Philadelphia’s connections with the Atlantic predated William Penn’s founding of the city in 1682. Imperial rivalries among European powers in the seventeenth century made the Delaware Valley a site of colonization, conflict, and diplomatic wrangling. In 1638, the powerful Swedish monarchy established the colony of New Sweden in the area that later became portions of Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. The colony survived until 1655, at which point the Dutch Republic conquered it and incorporated New Sweden into New Netherland. Less than ten years later, in 1664, the English took over New Netherland (renaming New Amsterdam as New York in the process), although the Dutch recaptured the colony during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-74). The Treaty of Westminster (1674) relinquished New Netherland to the English. Such contests among European monarchies and republics gave the Delaware Valley a cosmopolitan hue. Before Penn arrived, Lenape people lived alongside Swedes, Dutch, Finns, and Germans; enslaved African people have been documented around the Delaware region from 1639.

Within a few decades of the city’s founding, Philadelphia had become a bustling port city and a center of transoceanic trade. Commercial networks bound Philadelphia to the Atlantic World. By the 1750s, Philadelphia had outgrown Boston to become the busiest port in British America. Its shipping carried flaxseed exports to Ireland and sugar grown by enslaved people in the Caribbean for refining along the Delaware waterfront. Philadelphia, in other words, quickly became integrated into the dense web of connections stretching across the Atlantic and beyond. From the beginning, pirates took advantage of these connections as they preyed on vessels. William Penn discovered to his dismay in a 1699 visit to his city that pirates thrived in Philadelphia, where they received significant support from some of the city’s well-to-do residents and royal officials, and from whence they ventured to target Muslim pilgrims in the Indian Ocean.

Religious Freedom, Economic Opportunity

Transatlantic migration peopled early Philadelphia and its surroundings. Irish, English, Welsh, and German Quakers accompanied Penn across the ocean, drawn—like other dissenting groups—by Penn’s promise of the religious freedom denied to them in the Old World. Other newcomers in the eighteenth century, frequently from the British Isles and Germany, flocked to the rich agricultural land to the west of the city. Their small farms offered better economic opportunities than could be found in Europe, giving the region a reputation as “the best poor man’s country.”

But that land belonged to other people and, consequently, European immigration to the Delaware Valley assumed a settler colonial character marked by diplomacy and conflict. Negotiations between Lenape people and Europeans in Greater Philadelphia became an important, if much mythologized, part of the early history of the region. Some Native Americans appear to have preferred dealing with pacific Quakers and established productive relationships with them. At least in the beginning, Penn and Quakers seemed to negotiate in good faith. However, as time passed, more and more Europeans arrived in the region, eyed Native American lands covetously, and plotted to appropriate further territory for themselves. By the mid-eighteenth century, Scots Irish settler colonials to the west of Philadelphia blamed the colony’s Quakers for checking further conquest. In 1763, a marauding band known as the Paxton Boys massacred the residents of a Susquehannock settlement in Lancaster County that had been on good terms with the colony. Such instances reveal how voluntary European migration across the Atlantic led to the violent expropriation of the region’s Native peoples.

Not all passages across the ocean, though, were voluntary. Indentured servitude and African enslavement—the first a temporary form of unfree labor, the second a permanent one—also crossed the Atlantic. Some European immigrants could pay their fare, but those who could not traded up to seven years of their future labor for passage to the Americas. Conditions indentured servants experienced varied wildly across different times and places, but most did not have easy lives. The German schoolmaster Gottlieb Mittelberger sought to discourage such emigration from his homeland. His Journey to Pennsylvania (1756), based on his voyage from Rotterdam to Philadelphia and his subsequent sojourn in Lancaster County, did not pull any punches about the misery and exploitation that indentured servants and other immigrants often faced.

Trafficked African people, assigned by their captors with the inheritable status of enslavement, also arrived in Philadelphia, sometimes on ships outfitted in the city. In the early years of the colony most came from the Caribbean. However, when that supply became more fraught, as it did during Seven Years’ War, Philadelphian traffickers turned to direct importation from Africa. At the beginning of the American Revolution, Philadelphia contained roughly seven hundred enslaved people, who brought with them elements of African and Caribbean culture like pepper pot soup. Philadelphia and its hinterland—where enslavers held over two thousand more people as property—never developed the export-oriented plantation economy that flourished in Virginia, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. That said, enslaved people served in households, craft industries, and aboard ships. Furthermore, Philadelphians who did not enslave people themselves often purchased the products of enslaved labor, invested in slaving voyages, and facilitated the buying and selling of their fellow human beings.

Clashes Abroad Reverberate in Philadelphia

A region scarred by Black enslavement became a cradle of white liberty over the middle decades of the eighteenth century. As the foremost port in British North America, Philadelphia played a critical role during the Seven Years’ War, the Imperial Crisis, and the American Revolution. Each of these upheavals had Atlantic origins and ramifications. The struggle between Great Britain and France in Europe reverberated in the Americas. Similarly, events that occurred in the Americas, like George Washington’s military encounter with Joseph Coulon de Jumonville in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, rippled across the Atlantic as well. For Philadelphians, the backdrop of conflict among great powers intensified existing transatlantic connections and created opportunities for new ones. Benjamin Franklin spent considerable time in Great Britain in the 1760s and 1770s trying to prevent war between Great Britain and the thirteen colonies, as well as securing jobs for his friends and associates. Franklin had long been an Atlantic celebrity and his growing disillusionment with Great Britain represented the fraying political and intellectual links between Parliament and its American possessions.

Over these years Philadelphia and its surrounding region became a key battleground in the age of Atlantic Revolutions. Between 1770 and 1833, violent upheavals transformed France, Haiti, and vast colonized regions of North and South America into republics. In 1776 the Second Continental Congress, composed of delegates who were often born and educated in Europe, met in Philadelphia to sign the foundational document of the new United States. The Declaration of Independence reverberated across the ocean and reflected the influence of transatlantic thought. Its authors presented facts to the candid world and addressed a much broader audience than the residents of the thirteen colonies. The draft of Thomas Jefferson also revealed the western drift of Enlightenment ideas. He adapted, for instance, the claim of the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke that men had the right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property.” But the declaration, and the new republic it announced, were also shaped by Atlantic World slavery. As scholars have demonstrated, ideas about white freedom and liberty developed in tandem with racialized ideas about Black enslavement and submissiveness. Jefferson’s initial draft of the declaration placed the onus for slavery solely on Great Britain. From London, it prompted the lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson to wonder why the loudest cries for liberty emanated from the mouths of enslavers.

The Imperial Crisis and the American Revolution severed links to Britain. For some in the Delaware Valley the divorce proved hard to imagine. By no means did all residents in the region flock to the Patriot cause, and “Loyalists” who wanted to maintain relations with the mother country could be found among both the economic elite and ordinary people. The Delaware Valley’s Atlantic merchants confronted a difficult dilemma. Ties to the British Empire granted local merchants access to imperial markets, not least in the Caribbean, where food grown in Philadelphia’s fertile hinterland had been exchanged for sugar and cash crops. War cut off such long-established trading routes and led to the questioning of loyalties. Quaker merchants like Henry Drinker often had deep ties to Great Britain. Drinker and his wife Elizabeth faced the challenge of trying to thread the needle between making concessions to revolutionaries while maintaining their Atlantic connections. Revolutionaries eventually arrested him for treason, imprisoning him in Virginia, while Elizabeth navigated life in British-occupied Philadelphia during 1777-78. After regaining control of the city, Patriots held 638 “Tory” collaborators as suspected traitors. The Drinkers, embedded in Atlantic World networks, suffered as they attempted to navigate the complex politics of the Revolutionary era. Other Philadelphian merchants turned their gaze to the west, looking for new markets in China and the Pacific.

Ripples of the American Revolution

The Revolutionary War, like the Seven Years’ War before it, recalibrated Atlantic relations in other ways, too. At Valley Forge in 1777-78 the Prussian officer Baron von Steuben helped to drill George Washington’s army. The British evacuated Philadelphia in June 1778 and retreated to New York. Around three thousand Philadelphian loyalists left the city with the British military forces, joining a wider exodus of Tories and their allies (including enslaved Black Americans who had been promised freedom in exchange for military service) to Canada and Britain. Von Steuben’s work at Valley Forge helped Washington fight the British to a draw at Monmouth. A few months before Patriots retook Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, having been dispatched to Paris, steered the rebel colonies into a crucial alliance with France that helped to determine the outcome of the war. The decision to use Franklin as a diplomat proved a sound one. He fascinated the French, who saw him as the premier example of American genius, and he played his role with aplomb.

In the decades following the American Revolution, Philadelphia remained closely connected to the political currents of the Atlantic World. The ideas of the American Revolution were carried east and south. Revolutions erupted elsewhere—in France, in other parts of Europe, in Haiti, and in Spanish America. The career of Thomas Paine indicates their entangled paths. Paine, who was born in Norfolk, England, had been convinced by Franklin to go to the Americas. Arriving in Philadelphia in late 1774, his influential pamphlet Common Sense made the case for revolution in plain language that appealed to a wide readership. In the doldrums of 1776, Paine’s The American Crisis helped buoy Patriot morale. After the American Revolution ended, Paine traveled to France and served as a member of the National Convention, where he narrowly avoided the guillotine after falling out of favor with leading Jacobins. Paine’s career as an Atlantic revolutionary, with Philadelphia at its center, demonstrates how ideas easily crossed oceans.

As a major port city and an Atlantic World hub, Philadelphia often welcomed revolutionaries like Paine, while selectively supporting revolutions elsewhere. French Minister Edmond-Charles Genêt, also called Citizen Genêt, arrived in Philadelphia to a rapturous welcome in 1793. Genêt angered George Washington by attempting to subvert Washington’s proclamation of U.S. neutrality in the brewing conflict between Great Britain and France. Another figure to become embroiled in partisan battles of the early republic was the Polish nobleman Tadeusz Kościuszko. Having fought with the colonials during the American Revolution and then for Poland against Russia and Prussia, in 1797 he returned as a political exile to the United States, where he lived briefly in Philadelphia until leaving for Europe in 1798. Kościuszko wrote a will that named Thomas Jefferson as the executor, dedicating his estate to purchasing the freedom of enslaved people and providing them with an education.

