Pennsylvania is almost unsurpassed among the States. Plants native to salt water and coastal plain have invaded the region around Philadelphia; many native to the Far North have been left by glacial action in the bogs and mountains of the northern counties; the western portion abounds in flowers native to the Mississippi Valley and Middle West; and on the shore of Lake Erie grow plants not found elsewhere in Pennsylvania—stemming from seed dropped by migratory fowl. In addition, the State is the northern limit for a number of plants and animals that have migrated up the valleys and tributaries of the Potomac, Susquehanna, and Delaware Rivers.

The denuding of woodland tracts accounts in large part for the disappearance of elk and moose and the regrettable diminution of other forms of animal life in Pennsylvania. Early settlers found the wilderness teeming with game, the lakes and streams filled with fish, while the sun was often obscured for several minutes by dense flocks of migratory fowl. As no game laws existed, wild creatures were wantonly slaughtered, some hunters bagging as many as 50 deer a day. Poison, traps, falls, and firearms were used in slaying enormous numbers of animals, many for their hides and fur alone.

Scattered throughout the Commonwealth can be found such mammals as the skunk, opossum, mink, weasel, muskrat, groundhog, mole, short-tailed shrew, beaver, deer, rabbit, squirrel, field mouse, and bat. Porcupines are still seen in some sections. The catamount, or wildcat, has been reported in virtually every county in the State, although at rare intervals. The panther, which sometimes attained a length of six feet, was the largest carnivore but is now extinct. Wolves, once common in forested areas, were exterminated about 1850 by hydrophobia contracted from dogs. Black bear, the State’s prize game animal and the largest carnivorous animal now inhabiting Pennsylvania, was on the verge of extinction when the Pennsylvania Game Commission instituted protective measures. It is found in the central Allegheny counties and other high-brush country with rocky ledges and mountain-top swamps, especially in the Pocono and Pike County sections.

Among the turtles found in Pennsylvania are species of soft-shelled, snapping, box, and pond. Amphibians include five families of the Urodela, including the hellbinder (Cryptobranchus alleghaniensis), which reaches a length of two feet or more and is the only species of this family found in North America; and four families of the Salientia, including Fowler’s toad, the burrowing, and the spade-foot toad, as well as the tree, cricket, leopard, and true frog.

Only five species of lizards are known to occur in Pennsylvania, and none is found in great numbers. They are the five-lined skink, black skink, ground lizard, six-lined lizard, and common lizard. All the serpents within the State belong to the Colubrinae family, except the rattlesnake and the copperhead, whose habitat is the forested or mountainous sections.

The ruffed grouse, the State bird, incorrectly called the native pheasant, is usually found in the hardwood ridges and dense hemlock growths along streams, where it finds its favorite winter food—beechnuts, acorns, wild grapes, and thorn apples. Quail are plentiful, although virtually all are of imported stock because of the almost complete destruction of native stock. Other species of imported birds, such as the English ring-neck pheasant and the Hungarian gray partridge, are becoming numerous. Migratory fowl include ducks, geese, brant, shore birds, and woodcock.

Wild turkeys, plentiful in the days of early settlement, are now found only in the more remote areas, and wild geese sometimes visit the larger waterways and the Lake Erie shore. Wood dove, snipe, teal, and mud hen are hunted in various localities, but the heron and wild swan are rarely found. Virtually all species of nongame birds common to eastern United States abound in Pennsylvania.

Favorable geographic and climatic conditions in the State have produced a rich variety of vegetation. Maple, walnut, poplar, oak, pine, ash, beech, chestnut, box elder, linden, sassafras, sycamore, sweet gum, spice hickory, weeping willow, balsam, and elder are among the better-known trees, although the chestnut has suffered almost complete annihilation from blight during recent years. Such fruit trees as the apple, peach, pear, plum, and cherry are found in great numbers, together with a wide variety of such smaller trees and shrubs as dogwood, ironwood, mountain laurel, juneberry, water beech, dotted hawthorn, and New Jersey tea.

Buckeye trees grow only in a few western counties, red pine and paper birch are limited to the northern part of the State, and sweet gums flourish in the extreme southwestern portions. In the acid soil of the western valleys grow luxuriant elms, willows, birches, greenbriers, and various sorts of vines. On the higher tablelands are the chestnut, walnut, maple, hemlock, and pine. Pennsylvania’s hills were once largely covered with forests of hemlock, of which few specimens remain, though it is still the State tree.

