Until 1854, Philadelphia’s population concentrated within the original city boundaries set by William Penn (1644-1718), between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers and from what is now South Street to Vine. By 1820, however, inhabitants in the independent boroughs, districts, and townships that made up the rest of the county already outnumbered those in the city proper. Some of these suburbs were places of significance in their own right, with Spring Garden, the Northern Liberties, and Kensington, all north of the city center, ranking as the ninth, eleventh, and twelfth biggest urban settlements in the nation in the 1850 census. These districts, in common with their neighbors, had won from the Commonwealth the right to establish their own local governments, with powers to tax, borrow, and spend, and thus remained independent of Philadelphia City’s control. While they varied in their social and political character, they tended to be poorer and more Democratic than the historic center, which they sometimes referred to as the “Whig Gibraltar.”

The first organized calls for uniting the built-up portions of the county under one municipal authority came in response to two major riots in 1844. The anti-Catholic violence, which broke out in the northern suburb of Kensington and the southern district of Southwark–both neighborhoods in which Irish immigrants and native-born Protestants lived in close proximity–exposed the inadequacy of the prevailing system of law enforcement. With no uniformed officers in the county, and every jurisdiction responsible for its own policing, there was little to prevent violence from escalating. It took state militia armed with cannon to suppress the Southwark disturbance. Soon after the riots, the Public Ledger called for annexing the built-up outlying districts, and in November, citizens gathered at the County Court House (Congress Hall) to make the case for enlarging the city boundaries.

Opposition to a New Charter

The move for a new charter over the winter of 1844-5, however, came to very little. A bill was drawn up for consideration by the Commonwealth–which then, as now, held the power to create, alter, and destroy local government–but influential owners of property and city debt like Horace Binney (1780-1875) organized to oppose the proposal. Critics feared that consolidation would hand the keys of the Whig city to suburban Democrats, and that real estate owners in the prosperous city proper would be taxed to pay the interest on loans taken out by indebted outlying districts, which needed to borrow to maintain their rapid growth. The opponents of consolidation lobbied for legislation that would maintain the districts’ independence yet still address the issue of civil disorder by requiring that all built-up portions of Philadelphia retain one policeman for every 150 taxable inhabitants.

This measure failed to prevent another major riot in 1849, which sparked renewed calls for annexation. While this time the proposal enjoyed more support from the city’s merchants, manufacturers, and professionals, it failed once again in the state capital. Instead of consolidation, Harrisburg legislators established a police force under an elected marshal to deal with disorder across the built-up sections of the metropolis. The Marshal’s Police proved relatively successful in maintaining the peace, and despite endemic fighting among rival companies of volunteer firemen and street gangs, there were no major riots from 1850 to the eventual passage of the Consolidation Act in 1854.

Calls for metropolitan union nevertheless grew louder, despite the relative calm of the early 1850s. By then, municipal reformers hoped to do more than inoculate the city against the violence of the preceding decades. Many saw the district system as unnecessarily costly, as dozens of jurisdictions duplicated services that could have been provided more efficiently by a single government. Others feared that the city proper might become “an appendage to her own colonies,” as growth in industrial districts like Spring Garden and Kensington outpaced the historic center. Some no longer saw those suburbs as a financial burden, but rather as a potential source of tax revenue, because heavy investment in the Pennsylvania Railroad after its chartering in 1846 had left the city proper far more heavily indebted than its neighbors. Real estate owners in central Philadelphia complained that suburban property holders benefited from the trade that resulted from the rail link to Pittsburgh but had contributed little in the way of public funds to the railroad’s construction.

Rivalry With New York

Perhaps most importantly, though, supporters of consolidation believed that only a united Philadelphia would have the power and status to overtake New York in the struggle for metropolitan supremacy, a race the city had languished in for at least three decades as the completion of the Erie Canal (1825) and Chestnut Street’s decline as a financial center after the attack on the Second Bank of the United States by Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) enabled Manhattan to pull ahead. As North and South clashed over the question of slavery extension, advocates of annexation for Philadelphia readily adopted the rallying cry “In Union There Is Strength” for their own cause.

In the early 1850s both of the dominant political parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, promised to back annexation, but in Harrisburg, proposals for charter revision went nowhere.  To break the impasse supporters of the measure–prodded by their erstwhile opponent Binney–decided in 1853 to nominate their own slate of candidates for the Pennsylvania Assembly and Senate. In alliance with advocates of a professional fire department, they put forward a mixture of independents and regular Whig and Democratic party nominees. At the head of the ticket was Eli Kirk Price (1797-1884), a progressive real estate attorney, while the wealthy locomotive builder Matthias W. Baldwin (1795-1866) was among the candidates for the lower house. Most of the consolidation slate triumphed, and before Price went off to take his seat in the Senate, an Executive Consolidation Committee met in Philadelphia to draft a bill.

The Executive Consolidation Committee that convened in the Board of Trade rooms at the Merchants’ Exchange over the winter of 1853-54 represented a cross-section of Philadelphia’s economic elite. Many owned substantial real estate beyond the historic corporate boundaries, and by proposing to annex the entire county rather than just the much smaller built-up environs of the city proper, they went much further than their predecessors. Despite murmurs of protest from rural districts, the charter passed both houses and was signed into law in February. The new metropolis, encompassing industrial suburbs, romantic rural retreats, and vast stretches of farmland, came into being four months later.

Architects of the 1854 charter saw it as a victory over the self-interested politicians of the district system and the triumph of a rational, modern government over an antiquated predecessor. Executive power was invested in a mayor elected at-large for a two-year term, and voters chose the nativist playwright Robert T. Conrad (1810-1858) as the first to hold the office. In place of the old boundaries on the county map, meanwhile, twenty-four wards sent representatives to the Common and Select Councils. Ward representation preserved an element of localism in the councils–something party politicians quickly learned to exploit–but the financial muscle and territorial reach of the enlarged city enabled urban planning on a far greater scale than previously had been possible.

Preserving Open Spaces

The Consolidation Act resulted in other important changes for newly expanded Philadelphia. Among them, the legislation gave municipal authorities the duty to preserve open spaces, and before and after the Civil War steps were taken towards creating Fairmount Park, which lay entirely beyond the boundaries of the old city proper. Standardized street names and numbers (1857), a professionalized the fire department (1871), and a new city hall at Broad and Market Streets (1871-1901) demonstrated civic authorities’ readiness to raise the city’s metropolitan status, as did the suburban expansion fueled by horse-drawn streetcar lines and other infrastructure improvements that opened up cheap land in the consolidated city for builders. When Philadelphians in the second half of the nineteenth century contrasted their city of row homes with the tenements of New York, they credited the city’s expansion with eliminating the need for “vertical slums.”

Perhaps most importantly, though, consolidation gave the municipal government the power to maintain the peace. While violence did occasionally break out–in 1871, for instance, the African American civil rights campaigner Octavius Catto (1839-1871) was shot dead on a turbulent election day–the mayor, with his control of a large, uniformed police force, always had the resources at his disposal to prevent the kind of conflagrations that threatened to engulf the city in 1844. Under Republican stewardship, Philadelphia avoided the draft riots that occurred in New York in 1863 and the worst of the conflict between railroads and workers in the Great Strike of 1877. Citizens credited the Consolidation Act for the relative peace in a city once notorious for disorder.

Some of these developments, however, owed more to legislation in Harrisburg than they did to actions by the city government, and by the late 1860s, the habit of state officials overriding the municipal authorities in matters pertaining to the metropolis caused frequent complaints. So too did the tendency of councilmen to claim executive power for themselves, thus weakening the powers of the mayor’s office, which consolidators had sought to strengthen. As party bosses–usually Democratic in the immigrant enclaves of South Philadelphia, but Republican in the growing suburbs–established ward strongholds, centralized city- and state-wide Republican machines distributed jobs and contracts to supporters. After the Civil War a generation of affluent reformers began to see the 1854 act more as a giant source of patronage than a measure designed to bring peace, prosperity, and economic government. They hoped another new charter, eventually passed in 1887, would improve matters, but under Republican leadership, Philadelphians remained, in Lincoln Steffens‘ memorable phrase, “the most corrupt and the most contented.” This was consolidation’s unanticipated legacy, but the act’s limitations should not mask its real achievements in laying the foundations of modern Philadelphia.