Exiles Find a Home

Whether as a place of refuge from revolution and reaction or as a source of support for insurgents, the Delaware Valley became enmeshed with tumultuous upheavals across the Atlantic. When revolution erupted in Haiti in 1791, French masters fled the island, forcing many of the people they enslaved to join them. The exiles who arrived in Philadelphia brought firsthand accounts of the hemisphere’s first Black-led revolution, which energized both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist politics. Another Francophone uprooted by revolutionary wars was Joseph Bonaparte, who fled to the United States after his brother Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Following a short sojourn in Philadelphia he moved out to an estate in nearby Bordentown, New Jersey, where he spent most of his remaining years. Supporters of the Greeks in the Greek War for Independence from the Ottoman Empire raised money for the cause and even tried to persuade the United States to intervene. And in 1848, citizens gathered on Independence Square to welcome the proclamation of a new French Republic. People did not always like the direction foreign revolutions took, but Philadelphians, both Black and white, recognized their city’s place in a revolutionary Atlantic World.

Black Philadelphians insisted that those Atlantic revolutions had to reckon with enslavement—the cry of liberty rang hollow if new republics were built on the back of forced labor. Finding allies, however, did not prove easy; abolitionism was never more than a minority sentiment among white people in the eighteenth century. That said, some of the region’s Quakers, African Americans, and other friends of liberty raised their voices in favor of ending enslavement and emancipating enslaved people. Connections to the Caribbean and Europe shaped antislavery activism in the Delaware Valley. An extraordinary individual named Benjamin Lay, a Quaker immigrant, became one of the region’s earliest abolitionists. Born in England the same year as Philadelphia’s founding, Lay spent years traversing the Atlantic as a sailor, left for Barbados, and from there migrated to Philadelphia. Lay’s abolitionism sprang from his ardent Quaker faith, as well as his experiences in Barbados, where he witnessed enslavement’s brutality firsthand. While in Barbados, Lay and his wife Sarah held meetings at their house and served meals to enslaved people, which infuriated white slaveholders. After he and Sarah relocated to Philadelphia, Lay tried to convince fellow Quakers in the region to emancipate enslaved people. While some Friends had rejected enslavement before Lay’s arrival, his activism led to his disownment, and he retreated to a cave he converted into a cottage in Abington, Pennsylvania. From there Lay continued to urge the region’s Friends to acknowledge Atlantic enslavement as apostasy. By the end of his life more Quaker voices in the region had begun to proclaim the abolitionism gospel, including the New Jersey merchant John Woolman, a member of the Chesterfield Friends Meeting, who died in Britain on an antislavery mission, and the French-born religious refugee Anthony Benezet, who played an important role in founding the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage in 1775. The first abolition society in the Americas, it was later reorganized as the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage (usually referred to as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society) in 1789.

The AME Church Goes Global

In the decades that followed, Black abolitionists in Philadelphia built institutions and cultivated connections that reached across the Atlantic. By doing so they recognized that the struggle against enslavement in the United States was part of a wider battle for rights that extended to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa. Richard Allen, building on his efforts in establishing Philadelphia’s Free African Society in 1787 and Mother Bethel Church in 1794, founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 and became the church’s first bishop. AME churches subsequently sprang up all over the globe. By the end of the nineteenth century they had reached Bermuda, West Africa, and South Africa. An African American institution that began in Philadelphia therefore shaped the global spread of Black Christianity. Bishop Allen supported abolition, as did James Forten, a self-made sailmaker who after an initial flirtation with the idea of “colonizing” formerly enslaved Americans in Africa or Haiti became a fierce opponent of such schemes and an ardent advocate of an immediate end to enslavement. But the Atlantic connections of Philadelphia’s Black abolitionists are perhaps most evident in the career of Robert Purvis. Born free in Charleston, South Carolina, to parents of British, Moroccan, and Jewish roots, Purvis migrated to Philadelphia, where he helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society. Like many of his fellow abolitionists, Purvis sought to rally support in the United Kingdom, which had put enslavement on the path to extinction in its own colonies, and he traveled back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean on fundraising missions while corresponding with prominent British figures in the antislavery movement. When, on August 1, 1842, Black abolitionists marched through the southern wards of the city to mark the eighth anniversary of abolition across the British empire, a rampaging white mob threatened to burn down Purvis’s house.

The Lombard Street Riot of 1842, as it became known, proved just one of a series of riots that pitted rival immigrant and racial groups against one another in the “turbulent era” of the 1830s and 1840s. Tensions over religion, enslavement, and politics that reached across the Atlantic Ocean played out on the streets of Philadelphia. Immigration from Europe continued in the decades after the Revolution, with British, Germans, and Irish (especially after the beginning of the Potato Famine in the 1840s) the most heavily represented. Old World experiences shaped their politics. British Chartists, veterans of the struggle for the vote in the United Kingdom, welcomed the political rights denied to them in their country of origin. Irish Catholics gravitated toward the Democratic Party, in part due to the hostility of prominent Democrats like Andrew Jackson toward Britain. Indeed, the frequency with which Irish Catholics participated in anti-abolitionist violence owed something to their equation of abolitionism with support for the British crown. Germans, on the other hand, often backed the new antislavery Republican Party in the 1850s, and many of them saw the fight against enslavement as a continuation of the revolutions of 1848 in Europe. Catholic immigration in particular met a nativist backlash. The Philadelphia Nativist Riots of 1844, which saw the county placed under martial law, sprang from rumors that Irish newcomers wanted to replace the Protestant King James Bible in the city’s public schools. Philadelphia became a battleground in a conflict that stretched back to the English colonization of Ireland and break with Rome.

Movement across the ocean brought epidemics as well as people. Diseases rarely remained within the borders of one country; they spread rapidly across an increasingly connected world. Philadelphia’s status as an Atlantic port increased its vulnerability. A yellow fever epidemic in 1793, possibly carried on ships transporting French enslavers fleeing the Haitian Revolution, killed at least five thousand Philadelphians and sent tens of thousands fleeing from the city. Yellow fever recurred on a less destructive scale for decades. After the epidemic in 1793, the city decided to build new waterworks and engaged British-born architect Benjamin Latrobe to design them. Latrobe built the waterworks in a neoclassical style that evoked Athens. Cholera too crossed the Atlantic and caused epidemics in 1832, 1849, and 1866. By the late nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s sanitarians were learning from the hygiene measures that had begun to control such diseases in Europe.

The Arts and Sciences Flourish

Such exchange of knowledge had long been a feature of the region. The arts and sciences flourished in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin and John Bartram’s establishment of the American Philosophical Society in 1743 marked the first of many efforts for Philadelphians to demonstrate leadership in the arts and sciences. Philadelphia was the first city to lay claim to the mantle of the “Athens of America,” although some people later argued that Boston also deserved the title. The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia was founded in 1812, in part to impel the creation and diffusion of knowledge about the sciences and in part to place science in the United States on a par with its status in Europe. While Atlantic World rivalries proved important, the flourishing of the arts and sciences in Philadelphia also sprang from cultural exchange and connection, with leaders in fields as diverse as medicine (Benjamin Rush), botany (John Bartram), and history (Henry Charles Lea) all maintaining close links through either education or correspondence to their European counterparts. The French, in particular, had a powerful influence on the city, not least through the career of the merchant Stephen Girard, an immigrant who became one of the richest men in the United States and left most of his estate to his adopted city. Such figures cultivated and affirmed Atlantic World relationships.

If Philadelphia’s intellectual connections to the Atlantic remained a constant across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the region’s significance to the transoceanic economy eventually started to wane in the 1800s. In contrast to Washington, D.C., which foreign observers and even many people in the U.S. derided as a miasmic swamp or a sleepy, provincial village, Philadelphia remained an Atlantic financial hub well into the 1830s. The Second Bank of the United States, based on Chestnut Street and boasting a federal charter from its foundation in 1816 to 1836, maintained transatlantic financial ties between the U.S. and Europe, particularly Great Britain. Its demise at the hands of President Jackson strained those relations, which suffered further when Pennsylvania defaulted on its debt payments to European creditors in 1842, prompting the English Lake poet (and out of pocket “surly creditor”) William Wordsworth to rail against the commonwealth’s “degenerate Men.” Furthermore, Philadelphia lost ground to New York City as an Atlantic port, as the Erie Canal (among other factors) fueled Manhattan’s ascent as the financial capital of the United States. The source of Greater Philadelphia’s wealth shifted from commerce to manufacturing, as the Athens of America transformed into the workshop of the world, which increased local support for high protective tariffs to protect home industry. These higher tariffs, however, made it harder for the city to cultivate European markets. Some Philadelphians nevertheless found overseas clients. Joseph Harrison Jr., for example, built locomotives for Russia and Czar Nicholas I awarded him a gold medal for completing the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway. After his return to Philadelphia, Harrison amassed an impressive art collection, which he displayed at his mansion off Rittenhouse Square. Harrison, like some of his contemporaries, remained connected to the Atlantic World and prioritized connections and cultural exchange.

Philadelphia’s reputation as an Atlantic center of politics, finance, and commerce may have declined over the course of the nineteenth century but its links to its nearest ocean persisted in other respects. Immigration, which had slowed during the Civil War, accelerated again in the decades that followed. These arrivals increasingly came from eastern and southern Europe— especially Italy—rather than the western and northern reaches of the continent. Their children and grandchildren then often made the Atlantic crossing in reverse to fight in that continent’s wars. U.S. intervention in European conflict left a marked impact on the region’s economy and society. World War I and World War II stimulated ship production along the Delaware. During the latter, the Philadelphia Navy Yard employed over fifty thousand workers, whose labor made Philadelphia a vital part of the “Arsenal of Democracy.” Europe and Africa continued to exert an influence in art, design, and politics, too. Jacques-Henri-Auguste Gréber, a French landscape architect, designed and built the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and a proponent of Pan-Africanism, had a following in Philadelphia. Garvey is not the only example of Philadelphia’s connections to Africa. After the loosening of federal restrictions on immigration in the 1960s, Ethiopians, Ghanaians, Liberians, and Nigerians were prominently represented in the new African diaspora of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to Philadelphia.