Wild plants and flowers that grow throughout the State include all species common to the Middle Atlantic area. Mountain laurel grows in such profusion in many parts of Pennsylvania that it has been selected as the State flower. Rhododendron and wild azalea are also found in numerous sections. In deep and fertile valleys are many species of ferns. Wild and cultivated berries flourish virtually everywhere in the State, the most common being the huckleberry, raspberry, blackberry, and elderberry. Grapes are cultivated extensively in the State’s northwestern section. Abundant in numerous areas are the dewberry, wild columbine, wintergreen, and wild ginger.

In addition to the popular anemone, hepatica, bloodroot, wild honeysuckle, dog-toothed violet, spring beauty, and others, there are rarer varieties of flowers. In swampy places grows the carnivorous sundew; its arm-like leaves, covered with stout bristles terminating in sticky glands, lure and then imprison the tiny insects on which the plant lives. As though endeavoring to compensate for man’s devastation of primitive beauty, the bouncing bet, hound’s tongue, podded silkweed, and the viper’s bugloss choose hideous culm banks as their habitat and transform them into flowery mounds. The bouncing bet grows about two feet high and is covered with fragrant rose-colored blossoms.

About 160 varieties of fish, either indigenous or introduced for food and sport, are found in Pennsylvania lakes and streams. The most common are the trout, white carp, bass, sucker, yellow perch, sunfish, pickerel, fallfish, chub, and eel. The much sought muskellunge inhabits only the larger bodies of water; and shad, herring, white perch, and common sturgeon are becoming scarce. The brook trout, found in most mountain streams, is the favorite with fish culturists and anglers; many of the State’s trout streams have become nationally famous.

NATURAL RESOURCES

Pennsylvania possesses an enormous wealth of minerals. It leads all other States in the value of such mineral products as coal, cement, and slate. All of the Nation’s anthracite comes from an area of 484 square miles in the east-central part of the State.

Among the more important of the many varieties of minerals are lead, zinc, feldspar, magnetite, nickel, and copper. Deposits of carnotite near Mauch Chunk, where there is an outcropping of massive conglomerate, have yielded extractions of radium. In the southeastern counties are found graphite, kaolin, fluorspar, cyanite, gold, serpentine, nickel, talc, yttrium, asbestos, apatite, barite, copper, magnesium, corundum, and such precious or semiprecious stones as garnet, beryl, and amethyst. In the north, central, southern, and western sections of the State occur manganese, quartz, tungsten, asbestos, pyrite, lead, carnotite, siderite, copper, slate, magnetite, anthracite, petroleum, and bituminous coal.

Much of the State’s far-flung area is covered with heavy timber. A total of 13,206,000 acres in 34 counties, or about 46 per cent of the entire area of Pennsylvania, contains forests yielding annually about 150,000,000 board feet of lumber, 70 per cent of which is hardwood. Private industry, however, has made such inroads upon forest growth that the Commonwealth has been compelled to take measures to restore denuded areas.

When the white man first set foot upon Pennsylvania soil, forests covered virtually its entire area, except for a few natural meadows and the tops of occasional mountains. Settlers in the early days, and giant industrial interests afterward, slashed acre upon acre of valuable timberland, until there remains today less than half of the original 29,000,000 forested acres.

All of Pennsylvania is well watered by three main river systems. The Delaware drains the eastern region, with the Schuylkill and Lehigh as its main tributaries. In the central section is the Susquehanna into which the Juniata flows. In the west is the Ohio, with the tributary Allegheny, Monongahela, Youghiogheny, and Kiskiminetas Rivers forming one of the most important drainage systems in the country.

The Allegheny River, flowing through two thirds of the western section, has a total length of 310 miles and drains an area of 11,160 square miles in Pennsylvania and New York. Its headwaters are at an elevation of more than 2,000 feet. The Kiskiminetas, its largest tributary, drains an area of 1,900 square miles; the Youghiogheny and Monongahela drain the remainder of the section.