Andrew Heath is a Lecturer in American History at the University of Sheffield, U.K. He is currently writing a book on the Consolidation of 1854. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Historic districts emerged in the United States in the 1930s when Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana, passed local ordinances designating large areas of those cities as places of historical and architectural significance. On the federal level, historic districts first gained recognition under the National Historic Landmarks (NHL) program, authorized by the Historic Sites Act of 1935. Beginning in the early 1960s, a number of districts in the Philadelphia region received NHL status, including Elfreth’s Alley (1960), Brandywine Battlefield (1960), Colonial Germantown (1965), Washington’s Crossing (1961), Princeton Battlefield (1960), and the New Castle Historic District (1967). Some of these districts were initiated by historians at the National Park Service, while others were the result of community organizations seeking recognition for places that were at risk from disinvestment and increasing suburban development. These districts also earned listing in the National Register of Historic Places when it was created in 1966, because the Register included districts as one of the eligible property types. Over time the National Park Service developed guidelines for how to recognize, define, and document historic districts, and eventually dozens of districts in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware encompassing several thousand buildings and significant cultural landscapes joined the National Register.

Listing in the National Register or as an NHL served to raise awareness and generate pride in the history of these communities at a time when the United States was changing rapidly. National Register listing did not restrict private property owners from altering or demolishing properties in the districts, but did help to protect places such as Elfreth’s Alley from destruction related to construction of I-95. Over time, some of the Philadelphia’s most significant and iconic neighborhoods including Society Hill and Old City, Chestnut Hill, and Spruce Hill, became National Register Historic Districts as a result of efforts by community organizations. Many National Register districts in the city, especially in Center City and West Philadelphia, were initiated by the city and developers in an effort to make rehabilitation projects for historic buildings eligible for federal historic preservation tax credits.  Beyond the city’s oldest and grandest residential neighborhoods, commercial areas such the South Broad Street corridor, landscapes such as FDR Park and Fairmount Park, and midcentury modern architecture such as Greenbelt Knoll in Northeast Philadelphia have been listed in the National Register. The Yorktown Historic District in North Philadelphia, significant as a mid-twentieth-century example of community planning to provide quality housing opportunities for African Americans, became a National Register Historic District in 2012.

Cooper Grant and South Camden Districts

In southern New Jersey, many of Camden’s neighborhoods, including Cooper Grant in 1989, and South Camden in 1990, were listed in the National Register. These distinct neighborhoods illustrated a variety of housing types, from early twentieth-century middle-class residences to intact worker homes that housed the backbone of industrial New Jersey. Commercial corridors and residential neighborhoods in Collingswood, Haddonfield, Berlin, Burlington, Bridgeton, and many other communities throughout the state were designated historic districts, as were more rural neighborhoods, such as South Tuckahoe in Cape May County and Recklesstown (Village of Chesterfield) Historic District in Burlington County. In Delaware, historic districts listed on the National Register included the duPont-era industrial resources and landscapes along the Brandywine River in New Castle County, small towns such as Odessa, Smyrna, and Delaware City, and a number of historic neighborhoods in Wilmington.

Cities and municipalities have also designated historic districts through local ordinances. Unlike the National Register, local designations generally have required some form of review of alterations and demolition to buildings in the districts. While Philadelphia’s historic preservation ordinance was enacted in 1955 under the Home Rule Charter, it did not include the authority to designated historic districts. Main Street in Manayunk was the first city historic district, but it was designated under special legislation intended to preserve the textile mills and commercial corridor around them during a time when the textile industry was struggling and the community was organizing to help revitalize the neighborhood.  When the city’s preservation ordinance was overhauled in 1986 it included provisions for creating historic districts, and numerous neighborhoods, including Rittenhouse-Fitler Square, Old City, Girard Estates, Spring Garden, Awbury Arboretum, Diamond Street, and Parkside, among others, subsequently became designated as historic. These designations put in place certain restrictions on how buildings could be altered or demolished in an effort to preserve the setting and context created by the concentration of older buildings. This was a conscious move away from prior preservation practice, which tended to focus only on individual buildings, especially the oldest and grandest properties or places associated with prominent individuals or events.

In 1961 the Pennsylvania legislature passed the Historic Districts Act, which gave cities, boroughs, and townships outside of Philadelphia the authority to designate historic districts in their communities. This law did not apply to Philadelphia because the home rule charter gave the city wide latitude to develop its own laws and policies related to land use and historic preservation. In the ensuing decades, Cheltenham Township, Doylestown, East Bradford Township, Lower Merion Township, Ridley Park, Wester Chester, and numerous other municipalities in Greater Philadelphia took advantage of this power. In New Jersey, the Municipal Land Use Law was amended in the 1980s to include specific authorization for local historic preservation ordinances, including districts, and municipalities throughout the southern part of the state, including Cape May, Haddonfield, Burlington City, Camden, Evesham Township, and Salem City, created local preservation programs and designated historic districts. In Delaware, counties and independent municipalities have created locally designated historic districts in Wilmington, New Castle, Centreville, Christiana, and other smaller communities throughout New Castle County.

Communities throughout Greater Philadelphia have designated historic districts to recognize and protect both urban neighborhoods and rural communities where the individual buildings and landscapes may not be individually unique, but when taken together reflect important aspects of the region’s historical and architectural heritage. These districts not only exemplify the region’s historical and architectural significance, but also encompass many of the area’s vital business centers and desirable residential neighborhoods.

Cory Kegerise is the Community Preservation Coordinator for Eastern Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office.  A native of Berks County, he lives in Philadelphia and holds a master’s degree in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Interstate 95—known as the Delaware Expressway in the Philadelphia area—is one of the region’s key transportation conduits. Running alongside the western bank of the Delaware River, it links central Philadelphia with Mercer County in New Jersey and Bucks and Delaware Counties in Pennsylvania. Conceived and built in an era when planners promoted automobile traffic above all other considerations, I-95 has played a vital role in Greater Philadelphia’s highway network. Yet its history also reveals the costs and benefits of auto-dependent transportation, as individual convenience and economic growth were weighed against neighborhood and environmental destruction.

Planners had been proposing highways through the Philadelphia metropolitan area for decades before construction on I-95 began in 1959. Philadelphia’s City Planning Commission issued a design for an expressway along the Delaware River in the late 1930s, but those plans were scrapped due to concerns that it would interfere with the city’s shipping industry. After World War II, the Pennsylvania Department of Highways approved similar plans, this time for a toll-funded turnpike. With the passage of the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, the federal government promised to fund ninety percent of the $200 million project, which would be built under direction of local agencies, including the Southeastern Pennsylvania Regional Planning Commission, Pennsylvania’s Department of Highways, and Philadelphia’s City Planning Commission and Department of Streets.

Designed as part of a planned loop of expressways around central Philadelphia, I-95 was intended to link the city’s riverfront with its factories and airport. The City Planning Commission argued that the expressway would “become in effect the conveyor belt of Philadelphia as a producing unit…it will provide access to the piers and the warehouses essential for operation of the port.” Planners also hoped that new highways would encourage people to drive downtown from the suburban fringe, helping to revitalize Philadelphia’s urban core. Highway planning gave precedence to suburban automobiles—not urban residents or pedestrians. As City Planning Commission Executive Director Edmund Bacon (1910-2005) remarked, “We think it better not to fight with the automobile…but rather to treat it as an honored guest and cater to its needs.”

When Pennsylvania’s Department of Highways unveiled its plans for the expressway in the late 1950s, city residents who lived in its path reacted with outrage. Middle-class residents of Society Hill, a historic area just beginning to undergo revitalization, organized to fight the expressway by forming the Committee to Preserve Philadelphia’s Historic Gateway. The committee proposed that I-95 should be built below street grade with a cover to block it from view and preserve pedestrian access to the river. After many years of wrangling, the state agreed to an amended plan in 1969. Instead of a continuous six-block cover, the expressway would be covered in two sections: one from Delancey to Dock Streets and another from Gatzmer to Chestnut Streets.