Bonds of Culture Persist

Philadelphia’s Atlantic connections remained evident in spaces and civic life of the twenty-first century region. The Irish Memorial near Penn’s Landing, dedicated in 2003, sought to remind visitors about the migrants who built the city. The Mummers Parade could trace its roots back to older immigrant traditions from England, Germany, and Sweden. Annual Columbus Day celebrations testified to both the strength of Italian-American pride and the contested legacy of European colonization. Founders of the ODUNDE Festival, held the second Sunday in June, sought to celebrate the history and heritage of African peoples around the globe and created one of the longest-running and largest African American street festivals in the United States. Philadelphia’s historical connections to the Atlantic—forged in cultural exchange, revolutionary conflict, and the movement of peoples and revolutionary ideas—helped make the twenty-first century city a mecca for tourists. Yet such connections have sometimes underpinned a resurgent nativist politics that echoed an earlier era, as some residents used the region’s European cultural heritage to question the place of new immigrants from the Americas and Asia in the city. Philadelphia connections by the twenty-first century were global rather than primarily Atlantic. But the ocean the Delaware River empties into made the city a political and economic hub and the links it enabled remained lodged in civic memory.

Evan C. Rothera is Assistant Professor of History at Sam Houston State University. He is author of Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States, Mexico, and Argentina, 1860–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022) and coeditor, with Brian Matthew Jordan, of The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020). (Author information current at time of publication).

Although a relatively small place geographically, the Brandywine Valley enjoyed an outsized reputation, having often been celebrated by writers and artists, many of them based in Philadelphia (once called “The Athens of America”), who spread its fame widely. Brandywine Creek is only about sixty miles long, less than half the length of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River, and its watershed of 330 square miles is dwarfed by the Schuylkill’s 1,700 miles. 85 percent of the Brandywine watershed is confined to a single county in Pennsylvania, Chester County. Flowing south, it briefly skirts Delaware County at historic Chadds Ford before reaching its terminus in New Castle County, Delaware.

Only in its last few yards does the Brandywine reach the coastal plain; otherwise, it is the quintessential piedmont stream, rapidly falling over boulders of Wissahickon schist or Brandywine blue rock, at times twisting through rolling agricultural landscapes but then slipping into steep-sided valleys thickly wooded with some of the largest hardwood trees in the northeastern United States. Ecologically, the valley abounds with flora and fauna. This owes to a surprising variety of habitats from freshwater marshes to old-growth forests, and to the region’s felicitous location at the junction of North and South (surveyors Mason and Dixon wintered on the Brandywine during the years they surveyed their famous regional borderline, 1763-67). For example, northeastern plants such as hemlock trees mingle here with southeastern species such as umbrella magnolia.

The Swedes Arrive

Before European settlement, abundant ecological riches made the Brandywine a congenial place for Lenni-Lenape Indians, who hunted game in the hardwood forests or caught shad in the creek, long before dam-building interrupted the migration of fish upriver. The Indians watched in dismay as Swedes arrived in 1638 and built Fort Christina on a gentle rocky outcrop where it could guard the lower reaches of both the Christina River and Brandywine Creek—the first Swedish settlement in the New World. A successful Dutch campaign to seize the fort in 1655 was one of the first military encounters by rival European armies on American soil. The name “Brandywine Creek” is Dutch, of uncertain origin; perhaps it refers to the honey-brown color, similar to brandy, of the stream during one of its frequent floods, in visual contrast to the gray and placid Christina. Other theories abound. Nor is there agreement about whether the Brandywine is a “creek” (the typical usage for centuries) or the more recent “river.”

When William Penn’s Quakers arrived in 1682, Brandywine Creek formed the western boundary of the settled parts of Pennsylvania, with the junction of civilization and wilderness sharply demarcated at “Brumadgam” on the Thomas Holme map of 1687, subsequently Birmingham Township, Chester County. Wilmington, Delaware, was located on a hilltop between the Christina and the Brandywine in 1731, virtually a miniature replica of Philadelphia in layout, and it thrived because of the exceptionally prosperous milling that the Brandywine afforded. With its rapid drop in elevation, this piedmont river was ideally configured for the construction of water-powered mills, as the Swedes had been the first to recognize, establishing a mill-seat in what would become Wilmington’s Brandywine Park, where traces of the ancient dam survived into the twenty-first century.

By the late eighteenth century, the Brandywine Valley had become a crucible of the Industrial Revolution in America, with a proliferation of mills (more than 100 on just the Delaware section of the creek by 1793) that used increasingly advanced technology. The main north-south road in early America, linking Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., crossed the Brandywine at Wilmington, where tourists and travelers (among them George Washington) marveled at the fully automated milling technology on display by Market Street Bridge in Brandywine Village, an enclave of expensive Quaker millers’ homes.

Gunpowder and Iron Works

The Brandywine witnessed the American debut of the mechanical production of paper just upstream from Wilmington at Gilpin’s Mill in 1817, triggering a revolution in the production of books, magazines, and newspapers in the young republic. The ability of the fledgling nation to defend itself against menacing European powers was dependent upon the production of gunpowder on the Brandywine by the du Pont family, which arrived in Delaware from France in 1802 in time to supply powder to fight the Barbary pirates at Tripoli (1801-05) and the British in the War of 1812. On the eve of the Civil War, half of the national output of gunpowder came from duPont mills on the Brandywine, including the sturdy stone facilities preserved at Hagley Museum & Library. If industry faded long ago from the Brandywine in Delaware, it continued to thrive upstream at Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where the successor firm to Brandywine Iron Works (1810) remains the oldest steel mill in America. In the twenty-first century, countless local families of Italian and Irish descent could trace their ancestry to the early Brandywine mill workers, some of whose memories were preserved in an ambitious campaign of oral histories undertaken in the 1950s by the Hagley Museum. Millworker housing in dense rows remained a defining characteristic of many neighborhoods in Wilmington.

With nineteenth-century industry came wealth, as the Brandywine became nationally synonymous with technological revolutions in milling. Just outside Wilmington, handsome estates were built overlooking the stream, and poets and writers sang the praises of the valley, with its appealing mix of water-powered industry, picturesque riparian scenery, and tales of lore from Indian days and the Battle of the Brandywine, where the romantic young Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834) had been wounded. The culmination of these literary efforts was eventually The Brandywine, a book in the popular Rivers of America series (1941) by Wilmington-born critic Henry Seidel Canby (1878-1961), with illustrations by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009).

But industry also brought pollution of the creek, and by the 1860s there were calls to preserve land along its banks to safeguard the health of Wilmingtonians, who drank the foul-smelling water. Brandywine Park was established in the 1880s, laced with curving roadways that followed, rather imperfectly, a plan provided by the leading landscape architect of the day, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903). The park was the beginning of a conservation tradition that made the valley a recognized role model in watershed preservation nationwide. Headquartered at Chadds Ford, the Brandywine Conservancy, begun in 1967, expanded to hold more than 500 conservation easements over 12 percent of the watershed.

Preserving the Scenic Valley

As the du Pont family amassed extraordinary wealth—as late as the 1980s, they were one of the richest families in America—they played the key role in preserving the scenic Brandywine Valley against the looming threat of heavy industry, such as that which engulfed the lower Schuylkill, or the piecemeal suburban sprawl that jostled against Darby Creek, fifteen miles north. The Brandywine Conservancy, for example, was the brainchild of a boisterously enthusiastic du Pont descendant, George A. “Frolic” Weymouth (1936-2016). The unspoiled flavor of the region—as seen, for example, from the twelve-mile Brandywine Valley National Scenic Byway designated in 2005—owed much to the du Pont family’s traditional concern with large-scale estate agriculture, their cultivation of a pleasing landscape aesthetic, and the cherishing of historic sites.

Their special passion was gardening. America’s premier French-style formal garden flourished at the Nemours estate (1910) of Alfred I. du Pont (1864-1935), an elaborate homage to his French ancestors. A woodland garden underplanted with colorful azaleas flowed over the hillsides at Winterthur (“March Bank” garden, 1902), home of Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969), whose collection of American antiques remains unparalleled. Under the creative eye of Pierre S. du Pont (1870-1954), the nation’s largest-ever display garden took shape at Longwood (Main Conservatory, 1921) and later became the flagship cultural attraction of the Brandywine Valley, with more than 1.5 million visitors annually. All these gardens (and associated estates of sprawling size and sumptuous elegance) were funded by industry in places far distant and especially benefited from the windfall profits that the DuPont Company enjoyed from providing gunpowder to the western front in World War I.

As the estates of what contemporaries have nicknamed “Chateau Country” were being laid out and embellished, there simultaneously flourished the Brandywine School of Art, a movement centered on Howard Pyle (1853-1911), the Wilmington-born artist who revolutionized American illustration starting in the 1880s. Pyle moved to Philadelphia to be near the leading publishing houses of the day but eventually returned to the Brandywine Valley, which he regarded as the wellspring of his art, inspiring him deeply with its historical relics, from crumbling colonial houses and mills, to rustic “worm” fences lining dirt roads through the cornfields of the unspoiled countryside, to venerable Old Swedes Church (1698-99) near the Brandywine’s mouth. A teacher at Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, Pyle brought his best students to the Brandywine Valley, founding a summer art school on the Brandywine Battlefield at Chadds Ford. His star student arrived in 1902, N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), who shared Pyle’s near-religious devotion to the relics of America’s colonial past and settled permanently in Chadds Ford when he began his own, legendary career as the dean of American illustration.