Natural lakes and ponds, found in the northern sections of the State, are relatively small. Of these, the largest is Conneaut Lake in the northwest section, with an area of 928 acres. The largest artificial bodies of water are the Pymatuning Lake in the northwest, built to regulate the flow of the Beaver and Shenango Rivers, and Lake Wallenpaupack in the Pocono Mountains, used as a reservoir for hydroelectric purposes (see Tour 1). While the amount of water developed at Lake Wallenpaupack has increased in recent years, it constitutes only a small percentage of the total power used in the State. Three hydroelectric plants on the lower Susquehanna have a combined capacity of 442,213 horsepower—more than three fourths of the total water power used in Pennsylvania.

The soils of Pennsylvania are classified in 7 provinces and 47 series. Seventy-five per cent of the soils are of residual origin, 22 per cent are glacial, and the remainder are alluvial and lacustrine. The 47 series represent types ranging from highly productive to nonarable.

Sheet erosion is highly prevalent in the State. From 25 to 75 per cent of the surface soil has been lost in Pennsylvania since the land was first cleared and cultivated. Except for some southwestern areas, the most important livestock sections are not badly eroded. Even though most of this land is in grass, the prevailing system of farming is to plow the grass when it becomes thin. Because of the nature of the soil and the sharpness of the slopes, erosion in the southwestern section is serious, despite the fact that plowing of pasture land takes place only once or twice in a dozen years. In the dairy sections of northern Pennsylvania, erosion is not a serious problem because the slopes are less abrupt and the hillsides are kept constantly in sod.

CONSERVATION

The need of forest reclamation was not recognized until 1898, when the Commonwealth made its first purchase for the protection of a forest area. Throughout various administrations additional acreage was acquired, until by 1940 there were 36 State forest preserves, containing 1,651,979 acres of woodland. The Department of Forests and Waters maintains 144 observation towers for the detection of fires with a force of 55 foresters, 75 forest rangers, and approximately 4,000 fire wardens.

State forest nurseries are maintained at Mont Alto, Clearfield, Greenwood Furnace, and Potters Mills, where 15,000,000 seedlings and transplants are handled annually. Since establishment of the first nursery in 1902, more than 200,000,000 trees have been distributed to reforest lands throughout the State. The trees are sold by the department for $2 a thousand for seedlings and $5 a thousand for transplants, with purchasers agreeing to plant them for timber production or watershed protection only.

Maintenance and development of State forests have been greatly aided in recent years by the Civilian Conservation Corps. In 1940 there were about 50 CCC camps in Pennsylvania, 33 of them in State forests. The work accomplished by the CCC includes the construction of approximately 3,000 miles of forest roads and 6,600 miles of forest trails, and maintenance of 17,200 miles of roadway and 2,170 miles of telephone lines—in addition to fighting fires, planting trees, improving public camp grounds, and building fire towers, fire cabins, bridges, and fish dams.

Pennsylvania contains about 80 primary game preserves, in addition to 50 or more game refuges and 10 State-owned fish hatcheries. In one year the latter distributed more than 600,000,000 fish.

There are about 870 water storage reservoirs in the State, with a combined total capacity of 239 billion gallons. These are of value in flood control, in equalizing seasonal stream flow, and in preventing pollution. Thirty-eight flood control projects have been started in the State. On March 31, 1936, the State Planning Board submitted to the governor a proposed long-range program of flood control and river development, calling for construction of dams, impounding reservoirs, dikes, and levees at an estimated cost of nearly $100,000,000. More than $10,000,000 has already been spent in carrying through this program. Two dams for flood control on the upper Ohio River have been completed, others are projected, and a number of dikes and levees have been constructed on the Susquehanna.

The Indians

IMMEDIATELY before the advent of the white man, eastern Pennsylvania was inhabited principally by groups belonging linguistically to the Algonquians, who occupied a more extended area than any other linguistic stock in North America. An important tribe within this group was the Lenni-Lenape, or ‘original people,’ known historically as the Delaware.

The tribe consisted of three principal subtribes: The Unami or Wonamey, the Minsi or Munsee, and the Unalachtigo or Unalatka, each having its own territory and slightly different dialect. According to Lenape tradition, they had migrated into eastern Pennsylvania from the west, the tribal divisions later receiving their names from some geographic or other peculiarity characterizing the region in which they lived.