In Southwark, a working-class neighborhood on the South Philadelphia riverfront, construction of the expressway would prove more destructive. Plans necessitated the demolition of nearly 2,000 row houses and threatened the historic Gloria Dei (Old Swedes’) Church. In 1960, Mayor Richardson Dilworth (1898-1974) was heckled by 1,500 angry Southwark residents when he attended a neighborhood forum to discuss the highway. The community’s protests proved ineffective, however. Unlike the well-connected residents of Society Hill, they were unable to modify the proposed expressway. In 1966, demolition began in Southwark, where I-95 soon became a physical barrier between residents and the riverfront which had once provided jobs for thousands of area longshoremen.

While the first section of I-95—a six-mile stretch from Bucks Country to Woodhaven Road in Northeast Philadelphia—opened in 1964, delays continued to plague the project. There were contentious battles over where to place entrance and exit ramps in Central and South Philadelphia. Scores of protesters in Philadelphia’s Port Richmond neighborhood blockaded the off-ramp at Allegheny Avenue in 1969. The Philadelphia Inquirer quipped in 1970 that China’s Great Wall had been “built by hand at an average of 31 miles a year” while the Delaware Expressway was “being built by machine at an average of 2.9 miles a year.” At that glacial pace, I-95 was finally completed in 1979 (with the exception of a short segment near Philadelphia International Airport, finished in 1985).

Residents of New Jersey’s Mercer and Somerset Counties were even more dogged in their resistance to the expressway during the 1970s. Worried that I-95 would bring undesirable development to pastoral Princeton, Hopewell, and Montgomery Townships, wealthy residents banded together to fight the planned highway. In 1983, plans for the final segment of I-95 were scrapped; the expressway, designed to run continuously from Maine to Florida, stopped in central New Jersey. Drivers heading north from Pennsylvania towards New York City were forced to turn onto I-295 south when I-95 ended near Lawrence Township, New Jersey. In 2010, work began on a new link between I-95 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Bucks County, which would allow drivers to bypass the interrupted section of I-95 in Mercer County. When completed, the project would finally provide an unbroken highway connection between Philadelphia and New York.

Opposition aside, I-95 ultimately became a vital connection between Philadelphia and its neighboring cities and suburbs. The construction of the highway helped accelerate growth in Bucks County, where the population grew by thirty percent from 1980 to 2012. Developers built sprawling suburbs on former farmland. New business parks sprung up near I-95 exits in Bensalem and Bristol, and by 2009, nearly 30,000 Philadelphia residents commuted out of the city daily to jobs in the area. Traffic on I-95 grew along with Bucks County. In 1989, 90,000 vehicles per day used the expressway in Pennsylvania. By 2010, the same stretch carried 136,000 cars and 19,000 trucks per day.

In the 2000s, I-95 came under criticism again—yet this time, its detractors were not neighborhood residents, but urbanists concerned with environmental and lifestyle issues. Many Philadelphia planners argued that covering or removing the expressway would restore waterfront access and create acres of new valuable real estate. Inga Saffron (b. 1957), architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, summed up planners’ views in 2007 when she wrote that “Interstate 95 must change. Simple as that… .Bury it. Narrow it. Put a deck over it. Just get it out of our sight.” The debate over the future of I-95 exposed the growing rift between car-dependent suburbanites and city residents who valued walkability and recreational amenities.

Dylan Gottlieb, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, works on recent American urban history. (Author information current at time of publication.)

A rising political star in Philadelphia politics who had served as managing director for Mayor William Green (b. 1938), Goode campaigned throughout Northeast Philadelphia in an effort to convince skeptical white voters that he would improve municipal services if elected mayor. Residents remained hostile to Goode’s candidacy, however, largely because of his race.  Shortly after his election, Frank “Hank” Salvatore (1922-2014), a Republican state representative from Far Northeast Philadelphia, submitted a bill to the Pennsylvania legislature proposing that Northeast Philadelphia secede from the city to become a separate entity to be known as Liberty County. Goode countered by working to establish an amicable relationship with business and civic organizations in the  Northeast and promising in 1984 to build “a mini-City Hall” there.  His efforts fell short, however, as Northeast city council representatives Joan Krajewski (1934-2013) and Brian O’Neill (b. 1949) remained skeptical of Goode’s intentions, eventually joining an emerging chorus of community activists who questioned whether the mayor could fulfill his promise to build a municipal services center.

In May 1985 relations between Goode and his Northeast constituents took a further turn for the worse.  Following the tragically botched effort to remove the Black nationalist and anarcho-primitivist group MOVE from Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia on May 13, Northeast residents began to speak fearfully of the possibility that Goode might similarly resort to dropping explosives on their neighborhoods if they failed to comply with his executive authority.  Even as the city launched a formal investigation into the mayor’s handling of the crisis, Hank Salvatore sought to capitalize on the mayor’s political misfortunes by demanding a concurrent state legislative inquiry about the mayor’s actions against MOVE and its compound. Not to be cowed, Goode rebuffed his white political and civic-minded critics and made good on his promise for a Northeast “mini-City Hall,” which opened at the Northeast Shopping Center at Roosevelt Boulevard and Welsh Road in September 1985.

Goode’s action failed to alter the situation and animus against him in the Northeast peaked just months later in July 1986 during a municipal services strike that left piles of trash strewn on neighborhood sidewalks. Residents blamed the mayor for failing to resolve the crisis. With cries for Salvatore’s secession proposal still festering, the emergence of former mayor and police commissioner Frank Rizzo (1920-91) as a candidate once again for mayor further aggravated relations with the city. Labeled by supporters as a “Great White Hope,” Rizzo stormed Northeast neighborhoods, where he assured supporters that he would significantly improve city services if elected.  By contrast, Goode, who had pledged color-blind governance in 1983, found little support in the Northeast during the 1987 campaign and increasingly courted African American voters in other parts of the city.  While Goode ultimately prevailed over Rizzo to gain reelection–winning a significant number of Black voters but losing by large margins in Northeast Philadelphia–he was left governing a city that had failed to expunge its racial demons.

Resentful of Goode’s continued presence as mayor, Salvatore rallied those who supported his secessionist stance one last time by openly threatening again in February 1988 to create a separate, suburban entity, Liberty County, through state legislation. His action drew praise from some Northeast residents, who called him a latter-day “Patrick Henry” who would save the Northeast from the perceived tyranny of “King Wilson I.” But his plan lacked the same widespread community support it had initially corralled during the mid-1980s. Liberty County became little more than a fantasy to its white supporters, who slowly left the city for better housing opportunities and municipal services in the nearby suburbs during the 1990s and early 2000s. Salvatore’s supporters periodically reproposed his Liberty County idea in local newspapers throughout the Northeast , but lacked sufficient political support in their communities to make it a viable initiative.

Matthew Smalarz teaches history at Manor College in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, where he serves as the History and Social Sciences Coordinator and received the Outstanding Educator of the Year Award for the 2016-2017 academic year. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The territorial dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania began immediately after King Charles II (1630-1685) gave William Penn (1644-1718) a charter to settle the lands between New York and Maryland in 1681. The charter set Pennsylvania’s southern boundary at the fortieth parallel, but the proprietors of both Maryland and Pennsylvania hoped to take advantage of the charter’s ambiguities. Pennsylvanians tried to push the boundary farther south and gain a port on the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay. Marylanders contended that because Philadelphia is below the fortieth parallel, the city should actually be in Maryland.

In 1732 the British Board of Trade set the boundary about fifteen miles south of Philadelphia, though attempts to survey this line were abortive. Colonists on both sides forced the issue by settling on disputed lands and these perceived incursions, many of which were instigated by Marylander Thomas Cresap (1702-90), led to violence. In 1750, commissioners from both colonies agreed to run a border according to the 1732 agreement and, after struggling to conduct an accurate survey in the early 1760s, asked England’s Astronomer Royal for help. He sent Mason and Dixon.