Wyeth Tourism

N.C. Wyeth and other former students of Pyle became known as proponents of the “Brandywine school” of illustration, with a strong emphasis on rural life, the colonial heritage, and meticulously researched historical themes. His son Andrew extended the tradition right up to the twenty-first century, living and painting exclusively on the Brandywine all his life, except for summers in Maine, and developing a brooding, rather bleak style deliberately different from his father’s. The immense fame of Andrew Wyeth continued to draw tourists and plein-air painters to “Wyeth country” in the Brandywine Valley, where the Brandywine River Museum of Art amassed the world’s largest collection of Wyeth paintings, from N. C. right down to Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946), who lived and painted in the area into the twenty-first century.

First State National Historical Park promised to bring ever-more attention to the Brandywine, as an area hailed as “the Most Famous Small River in America.” But the modern Brandywine Valley’s widespread popularity also fed a surge in population growth, with upscale suburban developments peppering the hilltops and threatening to change the rural character of this historic place forever. The warnings of urbanist William H. “Holly” Whyte (1917-99) about the costs of sprawl came to pass in his native valley: traffic clogged twisty colonial roads, scenic viewsheds were violated, and invasive plants proliferated. As Chester County transformed rapidly, one encouraging sign was its open-space program, launched in 1989 and ultimately responsible for setting aside 28 percent of the county’s land. Nonetheless, a worrying symptom of overdevelopment was the markedly increased flooding of the Brandywine, culminating in a record-shattering rise of twenty feet at Chadds Ford following Hurricane Ida in September 2021. The village was inundated beneath brown water, and the Brandywine River Museum of Art suffered damage. The future brings new challenges to this famous valley that has long been loved and celebrated but has proved to be ecologically fragile in the face of modern development pressures.

W. Barksdale Maynard is the author of eight books on American history, art, and architecture, including Buildings of Delaware in the Buildings of the United States series (University of Virginia Press, 2008), The Brandywine: An Intimate Portrait (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), and Artists of Wyeth Country: Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth, and Andrew Wyeth (Temple University Press, 2021).  He lives in Wilmington, Delaware. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The pace of bridge construction was initially slow compared to that in New England and the South.  This was partly because the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers were themselves useful as highways, and so the need to cross them remained limited throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  The Lenni Lenape who first lived in the area marked good crossing locations along rivers, particularly the Delaware and Schuylkill.  These later became sites of ferry crossings, which would eventually foster bridge spans.

In 1660 King Charles II (1630-85) ordered a road, referred to as the King’s Highway, to be built stretching from Boston, Massachusetts, to Charleston, South Carolina.  By 1683, however, progress in Pennsylvania had stalled.  Consequently, and at the request of William Penn, that same year the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly passed a law requiring bridges to be built by local inhabitants across all streams and rivers that intersected the highway.  Due to technological limitations, which were just starting to be overcome in New England, these first bridges were not able to span major waterways like the Delaware River.  Instead, they typically kept to tributaries and smaller rivers.  The earliest surviving bridge built along the King’s Highway in the Delaware watershed area, the Pennypack Creek Bridge, was just such a structure.  Completed in 1697, it was stone arch in construction and spanned the Pennypack Creek, located north of Philadelphia where it empties into the Delaware River. Due to the way they facilitated travel, these bridges served as early milestones in the delineation of the region.

Bridges spanning the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers in Philadelphia were first constructed in the early nineteenth century, and, almost invariably, these river crossings originated as ferry points.  Swedish colonists operated the earliest ferries in the 1660s and by the 1730s a significant number of modern-day bridge sites had ferries in operation.  On the Schuylkill River these included Gray’s Ferry, the Middle Ferry at Market Street, and the Upper Ferry at Spring Garden Street (all in Philadelphia).  On the Delaware these included ferries at Trenton, New Jersey, and upriver at New Hope-Lambertville and Easton-Phillipsburg. 

Drawbacks of Ferries

Several factors drove the conversion of ferries to bridges.  As early as 1764 timber rafters using the Delaware for transport proved dangerous to ferry passengers.  As late as 1914 there was a collision between a raft and a ferry that caused the deaths of four passengers.  Also, ferries had to stop operation during flooding and freezing.  The greatest impetus, though, was when a ferry could no longer handle the amount of traffic queuing up to cross.  At this point a corporation, typically local residents of the towns on either side of the river, would petition the states for a charter to build a bridge.  They would then finance construction by selling stock in the company, and dividends (and repairs) would be paid from collected tolls.  Thus, privately owned ferries were converted into privately owned toll bridges.

The most heavily trafficked ferries on the Delaware were at Trenton and Easton, which consequently led to the first bridge construction over the river.  The Delaware River Bridge Company commissioned the Easton-Phillipsburg Bridge in 1795.  However, the Lower Trenton Bridge, though commissioned later, was completed nine months before the Easton bridge in January 1806.  New England had achieved greater technical feats in bridge building at the time, and as a result both of these bridges were designed by men whose earlier works were constructed in New York and Massachusetts: the Trenton bridge by Theodore Burr (1771-1822), designer of the first bridge to span the Hudson River, and the Easton bridge by Timothy Palmer (1751-1821), who designed and built the first timber-truss bridge in the United States over the Merrimack River in Massachusetts.  Trenton was an ascending manufacturing center and its bridge helped solidify its importance along the route between New York and Philadelphia.  Easton-Phillipsburg was initially a small agricultural area, but, through influences such as its bridge, it would become a transportation hub for the steel industry and funnel large quantities of anthracite coal to Philadelphia.

At the same time that these Delaware River bridges were enhancing the route between Philadelphia and New York, bridge construction across the Schuylkill was laying the potential for the expansion of Philadelphia’s suburbs, particularly West Philadelphia.  The Schuylkill bridges also generally started as ferry crossings.  Technically, the first span across the river was a floating bridge at Gray’s Ferry, built shortly after the Revolutionary War.  However, the first significant bridge (that did not need to be pulled aside for passing ships) was finished in 1805 and designed by Timothy Palmer (who would then go on to build the Trenton crossing).  It was known as Palmer’s Permanent Bridge at Market Street.  A bridge at Spring Street was completed in 1812 in anticipation of traffic from the growing neighborhood of Mantua.  At its completion, this Wernwag Bridge was the longest single-span bridge in the world at 343 feet.  The ease of access that these bridges provided to neighborhoods that were initially outside the city would be a justification for their inclusion within the city limits set with the 1854 Act of Consolidation.

Railways Played a Role

The need for railway bridges spurred further bridge construction across the Schuylkill River, both in Philadelphia and further upriver.  In 1838 Gray’s Ferry finally got a proper bridge.  Called the Newkirk Viaduct, this was a railway bridge that provided the first direct rail access from Philadelphia to Baltimore.  The Philadelphia and Reading Railway opened in 1842 and its multiple crossings as it stretched from Philadelphia to Reading and into northwest Pennsylvania’s coal region (including a major crossing at Norristown) allowed it to compete with the Schuylkill Navigation Company.  Its terminus was at Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad on the west side of the Schuylkill River from which point cargo would be transported to Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal via the Columbia Railway Bridge in Fairmount Park.

The bridges over these two major waterways would become more technologically advanced with time.  The Pennypack Bridge was a stone arch bridge suitable for modest length bridges over rivers that did not have much down-river traffic.  Bridges built in the area, starting with the Permanent and Lower Trenton Bridges, were wooden covered bridges, the Permanent Bridge being the first completely covered bridge in the United States.  For wide points in a river these bridges could require many spans (the Lower Trenton Bridge had five), which was a hazard during floods and freshets (spring ice thaws), and for timber rafts.  An 1841 flood damaged or destroyed many Delaware River bridges.  By some accounts only the Easton and Trenton bridges remained.

Beginning in the 1870s covered bridges were abandoned for steel bridges.  These were typically suspension bridges but sometimes truss or cantilever bridges.  The last wooden bridge built on the river was the Columbia-Portland bridge (upriver at Knowlton township New Jersey) completed in 1869.  After a particularly bad Delaware River flood in 1903, most of the covered bridges were damaged or destroyed and their respective companies repaired or replaced them with steel constructions.  Steel was typically required for a bridge to be able to handle railroad traffic for any length of time and was consequently used at Trenton (after an initial attempt at modifying the wooden bridge with track).  Other bridges farther upriver on the Delaware were also modified to permit rail traffic, which enhanced access to markets in the northeast, including New York City.

Camden Commuters

Just as development in West Philadelphia required bridges in order to handle the increase in traffic, higher levels of commuter traffic across the Delaware drove plans to connect the city directly to Camden.  To this end, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania legislatures created commissions that coalesced as the Delaware River Joint Commission in 1919 (later renamed the Delaware River Port Authority in 1931).  Its purpose was the building and maintaining of links between the two states.  This initially included a single bridge, which was completed in 1926 and named the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge).  This would expand to include three more bridges: the Walt Whitman Bridge in 1955, the Commodore Barry Bridge in 1974, and the Betsy Ross Bridge in 1976; the PATCO Speedline in 1969, a mass transit rail line running between Philadelphia and Camden over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge; and a ferry.  The Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman Bridges are steel suspension bridges, the Commodore Barry Bridge a steel cantilever bridge, and the Betsy Ross a steel truss bridge.

The initial reports conducted by the Delaware River Joint Commission in preparation for the Delaware River Bridge showed that most trans-Delaware traffic crossed using the ferry that ran between Market Street, Camden, and Market Street, Philadelphia.  Furthermore, they stressed that nearly two-thirds of this traffic originated locally in Camden, numbering 24.6 million passengers per year.  Also, a summary of these reports in 1920 showed that the trend was towards an increasing percentage of traffic across the river that was not local.  Therefore, a central conclusion was that, at the time of the construction of the first bridge, it was not economical for the commission to construct an elevated rapid transit system, but that it would be a plan with “attractive features” as traffic patterns shifted in the following decades to higher numbers of long-distance commuters.  The bridge itself would act as a catalyst for these trends.

