Where Pennsylvania began - Penn's landing at Chester

Ask around Delco where William Penn landed, and plenty of people will point you to Penn's Landing on the Philadelphia waterfront. It's an easy mistake, since the name is right there. The actual spot where Penn first set foot in his colony is about 15 minutes down I-95, in Chester, in a small plot near Penn and Front Streets. There's a granite stone there about five feet tall. The river is about 100 feet away now, on the other side of the railroad tracks.

I like this one because it's ours. Pennsylvania's story usually gets told from Philadelphia, but before there was a Philadelphia, there was a riverside town on Chester Creek, and that's where Penn came ashore. And this is the week to think about it, because on today's calendar the anniversary lands right around Nov 8.

A town called Upland

The William Penn Landing Site sits just south of the mouth of Chester Creek, where it meets the Delaware. In 1681, when King Charles II granted Penn the charter for his new province on March 4, that riverbank already had a town on it. It was called Upland, and it was the only town in the province.

Upland wasn't empty land waiting for Penn. Wikipedia's account says Swedish and Dutch settlers had lived in the area since the 1630s, and Quakers had been moving over from West Jersey since about 1675. About 500 Europeans lived in the whole province, mostly around Upland, in what are now Delaware and Chester counties. What government there was came from the Upland Court, which ran pretty much everything, from trials to lawmaking, under the Duke of York's laws.

Penn sent his deputy governor, William Markham, ahead. Markham arrived at Upland on Aug 3, 1681, and set up a court and a council there. So for more than a year before Penn showed up, Upland was already the front office of Pennsylvania.

The landing

Penn sailed from Deal, on the English Channel, aboard the ship Welcome on Aug 30, 1682. His first stop in America was New Castle, now in the state of Delaware, on Oct 27. There he took possession of the land in an old English ceremony called "turf and twig." Within two days he had come about 18 miles up the river to Upland.

The state historical marker, put up by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission in 1947, tells it in one sentence: "Oct. 29, 1682, soon after finishing a two-months' voyage, William Penn first set foot on his colony of Pennsylvania, granted by Charles II the year before." Other accounts say Oct 28. One of Penn's fellow passengers on the Welcome, Evan Oliver, wrote the date the Quaker way, "ye 28th of ye 8th month, '82." Either way, it was late October on the calendar England used then.

Penn came ashore near the log house of Robert Wade, a Quaker who had bought the property in 1675. The land had once belonged to the daughter of Johan Printz, the governor of New Sweden. Wade's house also served as the first Quaker meetinghouse in the area, and Penn spent his first night in Pennsylvania there.

The name question

Here's the story most people have heard about the Chester landing site. Penn steps off the boat, turns to a friend who came from Chester in England, and asks him to rename the town, and Upland becomes Chester on the spot.

That story comes from George Smith's History of Delaware County, published in 1862. The trouble is that Smith's own book quotes a document dated 1681, a year before Penn arrived, that already uses the name Chester. So the town did become Chester right around the time Penn came, but nothing in the record backs up the scene on the riverbank, so it stays a tradition. Some sources, including the Visit Delco page, still tell it as fact. I'd treat it as a good story and leave it there.

Two hundred years later

In 1752 England and its colonies switched to the calendar we use now, and dates in the 1600s shifted forward by 10 days. That moved Penn's late-October landing to early November. So when Chester marked the 200th anniversary, the monument at the landing site was put in place on Nov 8, 1882, and dedicated on Nov 9.

The monument was designed by John Struthers and paid for by members of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Penn Club. Penn's coat of arms is carved on the side facing inland. A special train ran from Philadelphia to Chester for the dedication, which by Wikipedia's account was celebrated at length. In 1971 the William Penn Landing Site was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Why it's behind the tracks

In 1682 Penn stepped onto a riverbank. Today the Penn landing stone sits about 100 feet inland, with railroad tracks between it and the Delaware, in an industrial part of Chester. More than three centuries of change along the waterfront moved the river's edge away from the spot. Standing at the stone, you're standing roughly where the bank used to be.

How to find it

Visit Delco lists the William Penn Landing Site at 100 Penn Street, Chester, PA 19013. The 1947 state marker is a block away on Second Street, between Penn and Edgemont Streets, and there's another marker a few steps from it titled "Delaware County, Where Pennsylvania Began." The visit is short. Read both markers, walk down to the stone, find Penn's coat of arms and then look toward the water. One visitor's 2023 write-up mentions free street parking nearby.

It isn't much to look at, and the setting is mostly rail lines and industry. But this patch of Chester riverbank is where Pennsylvania started, more than a year before Philadelphia got going. Go stand there this week, close to the anniversary, and picture the Welcome's boats coming up the river toward a little town called Upland.