Mason and Dixon arrived in Philadelphia in November 1763 while Pennsylvania was caught up in a cycle of increasingly racialized atrocities between whites and Natives, including the Paxton Boys’ massacre. Using state-of-the-art astronomical apparatus, Mason and Dixon surveyed borders between Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. In 1767, with the help of Iroquois guides, Mason and Dixon tried to extend their line west of the Royal Proclamation Line, which British officials had created in 1763 to regulate the expansion of white colonists into Indian lands across the Appalachian Mountains. But the threat of violence from Delaware Indians, who were then disputing Pennsylvanians’ and Iroquois claims to their territory, forced the expedition to turn back. In 1784, astronomers Andrew Ellicott (1754-1820) and David Rittenhouse (1732-96) ran the boundary to its intended endpoint—five degrees west of the Delaware River.

During the antebellum era, Americans began to identify the Mason-Dixon Line as delineating the northern and southern sections of the United States. But the line was never a clear boundary between a world where slavery ruled and one where freedom rang. Various forms of free and coerced labor existed along both sides of the line and southern slave owners maintained the legal right to recover enslaved Blacks who fled north of the 39º43ˊ parallel. Although many whites in Maryland, Delaware, and even Philadelphia sought to preserve racial slavery, the proximity of the line and the freedom it promised to runaway slaves forced planters in Maryland and Delaware to experiment with a wide variety of labor regimes. By 1860, large landowners in Maryland and Delaware had become far less dependent on slave labor than those in the Lower South and, ultimately, unwilling to join the confederacy, a crucial factor in the North’s eventual victory. For many Americans, the line has remained the iconic boundary between Northern and Southern cultures.

Cameron B. Strang is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno. (Author information current at time of publication.)

When founding Pennsylvania, William Penn (1644-1718) followed long-established precedent by dividing his province into counties. As an ancient jurisdiction, the county had roots in the shires of England’s Saxon earls. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, the shires became known as counties. Over the following centuries they became the primary administrative subdivisions for a growing state, and then in the American colonies beginning in Virginia in the 1630s. Penn followed suit, creating Philadelphia, Bucks, and Chester Counties in 1682.

Over the course of the eighteenth century the Provincial Assembly and Pennsylvania State Legislature altered Philadelphia County’s borders as the colony expanded. As colonists who had migrated westward petitioned for local governments of their own, portions of Philadelphia were sliced off to form Berks (1752) and Montgomery (1784) Counties. By 1800 Philadelphia County’s boundaries had been fixed in a manner that roughly corresponded to the future city limits, running along the Delaware River from southwest to northeast and stretching over the Schuylkill River to the west.

Local government in early Philadelphia County took place at three levels. Incorporated municipalities enjoyed rights granted by the proprietor, much in the manner of self-governing English towns. Within the county, the two-square-mile city of Philadelphia (1691) and Germantown (1691) each benefited from these privileges, although Germantown lost its charter in 1707 after devout Quakers and Pietists proved reluctant to hold local offices on religious grounds. Between that point and the Revolution, only Southwark (1762), which stood just to the south of the city proper, secured incorporation. Beyond these self-governing municipalities, county government held sway, with Philadelphia city serving as the seat. As the county covered a large rural area, it was subdivided into townships–twelve in all by 1718–that took on administrative roles. In Blockley, Bristol, and Byberry, for instance, township constables performed many of the same duties as Philadelphia’s sheriff.

County Politics

County government played an important role in the lives of the colonists. Together with its townships, it built and maintained highways, provided for the poor, preserved the public peace, prosecuted and punished offenders, and impounded stray animals. Like a chartered corporation, Philadelphia County could hold property and could sue and be sued. As the most visible form of local government, moreover, it became a political battleground. Despite holding Pennsylvania as a feudal estate, Penn and his heirs soon had to grant the province a measure of self-rule, which extended to counties and townships. Thus while a few county officers were directly appointed, voters usually had at least some say. The proprietor, for instance, chose the county sheriff, but only from the two leading candidates at the polls. Because a far higher proportion of Philadelphia’s rural men than their urban counterparts met the property qualification for voting, participation in county politics was common, including service as directly elected officials included property assessors and tax collectors.

Colonial patterns persisted long after the proprietorship of the Penns. In the decades after American independence, growing parts of Philadelphia County sought incorporation as self-governing municipalities, a process that gathered pace in the Jacksonian era. Many of these municipalities, like Moyamensing and Kensington, stood on the edge of Philadelphia proper, separated from the city only by lines on the county map that were more imaginary than real. Others, notably Manayunk (1840) and a rechartered Germantown (1844), burgeoned as villages, miles from the growing metropolis. The vast majority of Philadelphia County remained rural, and in these areas county and township government appeared perfectly adequate, especially as more positions–including the sheriff from 1838–opened to direct election. County jurisdiction also extended into the incorporated municipalities. Residents of the city, districts, and boroughs voted for county officers and paid the county tax, which went toward the upkeep of highways, courts, bridges, and prisons; some of the biggest building schemes proposed around mid-century—including early plans for public buildings at the Broad and Market intersection—were county projects. Among such designs was Moyamensing’s imposing jail—designed by Thomas U. Walter (1804-1887), fourth architect of the U.S. Capitol building—which stood from 1835 until 1968.

Philadelphia’s “turbulent era,” however, exposed the limits of county government. Between 1828 and 1849 the city was wracked by riot after riot, including the anti-Catholic violence of 1844. Much of the trouble took place in the newly incorporated suburbs. Neither city nor suburbs maintained a modern police force prior to 1845, and when crowd action got out of hand, it usually fell on the sheriff, as traditional conservator of the peace, to restore control by raising a posse comitatus (“power of the county”). Although the sheriff’s powers were broad in theory (a judge in 1844 compared them to those of a dictator in the Roman Republic), they proved weak in practice. One Kensington strike in 1843 concluded with weavers turning on the sheriff, and a year later, after the posse proved unable to stop two major mobs, the county was placed under martial law. Attempts to improve the county’s response to rioting—notably an 1841 statute that made taxpayers liable for losses incurred during riots—had little impact, and instead citizens began to look to either the creation of a professional police force or the consolidation of the city and built-up districts into one municipal government.

As if to step into the vacuum created by the want of strong municipal authorities, the county became more assertive. In 1853, the County Commissioners tried to borrow $2 million to help fund a railroad to Lake Erie. Such actions, along with the money made in fees by county and township officers, drew censure from prominent citizens; one labeled the purchase of stock “the most flagrant act of injustice ever attempted.” Frustration at spendthrift officials swelled support for a consolidation, which, when it finally came in 1854, swallowed the entire county into the city.

Consolidation’s Far-Reaching Effects

The extension of the city’s boundaries to embrace the county’s vast rural environs went far beyond the designs of most consolidators. Opposition to consolidation came largely from rural townships, where the routine work of maintaining highways and providing for the poor seemed a world away from the complex administration of a big city. In the years leading up to the Civil War residents in the remote northeast petitioned the state legislature to break away from the city and either form a new county or merge with neighboring Bucks; such secessionist sentiment in Philadelphia’s northeast persisted late into the twentieth century. But in 1854 consolidators promised county landowners spectacular returns on their property, lower rates of taxation, and the maintenance of separate poor boards. The mixture of incentives and concessions tempered hostility to annexation.

With the 1854 charter, Philadelphians were not quite sure whether city and county had become one and the same—even the architect of the Consolidation Act expressed his doubts, and the city commissioners retained a degree of independence from councils and the mayor—but the new charter seemed to have done its work. The county board disappeared, as did the townships, except for the purpose of providing poor relief. County officials came under the city’s control, including the county commissioners, who oversaw elections and tax collection. The county continued to play a role in the justice system, but the cost of maintaining courthouses and prisons fell on the city. A single municipal treasury had authority to raise taxes and disburse funds for city and county purposes.