After the completion of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, demand grew for a connection across the Delaware River between New Jersey and Delaware.  A ferry service started in 1926 to meet this demand almost immediately generated a traffic bottleneck with reported automobile lines of up to four miles long on both sides of the river.  Despite this, it was not until 1940 that the Delaware General Assembly studied the possibility of a bridge.  The project lagged due to World War II, but in 1947 the Delaware River Crossing Division formed and began construction of the Delaware Memorial Bridge.  It was completed in 1951, making it the second bridge across the Delaware in the Philadelphia area.

Washington-New York Corridor

From the Delaware Memorial Bridge’s inception, actual usage far exceeded the estimated projections of traffic (in 1960 it was calculated that traffic was increasing at a 5.7 percent compound growth rate). This was due in part to its strategic location on the north-south route between New York and Washington, as well as its connection to major highways running west.  While the Benjamin Franklin Bridge had made it possible for automobile travelers to reach New York without having to use a ferry, now it was possible to avoid traveling through Philadelphia altogether.  In 1962 the Delaware River and Bay Authority was created to enhance the first span and build a second, making it a twin suspension bridge, which was completed in 1968.

Further development south of Philadelphia was spurred with the opening of the Walt Whitman Bridge in 1957.  It was initially conceived by the Delaware River Port Authority as a way to reduce traffic on the Ben Franklin Bridge and provide an alternative route to South Jersey shore communities.  However, at the thirtieth anniversary ceremony of the bridge’s opening commenters noted that while originally many viewed the bridge as just another route to the shore, its larger consequence was to stimulate growth in southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey.  Migrant workers had easier transport between South Philadelphia and southern New Jersey farms, and many ultimately relocated outside of the Philadelphia area.  Furthermore, after its construction, the bridge was connected to the Schuylkill Expressway, opening a major route west of the Delaware.  The bridge also helped spur the establishment of the Food Distribution Center, the South Philadelphia sports complex, and the expanded use of Philadelphia International Airport.

The Delaware River Port Authority and the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission (DRJTBC) assumed responsibility for the majority of bridges crossing the Delaware between Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  Launched as the Commission for Elimination of Toll Bridges, the DRJTBC was created for two reasons.  It would purchase toll bridges along the Delaware River and convert them to free bridge crossings and use equal annual subsidies from both states to maintain the bridges.  From 1920 to 1934 the commission purchased, repaired, and consolidated many bridge crossings on the river.  In 1934 it was replaced with the DRJTBC, with responsibility to maintain a total of twelve toll-free bridges out of joint tax subsidies and maintain eight toll bridges including the Easton-Phillipsburg (U.S. Route 22) Bridge and Trenton-Morrisville (U.S. Route 1) Bridge (Lower Trenton Bridge).  Although many of these and the Schuylkill’s bridges were prompted by need, once completed they had a profound impact in altering patterns of travel and commerce, thus helping establish the distinct character of the region. 

Andrew Slemmon is a graduate student in the Department of History at West Chester University. (Author information current at the time of publication.)

Bridge Construction Types

Arch – A bridge whose substructure is composed of arches.
Truss – The load-bearing structure (truss) is composed of a series of connected elements, typically triangles.
Suspension – The roadway is hung below suspension cables (via vertical supporting cables), which transport tension to towers at either end of the bridge.
Cantilever – Each half of the bridge is a rigid structural element supported at one end only (a cantilever), which extends out over the river.

Bridges

Abbreviations of proprietors:
DRPA – Delaware River Port Authority.
DRJTBC – Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission.
PennDOT – Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

Benjamin Franklin Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Camden, suspension bridge, DRPA, opened 1926.
Walt Whitman Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Gloucester, suspension bridge, DRPA, opened 1957.
Commodore Barry Bridge: Delaware River between Chester and Bridgeport, cantilever bridge, DRPA, opened 1974.
Betsy Ross Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Pennsauken, truss bridge, DRPA, opened 1976.
Delaware Memorial Bridge: Delaware River between New Castle and Deepwater, twin suspension bridge, Delaware River and Bay Authority, opened 1951.
Tacony-Palmyra Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Palmyra, tied-arch bridge, Burlington County Bridge Commission, opened 1929.
Burlington-Bristol Bridge: Delaware River between Bristol Township and Burlington, truss bridge, Burlington County Bridge Commission, opened 1931.
Milford-Montague Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Milford and Montague Township, truss birdge, DRJTBC, opened 1953.
Delaware Watergap Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Delaware Water Gap and Hardwick Township, steel plate beam bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1953.
Portland-Columbia Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Portland and Columbia, girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1953.
Easton-Phillipsburg Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Easton and Phillipsburg, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1938.
I-78 Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Williams Township and Phillipsburg, twin girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1989.
New Hope-Lambertville Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Solebury Township and Delaware Township, girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1971.
Scudder Falls Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Lower Makefield Township and Ewing Township, plate girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1961.
Trenton-Morrisville Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Morrisville and Trenton, girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1952.
Portland Columbia Bridge: Delaware River between Portland and Columbia, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1957.
Riverton-Belvidere Bridge: Delaware River between Riverton and Belvidere, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Northampton Street Bridge: Delaware River between Easton and Phillipsburg, cantilever bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1896.
Riegelsville Bridge: Delaware River between Riegelsville and Pohatcong Township, suspension bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Upper Black Eddy-Milford Bridge: Delaware River between Upper Black Eddy and Milford, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1933.
Uhlerstown-Frenchtown Bridge: Delaware River between Uhlerstown and Frenchtown, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1931.
Lumberville-Raven Rock Bridge: Delaware River between Lumberville and Raven Rock, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Center Bridge-Stockton Bridge: Delaware River between Center Bridge and Stockton, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1927.
New Hope-Lambertville Bridge: Delaware River between New Hope and Lambertville, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Washington Crossing Bridge: Delaware River between Upper Makesfield Township and Hopewell Township, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Calhoun Street Bridge: Delaware River between Morrisville and Trenton, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1884.
Lower Trenton Bridge: Delaware River between Morrisville and Trenton, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1928.
Market Street Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, arch bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1932.
Walnut Street Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, truss bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1893.
Spring Garden Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1965.
Gray’s Ferry Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, State Highway Agency, opened 1976.
Girard Avenue Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1972.
Strawberry Mansion Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, arch truss bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1897.
Vine Street Expressway Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, PennDOT, opened 1959.
Schuylkill Expressway Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, PennDOT, opened 1956.
Columbia Railway Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, arch bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1920.
Schuylkill River Bridge: Schuylkill River between Swedesburg and Black Horse, girder bridge, Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, opened 1954.

Broad Street is, as its name implies, the city’s broadest north-south street. At one hundred feet in width, the north-south arterial is indeed wide, but its length is more remarkable. From the extreme limits of South Philadelphia, it shoots north into Center City and beyond to North Philadelphia, right to the edge of Montgomery County. It is the longest straight urban boulevard in the United States and the longest straight street in Philadelphia (although traffic must circle City Hall in the middle). An old Philly aphorism is: “They say Broad Street is the straightest street, but when you get to City Hall, it gets real crooked.” Also, an old local joke is to send someone to Fourteenth Street. There is no Fourteenth Street, as Broad Street is where that street would be.

Broad Street is the north-south counterpart to Market (formerly High) Street. When surveyor Thomas Holme (1624-95) prepared the first plan of the city of Philadelphia for William Penn (1644-1718), only Broad and High Streets were named. Twelfth Street was designated as Broad Street, and this rough road bisected the town almost exactly at its middle in what was then wilderness. The plan also designated a public square in the vicinity of this intersection, supposedly the center of the city, because Holme believed it to be the watershed dividing the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. The plot was therefore called Center Square. Penn intended that the Public Buildings (City Hall) of Philadelphia would one day go there.

Broad Street was moved to Fourteenth Street by the 1730s, as that was closer to the actual midpoint between the two rivers. Surveyors also corrected Holme’s error regarding Center Square and placed the commons where it is today—the location of City Hall. Troops drilled in and around Center Square during the War of Independence, and the French army under Rochambeau camped there on the way to Yorktown. Later, Center Square became the site for Philadelphia’s first waterworks.

Broad Grows North and South

After the Revolution, Broad Street grew, first to the north: The road was extended from Vine Street to Ridge Road (Avenue) in 1811. It continued north through the nineteenth century, and its northernmost extensions were created between 1903 and 1923. The street was also lengthened to the south:  In 1819, the road reached from South (formerly Cedar) Street to Dickinson Street. With the city-county consolidation of 1854, a rudimentary version of Broad Street extended as far south as the later site of the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

Broad Street began to fill in by the first third of the nineteenth century. As the city’s population grew westward from its original concentration near the Delaware River, South Broad Street became distinguished by elite residences, hotels, and cultural institutions. Wealthy Philadelphians who wished to escape the crowded conditions of old Philadelphia built fine mansions along South Broad. Several expensive hotels also opened on South Broad by the 1850s, including the LaPierre House at Broad and Sansom, which was touted as the most luxurious hotel in America. These hotels also housed clubrooms and rathskellars for the many social organizations based along both South and North Broad well into the twentieth century.

Closest to Center Square, Broad Street also became home to cultural institutions. On South Broad, the Academy of Music opened at Broad and Locust Streets in 1857, and it was joined by the Union League eight years later. To the north, during the second half of the nineteenth century Broad Street from City Hall to Race Street became lined with businesses and institutions including the Masonic Temple, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Offenbach’s Garden (replaced in 1892 by an Odd Fellows Temple), and the Adelphi Theater (demolished in 1881). Farther north, the street had an industrial character, created by Matthias Baldwin (1795-1866), who founded his great locomotive factory in the 1830s at the corner of Broad and Spring Garden (outside the city limits at that time). This industrial site grew to encompass several blocks between Callowhill and Spring Garden Streets as other manufactures joined the Baldwin Works in this gritty manufacturing area along North Broad Street.

