PAPennsylvania History

A province handed over to settle a royal debt

Charles II owed roughly 16,000 pounds to the estate of Admiral Sir William Penn, and in March 1681 he cleared the account by signing over a slab of North America to the admiral's son, a Quaker the king had already jailed once. The younger Penn wanted the place called Sylvania. The king insisted on adding the family name, so the debt is embedded in the word Pennsylvania itself. Penn then did something no other proprietor did, which was to treat the grant as an argument rather than an estate: he guaranteed liberty of conscience, published his frame of government in advance to attract settlers, and bought land from the Lenape instead of assuming it.

Lenape towns, Susquehannock forts and a Swedish start

Two very different peoples held the country Penn was handed. The Lenape lived in small autonomous communities along the Delaware and its creeks, speaking an Algonquian language and organizing by clan rather than by chiefdom. The Susquehannock, Iroquoian speakers, built large palisaded towns along the Susquehanna and controlled the fur trade south of the Great Lakes until epidemics and a long war with the Five Nations broke them in the 1670s.

Europeans arrived before Penn did. Swedish colonists settled Tinicum Island below present Philadelphia in 1643 under Governor Johan Printz, making it the first European seat of government on Pennsylvania soil. The Dutch took New Sweden in 1655, the English took the Dutch holdings in 1664, and the Swedish and Finnish farmers stayed on, along with their log building methods, which spread west with the frontier.

The holy experiment and the Walking Purchase

Philadelphia was surveyed in 1682 as a grid between two rivers, with five public squares, an unusually deliberate plan for a colonial port. Penn's promise of religious liberty pulled in people no other colony wanted in quantity: German Mennonites founded Germantown in 1683, and five years later four of them signed the first written protest against slavery in the English colonies. Moravians settled Bethlehem, Amish and Dunkers took the limestone country west of Philadelphia, and Scots Irish families pushed straight through to the mountains.

Penn's heirs did not keep his methods. In September 1737 Thomas Penn produced a dubious old deed describing a tract measured by a day and a half's walk, then hired trained runners who covered some 60 miles along a pre-cleared path. The Walking Purchase took roughly 1.2 million acres from the Lenape and pushed them toward the Ohio country, where they made common cause with France.

Two wars directed from Philadelphia

The Seven Years War began on ground Pennsylvania claimed. A young Virginia colonel surrendered Fort Necessity in the Laurel Highlands on July 3, 1754, General Braddock's column was destroyed near the Monongahela on July 9, 1755, and Forbes finally took the burned French post in November 1758 and renamed the site Pittsburgh. The fighting shattered the province's pacifist politics. During Pontiac's war in 1763 a vigilante band from Paxton murdered the last twenty Conestoga, the remnant of the Susquehannock, and then marched on Philadelphia, where Benjamin Franklin talked them into going home.

A dozen years later the Continental Congress met at Carpenters' Hall, then in the Pennsylvania State House, where independence was voted in July 1776 and the federal Constitution drafted in the summer of 1787. Washington's army lost at Brandywine and Germantown in the autumn of 1777, the British held Philadelphia through that winter, and the Continentals rebuilt themselves at Valley Forge. In March 1780 the state passed the first gradual abolition act in the new nation. Pennsylvania ratified the Constitution on December 12, 1787, second after Delaware. Then in 1794 farmers in the western counties refused the federal excise on whiskey and Washington personally rode out at the head of roughly 13,000 militia, the only sitting president ever to command troops in the field. The capital moved to Lancaster in 1799 and to Harrisburg in 1812.

Gettysburg and the burning of Chambersburg

Lee crossed into Pennsylvania in June 1863 to feed his army off northern farms and force a decision. The armies collided by accident at a road junction in Adams County, and over July 1 to 3 about 51,000 men were killed, wounded, captured or lost at Gettysburg, the costliest battle ever fought in North America. Lincoln came back on November 19 to dedicate the cemetery and spoke for barely two minutes. The state's war was not only Gettysburg: Camp William Penn outside Philadelphia trained eleven regiments of United States Colored Troops, and on July 30, 1864 Confederate cavalry burned the center of Chambersburg after the town refused to pay a ransom in gold.

Anthracite, Titusville, steel, and the long unwinding

Two years before the war, in August 1859, Edwin Drake struck oil at 69 feet outside Titusville and created the petroleum industry; the boom town of Pithole rose and emptied within about two years. Northeastern Pennsylvania held nearly all the anthracite in the United States, and the mines that fed the furnaces also produced the Molly Maguire trials, in which twenty Irish miners were hanged between 1877 and 1879, ten of them on a single June morning. Pittsburgh's railroad strike of 1877 ended with the roundhouse in flames. Carnegie opened the Edgar Thomson works at Braddock in 1875, the Homestead lockout in 1892 broke the steelworkers' union for four decades, and in 1901 the merger that created United States Steel made the first billion dollar corporation, headquartered in Pittsburgh.

The costs arrived on a schedule. A private club's earthen dam failed above Johnstown on May 31, 1889 and killed 2,209 people. A temperature inversion trapped mill fumes over Donora in October 1948 and killed twenty within days, which pushed Congress toward federal air pollution law. Reactor Unit 2 at Three Mile Island near Middletown partly melted down on March 28, 1979 and effectively ended new reactor orders in the United States. Then the mills themselves went: Homestead closed in 1986, Bethlehem Steel poured its last heat in 1995 and filed for bankruptcy in 2001, and the Monongahela valley lost tens of thousands of jobs in a handful of years. On September 11, 2001 United Flight 93 came down in a reclaimed strip mine near Shanksville. Pittsburgh rebuilt around hospitals, universities and robotics; Philadelphia around medicine and finance; and the Marcellus shale, drilled commercially from 2008, made the state a major gas producer for the second time in its history.

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