The Unami, using the turtle as their totem, inhabited the Delaware River Valley from the junction of the Lehigh River southward to what is now New Castle, Delaware. The Minsi, or Wolves, occupied the headwaters of the Delaware as far south as the Lehigh. The Unalachtigo, or Turkeys, lived on the west bank of the Delaware, in what is now the State of that name, and on the east bank in the present New Jersey. The Delaware had declined in power and dignity by the time Pennsylvania history began, and also had undergone a considerable redistribution in population areas. The Delaware within the present limits of Pennsylvania numbered only a few thousand when Penn came into the territory, and had become the vassals of the Iroquois Confederacy.

The Delaware were tall, broad-shouldered, small-waisted, and erect, with tawny reddish-brown complexion and straight black hair. Their hair was usually worn long, but sometimes they burned off all except a scalp lock. They wore no beards; hairs of the face were plucked out with pincers made of clam shells or small flat stones; their cheekbones were broad and high, and their eyes small and dark. Among their musical instruments were the drum, rattle, gourd, and a sort of flute fashioned from a reed or a deer’s tibia. They also had an instrument through which they could emit a howling, melancholy sound. They never developed harmony in instrumental music, although, like many other tribes, they achieved harmonic effects in choral singing.

In the time of Penn, the Minsi kindled their council fires on Minisink Flats along the Delaware River above the Water Gap; they had a village and peach orchard near the forks of the Delaware, where Nazareth now stands. The principal Lenape village was Shackamaxon, now part of Philadelphia, where Penn and the Delaware tribe presumably made their famous treaty. In later Colonial times the center of Indian influence moved northward to Shamokin, at the confluence of the north and west branches of the Susquehanna River, site of the present city of Sunbury. This Indian village was at one time the ‘melting pot’ of aboriginal culture, having among its inhabitants not only the belligerent Minsi and representatives of the crafty Iroquois Confederation, but scatterings of Shawnee, Conoy, Nanticoke, and other tribes.

Another interesting tribe was the Shawnee. Linguistically Algonquian and known as the ‘people from the south,’ the Shawnee were tall and muscular, with coarse features and exceptionally prominent cheekbones. They were diligent cultivators of the soil until expulsion from Kentucky and North Carolina forced them to lead a wandering existence. Permitted by the Delaware and Iroquois to enter Pennsylvania, they settled on the flats below Philadelphia, in the forks of the Delaware as far north as the Minisink, and in the Wyoming Valley. Later they drifted westward to the Ohio Valley and engaged in the Indian wars of a later day.

The Shawnee differed from other Algonquian peoples in allowing their women to sit in council. Their implements showed a crude knowledge of metallurgy, and like the Mound Builders and Susquehannock they practiced some sort of funeral ceremony involving cremation. Early settlers in western Pennsylvania found them living on the Monongahela (‘the river with skidding banks’) and on the Youghiogheny (‘the river that flows in a roundabout course’). In later times the Wyandotte and Miami resided in that section.

Remnants of the migrant Lenni-Lenape or Delaware tribes lingered in the region, but the Iroquoian influence probably was not felt until the Ottawa accompanied the French southward from Canada in the middle of the eighteenth century. In the bloody battle of Bushy Run in 1763, Colonel Henry Bouquet’s forces were opposed by the Delaware, Shawnee, Wyandotte, Mohican, Miami, Ottawa, and perhaps one or two other tribes.

White encroachment, climaxed in 1737 by the perfidy of the ‘Walking Purchase’ (see Tour 10A), drove the Delaware from their ancestral homes in eastern Pennsylvania, but the cause of their decline lay partly in their own loose confederacy and chiefly in the dominance of the Iroquois. The Iroquois Confederation consisted of the Onondaga, Cayuga, Oneida, Seneca, and Mohawk until early in the eighteenth century, when a tribe of Southern Indians—the Tuscarora—was taken in as the sixth nation. Although the Iroquois occupied very little of Pennsylvania territory, they held sway over the lands of the Delaware at a time when conditions led not only to bitter misunderstanding with early pioneers, but to strife and bloodshed as well. Subjugation of the Delaware is believed to have occurred after the Iroquois obtained firearms from the Dutch in New York, early in the period of American colonization. With these superior weapons they were able not only to subdue the tribes to the south but also to resist encroachment of the French from Canada.