Yet in the late nineteenth century divisions between city and county began to reappear. The state constitution of 1874 made several offices—including commissioner and treasurer—county positions. Courts subsequently confirmed that these city officers under the Consolidation Act were constitutionally-protected county officials. To municipal reformers, such a seemingly academic distinction had serious political consequences. First, county officials could spend money of their own accord and then leave the bill with city government. This “mandamus evil,” as Progressive reformers called it, reminded residents of post-Civil War commissions that had similar powers to burden the municipal treasury. Second, elected county officials had access to a rich patronage pot and considerable income in the form of state-mandated fees. A new city charter in 1919 established a merit system for city employees, but as the county lay beyond its jurisdiction, jobs there could still go as political rewards. By the middle of the twentieth century, about a thousand county employees were excluded from Philadelphia’s civil service requirements. Long before then, however, county offices had become a boon to Republican bosses like Simon Cameron (1799-1899) and James McManes (1822-99).

Long Road to True Consolidation

The task of completing what one early twentieth-century critic called the city and county’s “half-hearted” consolidation preoccupied reformers from the Progressive era (c. 1890-1920) onward. The independent Bureau of Municipal Research, which acknowledged the “complicated and technical” relationship between the two governments, nonetheless argued in 1923 that the matter was “of sufficient importance to engage the attention of every citizen.” The bureau led the drive for “home rule”: a measure adopted in other states that gave cities the freedom to draw up their own charters without legislative interference. Calls for the consolidation of city and county offices accompanied the campaign. Given that the 1874 state constitution safeguarded county offices, this required a constitutional amendment, and a measure enabling such a reform failed in a 1937 referendum despite registering a large majority in Philadelphia.

In the post-World War II era reformers found friendlier terrain for consolidation. Democrats Joseph S. Clark (1901-90) and Richardson Dilworth (1898-1974) exposed swindling in the Republican city machine, and for once “corrupt and contented” Philadelphians responded. Civic organizations called for home rule and the merger of city and county functions. In 1951, they secured a home rule charter, and state voters approved an amendment allowing cities and counties to merge. By 1952, under the reform charter, the work of bringing county offices under city control was well underway.

Philadelphia’s first consolidation in 1854 had merged the territory of city and county; its second, almost a century later, brought their separate institutions together under unified control. The county “row offices,” though, did not disappear entirely. In 2017, the Sheriff, the City Commissioners, the Clerk of Quarter Sessions, and the Register of Wills remained a part of city government. Reformers saw them as expensive anachronisms. The Register of Wills, for instance, was just about the only part of the municipal apparatus exempt from Philadelphia’s civil service rules. Philadelphia County died as a unit of local government, but in pockets of City Hall its legacy lived on.

Andrew Heath is a Lecturer in American History at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. He is writing a book on the Consolidation of 1854.

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 created an imaginary line along the Appalachian Mountains that prohibited European settlement beyond the crest of the mountains, approximately two hundred miles west of Philadelphia. It thus established the region from the eastern seaboard to the mountains as the extent of British North America. In Pennsylvania the proclamation heightened racial, economic, and political tensions in the 1760s and early 1770s, thus contributing to the colonists’ discontent with ineffective British policies. Moreover, between its promulgation on October 7, 1763, and the start of the Revolutionary War, colonists and Native Americans disregarded the Proclamation Line, thus exposing the limitations of British imperial control.

When Britain obtained lands west of the Appalachians from France as a result of the Treaty of Paris (1763), which ended the Seven Years’ War (1754-63), British officials needed to reestablish imperial authority over existing British subjects and bring the peoples who resided within these lands—both French and Indian—under imperial control. Administrators in England thus devised the Proclamation Line, which essentially cut off eastern Pennsylvania from the western part of the colony and reinforced politically the Appalachian Mountains as a natural barrier to colonial expansion into the Ohio River Valley. King George III (1738-1820) issued the proclamation, written by members of the British Board of Trade, that aimed to dictate the pace and locations of colonial expansion, endorsed the separation of natives and colonists, and sought to reap economic benefits from the territories east of the Mississippi River.

In Pennsylvania, the proclamation indirectly intensified racial hatred and cultural conflicts when Native Americans rejected British pretensions to rule in the trans-Appalachian west. In a series of spiritually charged battles known as Pontiac’s War (beginning in 1763 after the Treaty of Paris), Native Americans attacked British forts in the region from what later became Michigan through western Pennsylvania. Delaware and Shawnee Indians raided colonial settlements between the Proclamation Line and Susquehanna River Valley. In response, frontier colonists, blaming the provincial government for lack of military assistance, indiscriminately attacked local Indians. The so-called Paxton Boys murdered peaceful groups of Conestogas at Conestoga Manor and Lancaster in December 1763 then marched on Philadelphia in the attempt to attack Christian Moravian Indians who came under the provincial government’s protection. These events set aggrieved Scots-Irish and German frontiersmen against the government and pacifist Quakers, challenging their political power in Pennsylvania.

The imaginary line also frustrated Pennsylvania land speculators. In the mid-1760s, traders such as George Croghan (c. 1718-82) insisted that economic losses sustained during the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s War entitled them to western lands. In the early 1770s, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) and associates sent a petition to the Board of Trade that provided rationalization for opening of lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains for Pennsylvanian settlement through the erection of new colonies. Speculators argued that colonists from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania had already ignored the boundary line and that the lack of political, social, and economic connections between Pennsylvania and its frontier limited the commercial value of the Indian trade and the extension of British authority.
For Revolutionary Americans, the Proclamation of 1763 was a highly contentious document that pitted colonists against Indians, frontiersmen against the Pennsylvania government, and merchants, traders, and speculators against the imperial government. While the proclamation was meant to increase imperial authority over the colonies, it actually increased colonial discontent with British policies and demonstrated to both colonists and Native Americans the lack of imperial control over eastern North America.

Austin Stewart is working on his Ph.D. in American history at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Native inhabitants had been camping and fishing on the banks of the Schuylkill for as much as fourteen thousand years before the first Europeans arrived in the seventeenth century. The area was first settled by the Unalachtigo subtribe of the Lenape or “original people” who settled in bands along the rivers and creeks of southeastern Pennsylvania. They referred to the river as Ganshowahanna, meaning “Falling Water” or Manayunk, which meant “where we drink.” A navigator, Arendt Corrsen (?-1645) of the Dutch West India Company, gave the river its modern name in 1628, when he became the first European to navigate it. Translated as “hidden river,” the name is thought to refer to the location of its mouth, obscured from the Delaware River by League Island, later the site of the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. In 1633, Corrsen was appointed commissary and instructed by the company to acquire land on the river for a plantation and trading post. He purchased a tract known as “Armenveruis” from the Lenape, and in the same year, the Dutch erected Fort Beversre[e]de on the site. This fortification stood until about 1651 near the confluence of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers near where the Platt Bridge was later erected.

Even as European settlement proliferated, the Lenape maintained settlements along the river, including Nittabakonck (“place which is easy to get to”), a village located where the Schuylkill meets the Delaware River. It was this area where William Penn (1644-1718) chose to lay out Philadelphia. Granted a charter to settle the area from Charles II (1630-85) of England as partial repayment of a debt, Penn nonetheless chose to buy the area from the Lenape to ensure peace for the colony. Selected with an eye to tapping the rich agricultural hinterland to assure the city’s growth, the site relied on its rivers for supplies of food and lumber that could be floated to the city when water was high enough—usually the spring.

Many streams flowed into the Schuylkill, including the Wissahickon, Plymouth, Sandy Run, Skippack, Pennypack, and Perkiomen Creeks, prompting the construction of dams and mills to produce grain, lumber, oil, paper, and powder and enhance trade. The presence of natural rapids, however, presented obstacles to boats. After several failed attempts in the 1780s and 1790s to fund improvements that would make the rapid-filled Schuylkill navigable, Philadelphia businessmen finally convinced the Pennsylvania legislature in 1815 to approve the charter of the Schuylkill Navigation Company to construct a slack water navigation system of canals, dams, and pools between Philadelphia and Pottsville to the northwest in Schuylkill County. Despite setbacks in funding and the death of the chief engineer, the system opened to navigation in 1824, and with an extension to Port Carbon four years later it generated the shipment of newly discovered riches of anthracite coal. Although supporters of the new system envisioned it primarily as a means of securing the flow of natural products to Philadelphia, especially grain (which local businessmen feared might otherwise be sent to Baltimore by way of the Susquehanna River), coal quickly dominated the business.