After the Civil War, North Broad Street became one of Philadelphia’s leading elite addresses. Many mansions were built in the Gothic and Victorian styles, mostly to house the families of wealthy industrialists and middle managers, such as those who owned and worked at Baldwin Locomotive Works and associated factories. Other fabulous homes were erected for the owners and operators of traction companies who laid down trolley tracks in most of the streets of Philadelphia (and other cities too). These men—William L. Elkins (1832-1903) and Peter A. Widener (1834-1915)—and their enormous Victorian homes represented the peak of North Broad’s development.

Sidewalks Grow, Too

Reflecting the evolution of the street, Broad Street’s sidewalks were broadened and large granite blocks were used to pave the roadway in the 1870s. In 1894, Broad was the first street in Philadelphia surfaced with asphalt—the latest in paving technology at the time—for primitive automobiles. This work, instigated by Mayor Edwin S. Stuart (1853–1937), cost the city half a million dollars. The blocks of stone (Belgian blocks) that had previously lined Broad Street were used to replace the cobbles in nearby small streets. And, like Market Street, Broad Street subsequently became the route of a subway line, initially opened in 1928 with additions made in 1936, 1956, and 1970.

By far the biggest change for Broad Street occurred in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when City Hall was constructed on Center Square, encompassing the entire block and interrupting travel on both Broad and Market Streets. The completion of the “Public Buildings” encouraged the development of office and financial headquarters along the thoroughfare close to the new seat of government, and under the watchful eye of the statue of William Penn high atop the building’s tower. Philadelphia’s City Hall was designed to be huge in every way so as to make a statement about the city’s wealth and industrial might.

With the relocation of city government to Broad and Market, residential and office skyscrapers replaced many of the mansions and hotels along South Broad (although several fine hotels, such as the Bellevue Stratford, remained). The Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broad Street Station, opened in 1881 directly across from City Hall, added to the mix and helped transform Broad Street from a quiet institutional and residential roadway into a bustling commercial thoroughfare.

Broad Street also experienced a major building boom farther south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of this was due to the Vare Brothers—William Scott (1867-1934), George (1859-1908) and Edwin (1862-1922). They were construction contractors and politicians who ran a corrupt South Philadelphia political machine and reaped most of their construction and waste-handling business through municipal contracts. Besides building projects throughout South Philadelphia, the Vare brothers were responsible for the modern grading of Broad Street south of Oregon Avenue.

Cultural Magnet

North and south, Broad Street remained a cultural magnet into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Philadelphia’s famous New Year’s Day Mummer’s Parade has strutted and strummed along two miles of South Broad for over a hundred years. In the late 1990s, the crux of theaters, galleries, and performance spaces on Broad Street between City Hall and Washington Avenue was designated the “Avenue of the Arts.” Similar plans have been envisioned for North Broad Street as well.

In addition to such longstanding musical landmarks as the Academy of Music, Broad Street around the area of South Street became known in the early twentieth century as a center for jazz and gospel music. These developments were an outgrowth of the Great Migration, the northward movement of African Americans that occurred during and after the First World War. When labor demand created by World War II precipitated another African American migration to Philadelphia, North Broad Street also became an important cultural center for Black Philadelphians with such venues as the Uptown Theater, which opened in the 1920s as a movie theater but became a destination for soul and rhythm and blues performers from the 1950s to the 1970s.

North Broad Street played a role in the nation’s transportation history as a link in the Lincoln Highway, and it became Philadelphia’s Automobile Row with showrooms for the latest models. However, by the mid-twentieth century, North Broad experienced a severe decline. The well-heeled property owners of North Broad Street moved to suburban estates north and west of Philadelphia by the 1940s. Many of their mansions were subdivided into apartment buildings, while others were demolished and replaced by retail establishments, automobile dealerships, and gas stations.

Redevelopment initiatives included those of civil rights leader Leon Sullivan (1922-2001). A Baptist minister, he moved to Philadelphia in 1950 and became the pastor of Zion Baptist Church, 3600 N. Broad Street. In 1964, Sullivan formed the Opportunities Industrialization Center along North Broad to provide job training for African Americans. He also established the Zion Investment Association, which invested in new businesses in Philadelphia. As a result, the first Black-owned and developed shopping center in the world, Progress Plaza, was built in 1968 on North Broad. Other grassroots organizations, such as North Philadelphia Block Development Corporation (founded in 1976), lobbied for increased community development funding for the downtrodden neighborhoods flanking North Broad Street.

Broad Street grew from a rural lane in the countryside into a dense urban boulevard, as well as perhaps the most important street in Philadelphia. The central axis of nineteenth century industrial tycoons became a main artery for Philadelphians of all backgrounds, extending from Center City north and south through the entire city and its diverse neighborhoods.

Harry Kyriakodis is the author of Philadelphia’s Lost Waterfront (The History Press, 2011) and Northern Liberties: The Story of a Philadelphia River Ward (The History Press, 2012). He is a founding/certified member of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides. (Author information current at time of publication.)

As one of the original counties established by William Penn (1644-1718), Chester County was only modestly influenced by Philadelphia in its early development because after 1789 it shared no border with the city. Although the Pennsylvania Railroad linked the county’s central valley to Philadelphia in the mid-nineteenth century, it remained a largely rural landscape whose farms, mills, and forges operated within a mostly self-sufficient economy while sending surpluses to the Philadelphia market. Not until the second half of the twentieth century did dramatic changes come to its pastoral landscapes and small towns. Starting in the 1970s the arrival of financial services firms along with bio-medical research and development companies drew thousands of new residents, turning it into a county of farms plus pharma.

Lenni Lenape (also known as Delaware), along with some Dutch and Swedes, already lived in the area before Penn laid out the county boundaries stretching more than one hundred miles from the Delaware River to the Susquehanna River. That initial county structure proved too large to serve its inhabitants well. In 1729, provincial authorities carved out Lancaster County, then in 1752 shifted a small part to Berks County as well. Not long after the American Revolution, the residents in the western portion of the remaining county objected to traveling so far to conduct business in the county seat at Chester City on the Delaware River. They wanted a county seat located farther west. They got their wish when West Chester became the county seat, and three years later, in 1789, Delaware County was carved out. From that time, Chester County no longer shared a border with Philadelphia.

Penn had encouraged the early formation of townships covering the entire territory as a way to promote self-government. Many boroughs and townships had incorporated by the early eighteenth century, for example Caln in 1686,  Kennett in 1704, Uwchlan in 1712, and numerous others. But the Quakers who predominated in much of Chester County shunned town living, preferring life on their farms. Based on religious scruples, Quakers showed little interest in formal governance of their territory. Except for the county seat, early towns carried few public responsibilities beyond providing small local marketplaces and serving as units for assessing taxes. Rural families produced a large share of the goods for home consumption, and craftsmen lived among the farmers, trading their products for food.

Transportation Routes Shaped Settlements

The land formation known as the “Great Valley,” stretching from the Schuylkill River in Montgomery County to the southwest through Chester and Lancaster Counties, provided early travelers with a natural route. The first major east-west road following the Great Valley westward was the Lancaster Road or the Great Road, which became the most traveled route of its time. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) in 1789 remarked of German farmers that it was “no common thing, on the Lancaster and Reading roads, to meet in one day fifty to a hundred of these [Conestoga] wagons on their way to Philadelphia, most of which belong to German farmers.”

Largely following that same route, the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike Road Company constructed in 1795 the first long-distance paved route in the United States stretching sixty-two miles between Philadelphia and the city of Lancaster. The improved road bed allowed farmers and craftsmen to haul heavy freight and drive stage coaches from Lancaster to Philadelphia. It brought travelers to dozens of inns, taverns, saddleries, and shops of every variety, and helped build Downingtown and a few other commercial centers along its route.

To serve the southern part of the county, the state chartered the Philadelphia, Brandywine and New London Turnpike Company in 1808 to build a stagecoach road from Philadelphia to Baltimore. That route, known as the Baltimore Pike (designated Route 1 in 1926), entered Chester County from Delaware County at Chadds Ford and ran through the Brandywine Valley—a mix of farms and woodland, as well as commercial towns and villages like Kennett Square. Farmers in the Brandywine Valley hauled their grain to mills powered by the Brandywine River, which also powered paper mills that supplied Philadelphia printers.

Railroads exerted less impact on early settlement patterns in Chester County than in other suburban counties around Philadelphia because the rail network was less densely built on the western edge of the region. The great exception was the Main Line, a railroad designed as one component of a larger network of canals and rails that the state government sponsored in order to help Pennsylvania compete commercially against New York State. Construction started in 1829, carried on largely by Irish immigrants. In 1857 the Pennsylvania Railroad purchased the line since known as the Main Line.

Across the middle of the county, investors built the Philadelphia & Baltimore Central (P&BC) railroad just before the Civil War. They broke ground in 1855 in Concord Township in Delaware County, where the celebrants tossed one shovelful of dirt toward Philadelphia and another toward Baltimore to signify the goal of connecting the two cities.

As those two major lines crossed the county from east to west, they helped spur the economies of some towns along the way, including Downingtown and Coatesville on the Main Line and Oxford Borough on the P&BC near the county’s southern border with Maryland. But their main function was to link Philadelphia to the distant cities of Lancaster to the west and Baltimore to the south. One of the few places within the county that did purposely build rail lines to spur its own development was the county seat of West Chester, where business leaders formed a railroad company to connect their town to the Main Line running some miles to the north. They opened the West Chester Railroad (WCRR) in 1832 to carry both passengers and freight. In the 1850s a second group of investors built West Chester & Philadelphia Rail Road (WC&P) to offer an alternative connecting West Chester to the Philadelphia & Baltimore Central line running through southern Delaware and Chester Counties. During the period of railroad consolidations around the turn of the twentieth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad gained control over both West Chester railroads, as well as the Main Line and the Philadelphia & Baltimore Central.

Agriculture and Industry

Abundant sources of water power made milling the county’s first industry. Farmers grew corn, wheat, barley, oats, rye, buckwheat, and flax, and most settlements had a grist mill, which could also be used as a sawmill. However, as improved transportation networks made long-distance shipping easier, farmers shifted away from diversified crops to produce more livestock. The growth of Philadelphia and increasing purchasing power of the population persuaded farmers to supply more meat. By mid-nineteenth century, agriculture in Chester County focused most heavily on grazing and dairying. The 1860 agricultural census showed that of Chester County’s roughly fifty thousand cattle, half were for dairy and the other half for beef purposes.