The Iroquois, as represented in Pennsylvania chiefly by the Seneca, were powerful in physique, cunning and fierce in warfare, and often treacherous and overbearing in behavior. Despite these characteristics, they were imbued with a desire for peace, waging war primarily to perpetuate their unified political life and independence. They often allowed vanquished tribes to remain upon conquered territory, yet ruthlessly annihilated those who refused to submit to vassalage.

It must be understood that the term ‘Iroquois,’ while generally applied to the confederated nations, includes also the Erie, Susquehannock, and other tribes of Iroquoian origin. The Erie, occupying portions of northwestern Pennsylvania, lost their identity as a tribe in 1654, when the Five Nations virtually annihilated them. The Huron or Wyandotte also were destroyed as a strong tribal unit; those found in western Pennsylvania at the time of Bouquet were remnants of a once strong confederacy in the north smashed by the Five Nations in 1642.

Of all Pennsylvania’s native inhabitants in the early historical period, the least known to ethnologists are the Susquehannock. They appeared along the Susquehanna watershed at the beginning of white colonization, fought bitterly with both the Delaware and the Five Nations, and then faded into obscurity. Though of Iroquoian stock, they recognized no allegiance to the Massomacks, the Iroquois name for the confederacy. Several explanations are suggested for the derivation of their name, one being that it comes from the Algonquian Sas-k-we-an-og, meaning ‘the river that rubs upon the shore.’

All the Susquehanna Iroquoian groups, however, were called the Carantouan by the Five Nations. The most important were the Susquehannock on the lower reaches of the river. Those along the upper river were known as the Andaste. They were first visited by a white man in 1616, when Etienne Brulé, Champlain’s interpreter, came down from Canada to enlist their aid in a French attack against the Five Nations’ strongholds in New York. It was this alliance of the Carantouan and Huron with the French that later led to the destruction of these tribes by the Iroquois.

The early Swedes in Pennsylvania called the Susquehannock ‘Black Minquas.’ This term probably came from the Lenape, who used the Algonquian mingee or mengwe (‘treacherous’) as an opprobrious classification for all detached bands of Iroquois. Corrupted to ‘Mingo,’ the term was widely and loosely applied by Indian and white settler alike from early Colonial days until long after the Revolutionary War. In some parts of the State entire tribes or their remnants became known as Mingo, while further confusion in classification of tribal units resulted from amalgamation, adoption, and intermarriage.

The Susquehannock were tall, aggressive, and keen of mind; they had dispersed the Raritan and Piscataway in the Chesapeake Bay area and were in control of that territory when Captain John Smith encountered them in 1608. Excavations of their early burials indicate that some used platforms on which to place their dead until the flesh had rotted from the bones; the remains were then buried at a depth of three feet, with the skull surmounting the pile.

The power of the Susquehannock in Maryland and Virginia was broken by conflict with the whites early in the seventeenth century. In Pennsylvania, however, their war activities were centered chiefly against the Five Nations, for whom they had an undying hatred. The seat of their power in Pennsylvania was a stronghold near what is now Washington Borough. In 1663 they repulsed an attack of Seneca and Cayuga warriors, and sent the defeated Iroquois back to their Long House bearing messages of derision. By 1667, however, the Susquehannock had begun to feel the effects of continued warfare and sickness, and in 1670 they sent emissaries to the Five Nations in an attempt to make peace. The enraged Iroquois refused to bury the tomahawk, and hostilities continued until most of the Susquehannock were captured or slain.

The main body of the survivors fled to Maryland. Others found refuge along the Susquehanna’s west branch, and those remaining were absorbed by tribes of the confederacy. Many years later a group of exiled Susquehannock returned to their former home in Lancaster County and became known as the Conestoga. Crowded on all sides by white settlers and by tribes they once held in contempt, the Conestoga diminished in number until in 1763 only a few remained. In that year a band of white rioters, known as the ‘Paxton Boys,’ inflamed by accounts of Indian depredations along the frontiers, broke into the Lancaster jail, where the Conestoga had taken refuge, and destroyed all of them (see Lancaster). With this massacre, the last known group of Susquehannock passed out of existence.