Industry Expands Along the River

By the 1840s, the transport of coal had shifted to rail, further enhancing development throughout the Schuylkill River valley. The shift could be seen in Reading, the county seat of Berks County. Boosted not just by the Schuylkill Canal but also the completion in 1828 of the east-west Union Canal connecting the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Rivers, the town of Reading continued to grow following incorporation of the Reading and Philadelphia Railroad in 1833. Farther south, Phoenixville, located at the junction of the Schuylkill and French Creek, utilized the Chester County Canal, completed in 1828, and the Reading Railroad to gain easier access to raw materials and more efficient transportation of finished products from iron works that had their origin at the onset of the nineteenth century. More generally, from 1820 to the 1860s iron works, foundries, manufacturing mills, blast furnaces, rolling mills, railroads, warehouses, and train stations sprang up throughout the Schuylkill Valley. Tiny farm villages grew into vibrant company towns, then transitioned into small cities as major industry and supporting businesses transformed local economics and populations swelled. By 1857 more than a million tons of freight moved each year through the valley’s diversified transportation system.

Within Philadelphia County industry concentrated along the river’s east bank. The effect of shifting energy regimes could be seen most notably in Manayunk—originally called Flat Rock Bridge—where by 1828 there were as many as ten textile mills powered by water backed up by a dam at the Schuylkill and directed through a two-mile canal constructed by the Schuylkill Navigation Company. The introduction of industrial capitalism undercut the dominance of flour milling as it had flourished for almost a century along the nearby Wissahickon Creek and prompted such popular designations of Manayunk as the “Lowell of Pennsylvania” and the “Manchester of America.”

Even in the early years of Philadelphia’s commercial growth, officials grew concerned about assuring pure water for its residents. In 1799, the city established a watering committee and selected the Schuylkill as the city’s primary water source. As the city quickly outgrew a pumping station located in Centre Square at the heart of the old city, it directed city engineer Frederick Graff (1775-1847) to supervise construction of a water works at Fairmount, the prominent hill located on the Schuylkill’s east bank just north of the original city boundary. There engines would pump water from the river to a reservoir at the top of the hill, where it was distributed by a system of pipes to city subscribers. When steam engines proved costly and dangerous to operate, the watering committee converted the system to waterpower, assisted by construction of a dam at the Falls of the Schuylkill. Located where the river descends from the elevation of the Pennsylvania Piedmont to the low-lying Atlantic Coastal Plain, the area had long been the most famous natural attraction in the vicinity of Philadelphia. Not surprisingly, the area attracted the interest of Philadelphia’s wealthiest residents, who built country retreats free of the crowds, heat, and disease associated with the city.  Construction of the dam at that location created a quiet pool upstream, ideal for rowing and skating. For the villas on the east bank of the river, however, the change brought swamp conditions and flooded meadowlands that reduced the attractiveness of country living. As conditions worsened, the city, in a further effort to protect the purity of the water, began buying up those estates, turning their properties into parkland. Boosted by state legislation in the 1860s, Philadelphia’ expansive Fairmount Park took form on both sides of the Schuylkill in the following years.

Dredging Near Girard Point

Most of the commercial traffic on the Schuylkill River plied the portion between Center City and its mouth because navigation farther north was impeded by the dam at the falls. Following the Civil War a series of wharves and docks went up on the river west of Center City to accommodate ships and barges transporting cargo including coal, ice, lumber, and stone. This increased commercial traffic prompted the United States Army Corps of Engineers to plan river improvements near the Schuylkill’s mouth. In 1875 and 1876 dredging took place in the channel near Girard Point, adjacent to what became known as the Penrose Ferry Bridge and near Gibson’s Point. This portion of the river was used to ship over 10.8 million bushels of grain to foreign ports.

The Pennsylvania Railroad recognized the economic advantages of Philadelphia’s wharves for the import and export of grains including wheat, oats, and corn. Among the elevators constructed to sustain this trade, the largest was the International Navigation Company of Philadelphia’s 650,000-bushel Girard Point elevator erected in 1874 near the junction of the Schuylkill and the Delaware Rivers. Other industrial facilities taking advantage of a Schuylkill River location included the Atlantic Refining Company, established at the end of Passyunk Avenue in Point Breeze in 1860. It marked the advent of an influx of petroleum refineries into South Philadelphia. Initially established as a storage facility, by the 1880s it had become one of the largest refineries in the United States.

The transformation of land on both sides of the Schuylkill River from rural estates and farms to industrial and intensive-level residential use had direct consequences for the health of the river. As the Philadelphia region grew and its industries expanded, the Schuylkill’s pollution increased. The headwaters contributed the effluent from mine drainage and coal silt, and the lower sections were plagued with the waste of a large and growing population. According to the city engineer’s report for 1866, “Below Manayunk, the river assumes a dark, dirty, milky appearance, and is covered with soiled waste and shreds from shoddy mills … There is no doubt that a constant deterioration in quality is going on, which, if not arrested, will ultimately force the city to abandon the Schuylkill as a source of supply, if the time to do so has not already arrived.”

Problems worsened in the early twentieth century. As anthracite coal production peaked, large amounts of coal washing wastewater and coal silt discharged into nearby streams. To this were added sewer deposits described in a study by the Philadelphia Bureau of Engineers in 1913 as polluting the entire length through the city, to the point of preventing development along its banks either for pleasure or business. By 1927 the Army Corps of Engineers estimated that the Schuylkill River and its tributaries contained thirty-eight million tons of coal waste.

Clean Streams Act of 1937

Civic leader John Frederick Lewis (1860-1932) captured the sense of dismay shared by many residents in a 1924 illustrated address presented at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania published the same year. “Scores of cities with but a fraction of Philadelphia population, a tithe of her wealth, and a vastly larger per capita debt,” he charged, “might be cited as having recognized the wisdom of waterfront reclamation {and} sewage disposal by other means than by fouling their most valuable asset. Why should Philadelphia not do likewise?” The situation began to change when the Pennsylvania legislature unanimously passed the Clean Streams Act in 1937. A decade later Governor James H. Duff (1883-1969) directed a massive cleanup effort resulting in the excavation of twenty-three impounding basins along the river to receive dredged silt. In 1978 the Pennsylvania legislature responded to appeals from the Schuylkill River Greenway Association founded four years earlier, by designating the Schuylkill the state’s first Scenic River.

Restoration of the river accelerated at the turn of the twenty-first century. Building on the state’s designation of the Schuylkill as a Scenic River, advocates along the river corridor succeeded in 2000 in securing formation of the Schuylkill Greenways National Heritage Area and associated Greenways River Trail along the 128-mile corridor of the Schuylkill Valley with a commitment to repair environmental damage to the river and its surroundings. A 2003 report to the Schuylkill River Development Corporation on the state of the Schuylkill watershed brought together twenty-five nonprofit organizations with state and local agencies to pledge cooperation in addressing needs for clean water impacted by both population gains and losses along the Schuylkill’s tributaries. As a signature project, the organization launched Schuylkill Banks Park, a strip of parkland along the east bank of the river extending from the foot of Fairmount below the waterworks and south into the central city with an eventual destination of the Delaware River. Other organizations devoted to environmental stewardship of the river included the Delaware Riverkeepers Network, the Schuylkill River Greenway Association, the Schuylkill Highlands Conservation Landscape Initiative, the Middle Schuylkill River Conservation Landscape Initiative, the Lower Schuylkill River Conservation Landscape Initiative, the Schuylkill Action Network, the Phoenixville Iron Canal and Trails Association, and the Headwaters Association.

As much as was accomplished to boost the Schuylkill as a recreational asset, its industrial character, and the hazards it represented, were manifest in 2019 when a devastating explosion erupted at the former Atlantic Refinery site. While government and civic leaders sought to secure new environmentally safe uses for the property as the company entered bankruptcy, the costs of remediation and repurposing land under private ownership remained an obstacle, even as nearby residents struggled to secure compensation for damage to their health.