Water power enabled the county’s residents to exploit the area’s rich iron ore deposits. Early iron manufactories established a basis for nationally-known ironworks. In 1790 on the banks of French Creek, the French Creek Nail Works opened the first nail factory in the United States, later renamed the Phoenix Iron Company. It grew into an extensive ironworks consisting of furnace, foundry, rolling-mill, and nail factory. During the Civil War, Phoenix Iron produced the Griffen Gun and became a major supplier of the Union Army. As railroads multiplied, the company focused on structural steel for bridge building, a crucial requirement for railroad expansion.

Lukens Steel in Coatesville was born in 1810 when Isaac Pennock (1767-1824) began the Brandywine Iron Works and Nail Factory on the banks of the Brandywine River. All the raw materials needed—iron ore, limestone, and hardwood forests for charcoal—were available in the Coatesville area. In 1813 Pennock’s daughter Rebecca (1794-1854) married Charles Lukens (1786-1825), who oversaw the operation of his father-in-law’s business. When Lukens died in 1825, Rebecca took over operation of the steel mill. She managed the business until 1849 and turned it into the top producer of boilerplate in the country.

Agriculture continued to operate profitably throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aided by the rail lines that crossed the county. By the 1890s, the Pennsylvania Railroad trains that ran all the way to Lancaster gave farmers in western Chester County a way to ship fresh milk and produce daily to Philadelphia. In 1906 Abbott’s Dairy opened in Oxford on the far west side of the county yet still transported its products to the Philadelphia market.

Plant cultivation contributed significantly to the county economy. In the borough of West Grove In 1868 the Dingee & Conard Nursery Company began growing and selling fruit trees, roses, and other nursery products. They pioneered the use of mail order catalogues, and by the late 1880s shipping of their nursery products made West Grove the second-largest post office in Chester County. The company became nationally known for its roses, most notably the Peace Rose. In 1945, the company provided one of this specially bred flower to every international delegate meeting in San Francisco to establish the United Nations.

Undoubtedly mushrooms became Chester County’s best-known food crop. In the 1890s William Swayne (1851-1950), a florist in Kennett Square, began growing mushrooms in the unused space underneath his greenhouse benches. Because he required precise regulation of the temperature, humidity, and air quality, Swayne erected the first building to be used exclusively for mushroom growing, and Kennett Square eventually became the national center of mushroom cultivation. Ironically, old-fashioned mushroom cultivation helped build Chester County’s twenty-first century specialization in bio-life sciences. Starting in the 1920s chemist G. Raymond Rettew (1903-73) began providing testing services to area mushroom growers. He devised a process for growing penicillin that made mass production of the drug possible. He sold the idea to Reichel Laboratories of Phoenixville, which was acquired by Wyeth in 1943. The penicillin case demonstrated the important process of turning research into production that became a hallmark of Chester County’s high tech economy.

Social Disparities

From the start, Chester County’s population contained both rich and poor. In 1800, the wealthiest 10 percent of the county’s households paid 38 percent of the taxes, and the poorest 30 percent of the citizenry paid only 4 percent largely because taxes were based on land ownership. To house the poor and unemployed, county leaders in 1798 built a Poor House about eight miles from West Chester on the banks of the Brandywine Creek. On three hundred twenty-five acres, they built a large brick building and a barn to house a working farm. This county almshouse system replaced the aid provided by individual townships. The intent was to provide a more consistent level of care and a more efficient use of funds. Reflecting their shared belief in the value of work, they required every able body to work, even the children. Residents of the Poor House sold homespun cloth, brooms, smoked meats, and even quarried limestone.

Early European settlers held African slaves, though in relatively small numbers. In Chester County the number of slave owners reached 4 percent of taxpayers in 1759. The strong Quaker influence in the affairs of the county discouraged slavery as did economic factors. At the start of the Civil War, African American residents represented about 8 percent of Chester County’s population; although a modest share, that was the highest percentage of African Americans in the counties of southeast Pennsylvania. Those free African Americans worked for hire or owned their own small businesses.

Chester County residents included people who actively embraced the social reform movements of the mid-nineteenth century such as anti-slavery, women’s rights, and temperance. Local European Americans, primarily Quaker, and African American abolitionists concealed runaway enslaved people who traveled from the South through the mid-Atlantic and north to safety in Canada. Anti-slavery sentiment was particularly strong in Kennett Square, a center of abolitionism. Disagreement over the authority of Quaker meetings and how best to address the issue of slavery led to the establishment of the Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends in 1853 (Longwood Yearly Meeting). The Longwood Meetinghouse opened in 1855. Its annual meetings hosted radicals and reformers such as  Sojourner Truth and William Lloyd Garrison. County residents also hosted the first Pennsylvania Woman’s Rights Convention in June 1852 in West Chester, advocating for equal legal, social, economic, and political rights, including suffrage.

The African American population grew after the Civil War, when iron companies in Phoenixville and Coatesville recruited Black workers in the South as a way of discouraging European immigrants from striking for higher wages. Animosity between working-class white and Black people  came to a head in Coatesville in 1911 with the horrifying death of Zachariah Walker, a Black man who was literally burned alive by a white mob after his conviction for killing a white guard at a local steel plant.

In part to address social inequality, the Society of Friends supported education for all children. As early as 1787 the Kennett Monthly Meeting began raising funds to support “schooling the children of such poor people, whether Friends or others, as live within the verge of the Monthly Meeting.” For the offspring of more affluent families, the county was dotted by dozens of single-sex boarding schools, for example West Chester Academy, a private, state-aided school opened in 1813. It went through a series of transformations across the years that resulted in its becoming West Chester University. In 1854 the Pennsylvania legislature incorporated another of Chester County’s prominent educational institutions as Ashmun Institute for the education of young men of color, a name that changed in 1866 to Lincoln University.

Despite important efforts to promote broad social advancement, the county entered the twentieth century with wide disparities among its residents. Wealthy families built rural retreats on large estates, many of them designed in the Victorian style popular among early twentieth century architects. West Whiteland Township, served by the Pennsylvania Railroad running along the Main Line, boasted an impressive collection of such homes. Important Philadelphia architects built many of them, for example the Francis W. Kennedy House designed by Frank Miles Day (1861-1918) in 1889 for a vice president of the Wilkes-Barre and Western Railway; the Joseph Price House, an older structure that was extensively altered in 1894 for a wealthy Philadelphia surgeon; and Meadowcourt (sometimes called Autun) which was designed by Edmund Gilchrist (1885-1953) in the French style in 1928 for insurance executive Benjamin Rush Jr. Owners of these large properties pursued diversions like foxhunting, for which a group of well-to-do families established the Whitelands Hunt.

In the Brandywine Valley in 1906 Pierre S. Dupont (1870-1954) of the wealthy Delaware Dupont family bought the Peirce Farm in Kennett Township and created an estate of incomparable beauty. He repaired and expanded the original Peirce farmhouse, connecting new and old wings with a conservatory whose courtyard was planted with exotic foliage and a marble fountain. In 1923, he added an elegant music room with walnut paneling, damask-covered walls, teak floors, and a molded plaster ceiling, opening onto the central axis of the main greenhouse. Dupont named his estate Longwood Gardens for the nearby Longwood Meeting House built by Quakers.

At the other end of the social spectrum, in nearby communities of southern Chester County, immigrants lived in deplorable conditions. Around the turn of the twentieth century, southern Europeans came to the county. One of the county’s most successful plant nurseries, Hoopes Brothers & Thomas in West Chester, began hiring Italian immigrants in 1906 because they could not find enough local labor. By 1908, newspapers were criticizing these immigrant workers for drying their laundry on the outside of their shanties. Despite the social stigma the Italians stayed, and a century later 11 percent of West Chester residents still claimed Italian ancestry. In industrial towns like Coatesville and Phoenixville, Eastern Europeans, notably Hungarians and Poles, served as a significant source for factory labor.

Puerto Ricans initially arrived in Chester County after World War II, while Mexicans arrived in the 1960s.  Recruiters brought them to Pennsylvania to farm labor-intensive crops like vegetables, fruits, and mushrooms. Kennett Square, the center of mushroom production, attracted a substantial Spanish-speaking population, as did the smaller community of Toughkenamon a mile west of Kennett Square.

Limited by their very low wages and undocumented status, many immigrants settled for dilapidated, overcrowded houses, apartments, or mobile homes. In 1994 the Alliance for Better Housing composed of clergy, mushroom growers, and local officials began working to improve housing conditions for farm workers and other low-income residents in southern Chester County. Additional help came from local organizations like United Way, La Comunidad Hispana, PathStone, Mission Santa Maria, local food cupboards and local churches.

Newcomers from South and East Asia lived a completely different immigrant experience from the mushroom workers in southern Chester County. Hired into knowledge economy jobs, they clustered in affluent townships along Route 202 or Route 30—for example, East Whiteland, West Whiteland, East Caln, and Upper Uwchlan—in the northeast section of the county, where they worked in technology and finance companies.

The county’s rapid economic ascent after 1980 attracted a workforce equipped to prosper in the knowledge, finance, and service economy. The 2014 American Community Survey showed that 49 percent of county residents had college degrees, the highest percentage among suburban counties surrounding Philadelphia. Of the population 25 years or older, 92 percent were high school graduates, 49 percent had a bachelor’s degree or higher, and 20 percent had a graduate or professional degree. In 2010, it was the highest-income county in Pennsylvania and twenty-fourth highest in the U.S. as measured by median household income.