According to conservative estimate the Indian population of Pennsylvania was about 15,000 at the time of the first English settlement; but by 1790 white encroachment and conquest had reduced it to little more than 1,000. The Powhatan Nanticoke, who entered the Province from Maryland in 1690, drifted northward to New York, after living for a time along the Susquehanna’s east branch. The Conoy, another Algonquian tribe more correctly known as the Gawanese or Piscataway, migrated to southeastern Pennsylvania from West Virginia early in the eighteenth century, but by 1765 had removed to New York. The Shawnee and Delaware, the former never numbering more than 1,000 in Pennsylvania, had settled in Ohio by the end of the Revolution. The Indians had then ceased to be an important factor in Pennsylvania history, and those remaining within its borders were chiefly Seneca under the chieftainship of Cornplanter.

The Iroquois Confederacy played a minor part in affairs of the Province until 1742, when the aid of the Six Nations was enlisted by the Proprietors in expelling the Delaware from territory involved in the ‘Walking Purchase.’ Up to that time William Penn’s successors had treated directly with the Delaware, but in 1745 the Iroquois established headquarters at Shamokin for control of Indian affairs in the Province. Thereafter the Lenape had to submit to Iroquois decision in all matters pertaining to the sale of land. Dispossessed Delaware, angered Shawnee, and sympathetic Seneca banded together in western Pennsylvania and Ohio, and took an important part in the Indian uprisings from 1755 to 1763. During the French and Indian War, the Six Nations as a confederacy remained neutral, although the Seneca, or Mingo, in the region were drawn into the struggle against the British through association with the Delaware and Shawnee. In the Revolutionary War, however, the Iroquois Confederacy, except for the Oneida and about half of the Tuscarora tribe, was allied with the British.

Today the red man is little more than a memory in Pennsylvania. The State contains a small Indian settlement on lands granted by the Commonwealth to Chief Cornplanter (see Tour 1). It is on the west bank of the Allegheny River, some 20 miles northeast of Warren, where live about 50 families of Seneca blood. Here is buried Chief Cornplanter, Indian benefactor and friend of the whites, to whom a monument was erected in 1866 by special act of the Assembly. Several hundred descendants of other tribes are scattered throughout the Commonwealth, their tribal identities all but lost through fusion with the white man’s culture and participation in modern industry. One thousand descendants of the Delaware are with the Cherokee and Wichita in Oklahoma; some are with the Stockbridge in Wisconsin and the Chippewa in Kansas, and still others are with the Iroquois in Ontario, Canada. For a time a nonreservation Indian school (see Education) was maintained by the United States Government at Carlisle, but this institution was discontinued in 1918.

Philadelphia contains two small plots of ground said to have been set aside originally as camping sites for Indian delegations visiting the city. One plot, formerly a part of the Penn lawn, is just off Second Street, between Walnut and Chestnut; the other is behind the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Broad Street. Both are believed to have been granted long ago to the Six Nations; but whatever claims the Indians may once have had upon these plots, the grants now have a legendary rather than a legal base. In 1922 a delegation of Blackfeet, Oneida, and Ojibway Indians visited the city and held a conclave on the Second Street tract. At that time, John Gaskell Hall, a descendant of Penn, ‘re-dedicated’ the old camping site to the Indians in the presence of Governor Sproul and Mayor Moore.

Evils may be laid at the door of William Penn’s successors, but Penn himself took pride in treating the Indians fairly, and his policy of amicable settlements in all purchases of land was carried on throughout his life. It is significant that his Swedish predecessors had pursued a similar policy. Even before he had met and learned to love them, he had entrusted to Thomas Holme a letter addressed to the Indians in Pennsylvania, in which he wrote:

The great God, who is the power that made you and me, incline your hearts to righteousness, love and peace with one another, which I hope the great God will incline both you and me to do . . . I have already taken care that none of my people sell rum to make your people drunk . . .

I am your loving friend,

William Penn,

England, 21st of the Second month, 1682.

One of Penn’s first acts on arriving in Pennsylvania, it is said, was to make a treaty with the Delaware and Susquehannock tribes, probably at Shackamaxon, on a site now marked by a marble obelisk. Voltaire referred to this compact as ‘the only treaty never sworn to, and never broken.’ Indeed, between the early settlers and the Indians a spirit of love and friendship endured until the white men’s greed had destroyed the attachment that years before had led Captain Smith to write: ‘They adore us as gods.’