Over many years river area residents sought balance between beauty and production, serenity and empire.  A longtime source of recreation, the Schuylkill’s mixed legacy was well captured by artist Thomas Eakins (1844-1916). A rower himself, Eakins captured the serene presence of rowers on the river never distant, however, from the emblems of industry located nearby. The modern effort to balance industry with nature was the reclamation of tidewater gardens at Southwest Philadelphia’s Schuylkill border. There, at the oldest surviving botanical garden in North America, Bartram’s Garden, founded in 1728 by botanist John Bartram (1699-1777), modern programs introduced area residents to the natural features of the river and the importance of their conservation. With industrial activity never far away from this spot, it served in the twenty-first century as a prime vantage point for encountering the river’s mixed heritage. Coincidentally the City Parks Association revisited John Frederick Lewis’s Redemption of the Lower Schuylkill with a similarly-named exhibit. Clearly, conservationists still had work to do. Yet even after centuries of development along the river’s banks, forests regrew to cover about 41 percent of the basin, representing important areas for recreation and wildlife. Agriculture still occupied 40 percent of the acreage while developed lands represented about 13 percent. Surface and groundwater resources in the basin continued to provide drinking water for more than three million people.

Howard Gillette is Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers-Camden and Co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. This essay incorporates information gathered and compiled by Douglas McVarish, Principal, West Jersey Historical Research. (Author information current at time of publication.)

South Street (then known as Cedar Street) formed the original southern boundary of William Penn’s 1682 plan for Philadelphia. In the eighteenth century, it was a liminal space between an increasingly cosmopolitan central city and rural townships to the south. Farmers came to hawk their wares at the New Market, which stood on today’s Headhouse Square at Second and South Streets. Southwark Theatre—Philadelphia’s first—was built on the southern side of the street, since Quaker doctrine forbade live performances within Philadelphia proper. Indeed, over the next three hundred years, South Street would continue to attract those who sought to live beyond the reach of Quaker-influenced city governance.

By the early 1800s, South Street was becoming the epicenter of the city’s Black community. Freed slaves clustered near the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church—the first AME church in America—just north of South Street. After emancipation, Philadelphia’s Black community grew steadily as migrants came north, boosting its numbers from 31,699 in 1870 to 84,459 by 1910. With that growth, Black settlement extended westward to the Schuylkill River along the South Street corridor. Sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) documented life in this densely packed neighborhood in his seminal 1899 study, The Philadelphia Negro. Meanwhile, the western blocks of South Street became a bustling African American shopping and entertainment strip. Black-owned restaurants were especially numerous. Walking down South Street, a recently arrived migrant from North Carolina remembered being met with strange and wonderful odors, the smell of coffee mingling with “spices and the strange, dank odor of the river.”

Wave of European Immigration

Beginning in the 1830s, African Americans were joined by an increasing number of European immigrants. Droves of Irish came to the area in search of work on the waterfront. In the 1870s, the Pennsylvania Railroad built the Washington Avenue Immigration Station on a pier just south of South Street. Over the next forty-five years, hundreds of thousands of Italians, Poles, and eastern European Jews streamed through the station. Between 1870 and 1910, the number of Philadelphia’s Russian-born Jews rose from fewer than 100 to nearly 91,000. Arrivals listing Italian origins skyrocketed from 500 to 45,000. Many of those immigrants settled just north of the Immigration Station in row houses on or near South Street itself.

By the early twentieth century, South Street had evolved into a commercial corridor with multiple identities. The Shambles, an open-air food market, bustled just north of Second and South Streets. Garment workshops, warehouses, and stores dominated South Street’s eastern stretch, from the Delaware River to Sixth Street, along with adjacent Fabric Row on Fourth Street. These Jewish-owned shops were a less-expensive alternative to Center City’s department stores, and South Street bustled with shoppers looking for bargains. West of Broad Street, the area around South Street was populated by African Americans—some pushed westward by waves of European immigration, others recent migrants from the South. From 1900 to 1920, the number of Blacks living on the blocks around western South Street rose from 9,000 to 12,241. In this area, African American restaurants, churches, and cabarets thrived. In the 1910s, several Black-owned theaters opened on the western stretch of South Street. In the 1920s, Gibson’s Standard Theater hosted famous performers like the vaudeville entertainer Billy Higgins (1888-1937).

In the decades that followed, South Street’s reputation for commerce and entertainment only grew. In 1963, the R&B group The Orlons christened South Street the “hippest street in town,” an homage to the Black hipsters who flocked to South Street’s nightclubs and cruised their cars up and down the strip. Throughout this era, popular novels like William Gardner Smith’s South Street (1954) depicted it as a contact zone—a place where different ethnicities and social classes interacted. South Street was the space where the black community rubbed up against white ethnics and where the working and middle classes met. All of that intermingling translated into excitement. As one of Smith’s characters remarked, “There was life in the air of South Street.”

The Expressway Threat

At the same time, however, South Street was beginning to experience the forces that contributed to its mid-century decline. The biggest blow came with the city’s announcement in the 1950s that it planned to bulldoze South Street and neighboring Bainbridge Street to make way for the eight-lane Crosstown Expressway. Real estate values along South Street plummeted. Vacancy rates soared as businesses and homeowners fled to other commercial districts. After years of traffic studies and funding delays, in 1966 the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation notified South Street’s remaining residents—many of whom were Black and impoverished—that their houses would finally be razed. In response, African American neighborhood leaders George T. Dukes (1931-2008) and Alice Liscomb (1916-2003) mobilized to oppose the planned highway, forming the Citizens Committee to Preserve and Develop the Crosstown Community.

Meanwhile, South Street’s eastern blocks were undergoing a limited revival. In 1964, the avant-garde Theatre of the Living Arts (TLA) opened on the 300 block of South Street. The TLA was an immediate hit. From 1964 to 1969, it sold over 250,000 tickets. The TLA also became a magnet for artists and elements of a burgeoning counterculture as they settled on nearby blocks to give South Street a bohemian air. As galleries and cafes began to spring up around the TLA, South Street was once again becoming a locus of creative energy—an entertainment destination for consumers from all over the region.

In the late 1960s, new residents joined with the existing community to continue fighting the planned Crosstown Expressway. In 1968, this coalition asked the architectural firm of Venturi and Rauch to conduct a study that would demonstrate South Street’s enduring vitality. Denise Scott Brown (b. 1931), the study’s lead author, argued that the city should preserve South Street’s valuable mix of low-cost shops and vernacular architecture. In 1970, a city-hired consultant agreed: The expressway no longer made fiscal or architectural sense. While various planners tried to revive the expressway during the 1970s, it met continued (and ultimately successful) resistance from neighborhood residents.

The Residents Prevail

As the threat of the expressway faded during the 1970s, South Street’s eastern half grew into a lively commercial district. Hip restaurants like the Black Banana and Lickety Split joined feminist bookstores, natural foods stores, and a growing number of galleries. South Street also began to attract many gays and lesbians. In 1973, Giovanni’s Room bookstore opened at 232 South Street. The shop became a center for Philadelphia’s gay community, hosting poetry readings and community meetings.

South Street’s resurgence accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s as newspapers and magazines broadcast the allure of the South Street scene to a broader metropolitan readership. Weekend arts festivals and outdoor concerts drew visitors from all over Greater Philadelphia. The Odunde Festival, a celebration of African and African American culture, was held yearly on the western blocks of South Street. Upscale businesses that catered to increasingly wealthy residents of Bella Vista and Queen Village (neighborhoods to the immediate south of South Street) sprung up. They were joined by edgier storefronts—tattoo parlors, punk-themed record stores, and sex shops—that catered to a youth market. As in decades past, South Street emerged as a heterogeneous commercial corridor, its sidewalks thronged with a diverse range of shoppers.

In the early 2010s, however, the tenuous racial peace that had reigned on South Street was threatened. Hundreds of teenagers, many of them Black, massed on South Street in what city officials called “flash mobs.” There were reports of violence and vandalism; police arrested a handful of youths and enacted a strict curfew. Some media outlets blamed the incidents on social networking, others on poverty and disaffection. Still others claimed that they were simply organized dance parties. Whatever the case, the so-called “flash mobs” demonstrated that racialized fears lurked under South Street’s veneer of diversity. As the western strip of South Street rapidly gentrified in the 2010s—transitioning from majority-Black to majority-white in just a few years—it remained to be seen if the street could retain the peaceable cosmopolitanism that had been its hallmark.

