56 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
To pay off an old debt, in 1681 King Charles II made
William Penn the sole proprietor of 45,000 acres of
land north of Maryland and west of the Delaware
River. This astonishingly powerful charter gave Penn
tremendous influence over the organization and
settlement of a region nearly the size of England
itself. Penn was known as an advocate of religious
freedom as well as a successful real-estate developer,
and these two experiences directly shaped his vision
of an expansive Quaker colony in America.
Penn envisioned a “Holy Experiment” that would
embody democracy, economic opportunity, and
religious freedom. Within months he had distributed
land to about 250 “first purchasers,” and that fall
he sent commissioners to organize the colony, allot
the grants, and site the capital city. Soon thereafter,
he dispatched his fellow Quaker Thomas Holme
as surveyor general of the new colony. Holme
arrived in April 1682 to survey and map the new city
of Philadelphia on an orderly grid, enthusing to
investors back home that “such a Scituation is scarce
to be parallel’d.” Located between the Delaware and
the Schuylkill rivers, the site was already home to a
few natives and white settlers, but for the most part it
remained a forest.
By the end of 1682, Holme had finalized the new
street plan shown at right. His orderly grid—“two
Miles in Length and one in Breadth”—incorporated
Penn’s ideals: even modest parcels would have space
for a garden and a small orchard, and access to one
of two rivers. Four squares would anchor the city’s
public life, while a fifth at the center would provide
space for a meeting house. The numbers on the map
refer to the lots granted to those first purchasers.
Even the street names reflected Penn’s Quaker
sensibility: upon Holme’s suggestion, he named
them for trees rather than after illustrious leaders.
Such a harmonious and composed plan must have
held particular appeal for Londoners, whose ancient
city had recently been ravaged by the fire of 1666.
Here was a new and rationally organized town, the
first European urban plan in the colonies.
PENN’S HOLY EXPERIMENT
Thomas Holme, “A Portraiture of the
City of Philadelphia,” 1683, and “A Map
of the Province of Pennsilvania,”
circa 1687