History

PENNSYLVANIA has been at different times a possession of three foreign nations: The Netherlands, Sweden, and Great Britain. In addition, the western part was once under French military control and claimed as part of New France.

As early as 1608 Captain John Smith, exploring Chesapeake Bay, went as far as ‘the countrey of the Susquehannocks,’ but probably did not reach Pennsylvania. In 1609 Henry Hudson and in 1610 Captain Samuel Argall sounded the waters of the lower Delaware. The next explorer, Captain Cornelis Jacobssen May, probably ventured a short distance up the Delaware River in 1614. Etienne Brulé, in the service of the French, explored the Susquehanna from headwaters to mouth in 1615–16, and in 1616 Captain Cornelius Hendricksen ascended the Delaware at least to the mouth of the Schuylkill, possibly as far as the falls near Trenton. At or near the site of Philadelphia, Captain Hendricksen ‘ransomed from the Indians’ a Dutch fur trader named Kleynties and two companions, who had come ‘from the North (Hudson) River by land.’

Dutch Delaware was free to all traders from 1618 until 1621, when the Dutch West India Company was chartered. Captain May, revisiting the section in 1623, established a trading settlement on the east bank of the Delaware near Gloucester Point, New Jersey, and built Fort Nassau, which was soon abandoned.

Subsequently, Sweden became interested in the new land. Capital for the New Sweden Company was supplied by Dutch and Swedish members, and in the spring of 1638 two vessels sailed up the Delaware and established Fort Christina at what is now Wilmington, Delaware. Peter Minuit, who had been director-general of New Netherland for the Dutch West India Company for six years (1626–32), was first governor of New Sweden. Fort Nassau had been rebuilt and garrisoned by the Dutch, so the Swedes kept to the west bank of the Delaware.

Swedish settlers carried on trade in spite of protests from Dutch and English, and two more expeditions were sent out, the first in 1640 under Peter Hollander Ridder, the second in 1641. In 1643 a new expedition under Johan Printz went up the river and made the first Colonial settlement within the present borders of Pennsylvania, at Tinicum. Printz, appointed governor by Queen Christina, constructed a fort, New Göttenburg, on the more protected site earlier purchased from Indians by Minuit. It was Printz who set up the first local government and courts in Pennsylvania; the Swedes erected on Cobbs Creek the first mill in what is now the Commonwealth.

Printz carried on a fur trade with the Indians and labored unceasingly for the cause of New Sweden. The neighboring Indians caused him less worry than the Dutch in Manhattan, who in 1645 sent an expedition to the Schuylkill to erect Fort Beversrede. The Swedes countered by building another fort, but in 1651 the Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant, brought a formidable fleet into the Delaware River. He built a fort at Sand Hook (New Castle, Del.), named it Fort Casimir, and moved to it the garrison from Fort Nassau (Gloucester, N.J.). The Dutch now controlled the river trade, as Arent Corssen had extinguished the Indian title to the land in 1633.

After ten years of administration, Printz turned over his affairs to the vice governor, Johan Papegoja, and returned to Europe. Before departing, he gave his daughter in marriage to the new governor in the first Christian marriage ceremony performed within the borders of Pennsylvania. Papegoja was supplanted by John Classon Rysing, or Rysingh, who arrived in 1654. Authorized to oust the Dutch from Fort Casimir, he appeared before that fort on May 24 and demanded its surrender. The Dutch, taken by surprise, could not defend Fort Casimir, which passed to the Swedes, who renamed it Fort Trefaldighet (Fort Trinity).

In 1655 Stuyvesant, resolved to regain Dutch supremacy on the Delaware River and uproot the Swedes, sent out an expedition of seven vessels and 600 or 700 men, who succeeded in lowering every Swedish flag on the Delaware and hoisting the Dutch emblem. Rysing, accompanied by the leading Swedish settlers, sailed back home, while those of his countrymen who chose to remain were permitted to retain their property and continue peaceful pursuits.