Dylan Gottlieb is a Ph.D. student at Princeton University, where he works on recent American urban history. His latest publication is “ ‘Closer to Heaven’: Race and Diversity in Suburban America,” which was published in the Journal of Urban History. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Land was the most valuable commodity in the Delaware Valley during the colonial period, and it had to be surveyed before it could be granted or transferred. In Pennsylvania, William Penn (1644–1718) relied upon surveyors to measure and map his new lands. Colonial surveyors established tract, manor, township, and county boundaries, laid out city streets and lots, determined borders between Pennsylvania and neighboring provinces, located the likeliest routes for roads connecting the hinterland, and established inland navigation routes and mill sites. West Jersey’s proprietors similarly relied on surveyors. Employing techniques and instruments developed in England, Ireland, and Scotland during the great enclosure movement, colonial surveyors imposed European notions of order on the Delaware Valley.

In both Pennsylvania and West Jersey, the authority to produce official surveys rested with the appointed surveyor-general, a prestigious and influential post that included a seat on the Provincial Council. Thomas Holme (1624–95), Pennsylvania’s first surveyor-general, arrived from England in 1682 as part of a commission of four who sited and surveyed Philadelphia ahead of William Penn’s arrival. Holme produced the first two maps in Pennsylvania, A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia in the Province of Pennsylvania in America (1682) and A Map of the Improved Part of the Province of Pennsilvania in America (1687). Pennsylvania’s modern boundaries were not officially fully surveyed until 1792. The extent of the work performed in the interim can be gauged by comparing Holme’s maps with that of Reading Howell (1743–1827), A Map of the State of Pennsylvania (1792), which represented the culmination of eleven decades of painstaking surveys performed by hundreds of men, occasionally under adverse physical and social conditions.

Every land patent in the greater Delaware Valley was contingent on an official survey return. When the provincial land-granting apparatus issued a parcel of land to a developer it also issued a concomitant “warrant to survey,” which directed the surveyor-general to survey and lay out the tract. The surveyor-general then deputized one of an estimated one hundred and fifty surveyors active throughout the Delaware Valley during the colonial period to perform the work. Beginning in 1700 and mirroring bureaucratic trends throughout the mid-Atlantic colonies, deputies working in Pennsylvania were required to post a bond and take an oath of office as a guarantee of their skill and honesty. With the survey return in hand, the surveyor-general checked the work for accuracy and attempted to ensure the new patent did not conflict with existing property claims. In theory, Delaware Valley surveyors were a tightly controlled cohort, but the practice of performing unofficial surveys on behalf of unpatented property holders by undeputized surveyors became increasingly common by the last years of the colonial period.

Surveying was a respected skill in colonial society, and surveyors served as vital links between local communities and the provincial government. Surveying was a seasonal task and a skill that contributed to the livelihood of men who were also farmers, millers, craftsmen, or petty regional bureaucrats. Delaware Valley surveyors drew on English methods and learned as apprentices under fathers or uncles or were taught by private instructors. After 1755, the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania) also taught surveying theory. Many surveyors were self-taught, despite the range of skills required. Two of the most trusted manuals used by local surveyors were Geodaesia: or the Art of Surveying and Measuring of Land Made Easie (twelve editions; 1688–1793) by John Love  and The Practical Surveyor, or the Art of Land Measuring Made Easy (five editions through 1764) by Samuel Wyld.

Surveying required knowledge of basic geometry, and surveyors learned to see land as a linear jigsaw puzzle. When preparing a survey return, they constructed perpendiculars, proportionally divided lines, and reduced irregular polygons into triangles. These skills, coupled with basic arithmetic, allowed them to adjust field measurements to account for the curvature of the earth, calculate the area of irregular shapes and ovals, discover elevation, divide a piece of land several ways, and scale surveys to fit a map. Elite surveyors such as Andrew Ellicott (1754–1820), who worked on Pennsylvania’s boundary surveys, paired these skills with observations of the stars to find a meridian line, calculate latitude, and find the altitude and zenith of any star in the sky.

Before 1750, there were few local instrument makers, and surveyors relied on English manufacturers for their tools, which included the magnetic compass, circumferentor, theodolite, Gunter’s chain, level, and plane table. A competent surveyor maintained and repaired his instruments as needed, however, inaccurate compasses and damaged or stretched chains remained a common source of error throughout the colonial period. The most important drafting instruments were the protractor, plain and diagonal scales, and the trigonometric table. The surveyor-general checked all his deputies’ work for accuracy and took half the surveying fee. With the remainder, the deputy paid himself and his crew, which could be as large as a half-dozen men on extensive surveys. Surveyors did not get rich surveying; over the course of a summer season a busy surveyor made about one-tenth the annual income of a successful lawyer. However, they did command invaluable intelligence about frontier landscapes, an asset that several prominent deputies were able to parlay into social status.

Despite their important role in colonial society, Delaware Valley surveyors were routinely unable or unwilling to meet the exacting or unethical expectations of their patrons. Colonists demonstrated a willingness to forge survey warrants, bribe chain carriers and surveyors, and issue death threats in order to acquire, protect, or enlarge their claims to patented land. When in the field, surveyors also faced unpredictable weather, hostile Natives, recalcitrant squatters, and technical difficulties as routine challenges in the production of accurate survey returns.

While the Delaware Valley did not witness unrest on the scale of the land riots in New York or East Jersey, conflict was common in the Susquehanna Valley and many boundaries between adjacent tracts and provinces were left unresolved. Conflicting land titles issued from competing sovereigns were a recurring source of social unrest throughout the mid-Atlantic during the colonial period. In the lower Susquehanna, Cresap’s War broke out in the 1730s along Pennsylvania and Maryland’s disputed border. The inability of colonial surveyors to accurately survey long meridian lines led Thomas Penn (1702–75) and Lord Baltimore (1731–71) to turn to the London Board of Trade to settle the contested boundary between their colonies. The board turned to the Royal Philosophical Society, which appointed leading English surveyors Charles Mason (1728–86) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–79), who successfully surveyed what became known as the Mason-Dixon Line. Elsewhere, along the North Branch of the Susquehanna, Yankees claiming title under Connecticut’s charter organized as the Susquehanna Company in the 1760s and violently competed with Pennsylvania settlers for choice bottomlands.

In terms of technique, the magnetic variation from true north posed the greatest challenge to colonial surveyors. Compass needles pointed to magnetic north, a target that moved substantially during the colonial period and at times and places differed from true north by as much as eight degrees. New Jersey surveyor-general James Alexander (1691–1756) identified the problem and its potential to lead to disputes and social unrest as early as the 1740s. During the late colonial period, surveyors practiced several unreliable or difficult schemes to find true north. Under the leadership of David Rittenhouse (1732–96), the American Philosophical Society led the effort to devise a practical method of discovery, which led to the development of the Vernier compass in the early 1780s. Andrew Ellicott worked closely with Rittenhouse on several surveys, including of the  commonwealth’s northern and western boundaries, and his experience made him a national authority on finding true north. He shared his expertise by publishing Several Methods by which Meridional Lines may be found with Ease and Accuracy (1796).

Many of the social and technical challenges that perturbed the Delaware Valley’s colonial surveyors were removed by 1800. The Native American frontier moved into central and western Pennsylvania, where enormous tracts were laid out using the new grid system pioneered by the federal land survey. New techniques and the larger scale of surveys marked the early national period as a new era in the history of surveying. But these new methods built upon the work of the Delaware Valley’s colonial surveyors, who, working in the midst of a deeply contested landscape and without a reliable method of determining a standard reference point, inscribed a European sense of order into the land.

Michael Pospishil is a Ph.D. candidate in the Hagley Program of Capitalism, Technology, and Culture at the University of Delaware. His dissertation explores the role of mid-Atlantic surveyors in cultivating a sense of order during and after the American Revolution. (Author information current at time of publication.)