The English now were gaining a strong foothold in the new land. Virginia voyagers had sailed up the Delaware as early as 1634, establishing at the mouth of the Schuylkill a tiny fort that was promptly destroyed by the Dutch. Seven years later a party of 60 English Puritans from Connecticut attempted to settle on the same site, but were taken as prisoners to Manhattan. By the time the Dutch had wrested exclusive control of the Delaware River colonies from the Swedes, the encroachment of the English upon New Netherland had become inexorable. In 1664 Colonel Richard Nicolls in behalf of England established the rule of the Duke of York over Dutch New Netherland and the Delaware region. At that time there were about 2,000 persons on the Delaware, the Swedes and Finns being in the majority. When the English took control they permitted the magistrates then in power to continue ‘to exercise their civil power as formerly.’ The English retained control except for the brief Colve period—August 1673 to November 1674—and secured their claims by the Treaty of Westminster in 1674. The Duke of York continued in power until 1682, when he relinquished Pennsylvania and the Lower Counties (Delaware) to William Penn.

THE COMING OF WILLIAM PENN

The second, and vigorous, period of colonization in Pennsylvania began with the advent of William Penn. In settlement of a debt of £16,000 owed to his father by Charles II, Penn in 1681 obtained the grant of almost all of what is now Pennsylvania. Soon afterward the Duke of York leased and deeded to him the Lower Counties (Delaware), although these were claimed by Lord Baltimore as being within the original Maryland patent.

Penn’s grant from the British crown extended five degrees of longitude west of the Delaware, with the 43rd degree of latitude as its northern boundary. Measurement from the southern boundary extended ‘from a circle drawn at 12 miles distant from New Castle, northward and westward, to the beginning of the 40th degree of northern latitude, and then by a straight line westward to the limits of the longitude mentioned.’

New Wales was the name chosen by Penn for the province, in recognition both of his Welsh connections and of the mountainous character of much of the territory. A Welshman, present in the Privy Council, objected; whereupon Penn suggested ‘Sylvania,’ because of the magnificent forests. The council, at the king’s desire, prefixed ‘Penn.’ Penn was required to pay to the king, or the king’s heirs, ‘Two Beaver Skins to bee delivered att our said Castle of Windsor, on the first day of January, in every yeare, and also the fifth parte of all Gold and Silver Oare, which shall from time to time happen to be found within the Limits aforesaid . . .’

William Markham, Penn’s cousin and deputy governor, armed with power of adjusting boundaries, arrived on the Delaware about July 1, 1681, took the oath of office, and called a council consisting of two Swedes and seven English settlers. At its first session the council established Upland as the capital.

The interest aroused by Penn’s publication in 1681 of ‘some account of the province,’ offering easy terms of sale for lands, led to his appointing four commissioners to locate ‘a Great Town.’ One withdrew, but the others, William Crispin, John Bezar, and Nathaniel Allen, arrived on the Delaware in the spring of 1682. They selected the site of Philadelphia for the projected town.

In June 1682 Penn sent Thomas Holme to America with orders to lay out the town, while he himself worked on the Frame of Government, disposed of 300,000 acres of land, and settled territorial problems with the Duke of York. In August 1682 the duke executed three deeds to Penn; the first surrendered his right to the province; the second ceded New Castle and the land lying within a circle twelve miles about it; the third ceded at an agreed rental the tract extending from twelve miles below the town southward to Cape Henlopen. Thus Penn secured access to the sea. On August 31 he sailed for America, arriving at New Castle on October 27 and two days later at Upland, which he renamed Chester. Within a few days he was in Philadelphia, where the advance guard of settlers under Holme was laying out streets and building houses.

The purchase of Indian rights to the land was one of the first matters to which Penn gave attention. Tradition says that ‘near the close of November 1682’ he met chiefs of the Lenni Lenape, Susquehannock, and Shawnee tribes at Sachamexing, a part of Philadelphia now called Shackamaxon, where he presented to the sachem Taminend (spelled variously) a roll of parchment to confirm a ‘treaty of purchase and amity.’ Penn explained that he wished to dwell with the Indians ‘in peace and friendship,’ that he and his followers ‘met them unarmed because their religion forbade the use of hostile weapons,’ and that ‘they came not to injure others but to do good.’ He told the chiefs that Indians would be protected in their lawful pursuits, that their right to improve their plantations and to procure subsistence was in all respects similar to that