Not all towns shared that success. Because of its reliance on the steel industry, the city of Coatesville suffered the most visible and dramatic setbacks in the county. Lukens Steel had flourished there since the early 1800s, building major national projects from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to the Battleship USS New Jersey. But faced with competition from foreign steel producers, in 1982 the company reduced its workforce by 22 percent between January and September 1982 and cut the pay of salaried employees by 10 percent. After 187 years of continuous operation, Lukens Steel Company sold its Coatesville operation to Bethlehem Steel Company, which in turn sold the plant to new international owners. Each new owner reduced the workforce, so that by the end of the twentieth century the steel plant that had employed over six thousand workers at midcentury provided jobs for fewer than one thousand.

These contrasting fortunes yielded substantial differences in tax resources available to town governments, and that in turn produced unequal public services. Among the fourteen school districts in Chester County, the highest-spending district, the Great Valley School District, serving the high tech corridor, spent $20,588 per student in 2015 while the lowest-spending district, the Oxford Area School District in southern Chester County, spent barely more than $13,000 per student. To worsen inequalities, lower-spending districts were educating larger shares of low-income children. In 2015 only 14 percent of the school population in the high-spending Great Valley School District had incomes low enough to qualify for free and reduced-price lunches. That same year, the low-spending Oxford Area School District served a student body in which 40 percent qualified for subsidized lunches.

Development patterns

The Pennsylvania Turnpike (Interstate 76) dramatically altered development in the northeast section of the county. Builders completed the Chester County section of the Turnpike in 1950. Designed as a limited-access route to allow fast travel across Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Turnpike initially provided just two exits located within Chester County (Downingtown and Malvern/Phoenixville). Those two exits became focal points for growth, as did the Valley Forge/King of Prussia exit located in Montgomery County right at the border with Chester County.

Another example of an expressway influencing development was Route 202, a highway dating back to 1926. In 1964, the Pennsylvania Department of Highways designed a continuous four-lane expressway along the US 202 corridor, opening the section of that new expressway south from King of Prussia toward West Chester in 1967. Over the next several decades that stretch of Route 202 attracted hundreds of computer-related companies, biomedical concerns, and other service and information- based firms.

Suburbanizing relatively late, Chester County in the 1970s offered developers a chance to acquire huge open parcels on which to build a series of high-profile and often controversial industrial parks. Some occupied more than a square mile of ground, making them larger than some boroughs in Chester County. Businessman Raymond Carr (1925-2015) built Chester County’s first industrial park on what had previously been cornfields. Carr and his partner David Knauer (1928-2011) recognized the value of farmland sitting near the Downingtown exit off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which was the only connection to the national superhighway system in Chester County. In 1965 the partners bought 180 acres for sale in Lionville and turned them into Pickering Creek Industrial Park, a collection of more than a dozen multipurpose buildings that housed companies specializing in product testing, manufacturing, and eventually biotechnology and life sciences.

In 1969 not far from the Turnpike’s Valley Forge exit, developer Richard Fox (b. 1927) bought Chesterbrook Farm, located between the turnpike on its northern border and Route 202 on its southern border. His plan, unusual for combining residential neighborhoods with a corporate complex, faced stiff public opposition when unveiled in 1971. Opponents feared that the traffic it generated would negatively impact Valley Forge State (later National) Park. The ensuing legal battle went all the way to the state Supreme Court. Hundreds of residents attended meetings and signed petitions against construction, but eventually Fox prevailed and began to build housing in 1977, gradually adding a shopping center, restaurants, corporate offices, and a hotel, along with open spaces.

The business complex that launched Route 202’s reputation as Tech Alley was the Great Valley Corporate Center, started in 1974 on pasture land located between a landfill and a quarry. Philadelphia-based developer Willard Rouse (1942-2003) convinced young companies to locate in his new development by building facilities to their specifications and helping them finance the move to Chester County. Biotechnology companies valued a location that put them close to Philadelphia universities and medical centers and at the same time close to pharmaceutical companies like SmithKline, Merck, and Rhone-Poulenc Rorer.

Also in the mid-1970s, Willard Rouse’s uncle, James W. Rouse (1914-96), built the Exton Square Mall. The Maryland developer acquired a tract of land at the intersection of Route 30 and Route 100 that held little more than a few gas stations, a drive-in movie, a diner and a motel, and built his mall there in 1972. Exton Square remained a major retail center well into the twenty-first century. Its size and scope attracted additional services, including a public library, the Exton Transportation Center with connections to the King of Prussia Mall, and medical facilities.

Watching such large-scale, master-planned developments multiply during the 1970s and 1980s, Chester County residents feared the loss of open land and the road congestion that such developments brought with them. Those apprehensions brought an end to one of the most ambitious proposals ever considered in the county. In 1987 Willard Rouse announced plans to build Churchill, a 1,500-acre mixed-use development on Church Farm School property on Route 30 in Exton. That unspoiled expanse of cornfields was so massive that it spanned parts of four townships, forcing Rouse to negotiate for years with multiple local governments to secure permission to build. In the end the sheer scale of development proved too much for local residents. Both East Whiteland and West Whiteland townships denied Rouse permission to build.

Taking control of development patterns

From 1969 to 2000, Chester County lost twenty-six percent of its farmland to development. If that pace had been allowed to continue, all of the county’s farmland would have been paved over within forty years. To stave off such a future, the county government adopted a dramatic and far-reaching plan titled Landscapes: Managing Change in Chester County to shape its growth until 2020. The plan prescribed preserving open space while directing future development into already-existing towns, to ensure Chester County would remain attractive as a place for knowledge industries to locate. Although the county government could do little more than offer technical assistance for implementing the plan to local governments that retained control of land use under Pennsylvania law, nonetheless by 2015 about one quarter of the land area in the county had been permanently preserved.

Some private developers fell in line with county plans by making investments that reduced the number of auto trips workers needed to make each day. For example, the owners of Great Valley Corporate Center redesigned their auto-dependent complex to incorporate everyday services like day care, fitness centers, stores, and restaurants within a walkable mixed-use development. Other developers saw opportunities in older boroughs like Phoenixville and West Chester to reinvest in Victorian structures and community character that would attract residents.

Still other builders sought to create new housing on smaller-than-standard-size lots so they could permanently preserve open space for the pleasure of community residents. They found local zoning laws a major stumbling block. A 2007 book written about one company’s effort to build a high-density housing development dubbed “New Daleville” showed how difficult it was to convince town officials to adjust standard zoning to allow a village-style approach with small lots and shared open space. The developer persisted and eventually succeeded, but not without enormous resistance from residents who supported more conventional subdivision designs.

In one important respect, Chester County’s late suburbanization proved a blessing. It gave county leaders a greater chance to preserve farms, wooded areas, and historic landscapes than in other counties in the Philadelphia region. Yet the negative consequence of delayed development was that Chester County possessed even less public transit than neighboring counties. Chester County entered the twenty-first century with little hope of convincing motorists to abandon their cars. The county’s heavy auto dependence, combined with a pattern of erecting massive job centers along major highways, virtually ensured that traffic congestion would continue to be its residents’ unceasing complaint.

Carolyn T. Adams is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University and associate editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. This essay incorporates information and suggestions provided by Laurie A.  Rofini, Archives Director, and Cliff C. Parker, Archivist, of Chester County Archives and Records Services and Chester County Historical Society. (Author information current at time of publication.)

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.)

Delaware Avenue originated in the late eighteenth century as an irregular footpath built atop filled-up docks and wharves that had outlived their usefulness. It became a more formal thoroughfare as a result of $500,000 left to the city of Philadelphia by wealthy merchant Stephen Girard (1750-1831). Much of the Port of Philadelphia’s rise to importance is traceable to this bequest.

Girard lived very close to Philadelphia’s busy waterfront, at his mansion and counting house on Water Street near Market Street. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sailing ships and then steamships bound for England, the West Indies, China, India, and other remote destinations routinely left from the city’s waterfront. Ferries and other boats on the Delaware River also linked Philadelphia to Camden and communities on the river and along the East Coast.

Bequest Funds the Avenue

Girard was familiar and unhappy with the congested state of Philadelphia’s waterside pathway as it had developed by the early nineteenth century. He knew that trade had suffered without a capable waterfront roadway. In his will, he specified that a wide boulevard should be constructed beside the river and specified that this street be named “Delaware Avenue.” His bequest allowed for extending the street eastward into the Delaware River, incorporating existing docks, and using landfill to create the roadbed.

Taking place between 1834 and 1845, the construction of Delaware Avenue produced a proper street twenty-five feet wide, paved with Belgian blocks, between Vine and South Streets. Girard’s money also initiated the construction of bulkheads and the first lighting by the river—first with gas lamps, later with arc lamps. The City of Philadelphia expended $249,696 of Girard’s legacy.

Commerce increased rapidly, as Girard had envisioned. But Delaware Avenue became a victim of its own success, as traffic tie-ups and other problems grew each year. In response, between 1857 and 1867 the city widened the avenue to fifty feet, and expended $313,726 from the Delaware Avenue Fund. The thoroughfare also was extended north of Vine Street and south of South Street in the 1870s and farther thereafter. Between 1897 and 1900, the avenue was broadened again, to 150 feet. This work was the most expensive civic improvement project in Philadelphia up to that time.

As it developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Delaware Avenue became the main transportation corridor for the shipping and handling of food and general cargo for all of Philadelphia. Early photographs show hordes of horse-drawn wagons jamming the street, most loaded with perishable goods. Dock Street near Delaware Avenue was the city’s primary food distribution center for more than a century.

Belt Line Railroad

Beginning in the 1890s two sets of railroad tracks also ran on Delaware Avenue to meet the freight hauling needs of docks and industries alongside the river. Known as the Philadelphia Belt Line Railroad, these tracks extended about eighteen miles from Port Richmond to South Philadelphia. Also, the Delaware Avenue Elevated operated atop the southbound lanes of the avenue from Arch Street (where it connected with the Market Street Subway at Front Street) to South Street, where it stub-ended. Also known as the “Ferry Branch” or “Ferry Line,” its stations served the many ferries to New Jersey. The transit line lost passengers as ferry traffic diminished after the Delaware River (Benjamin Franklin) Bridge opened in 1926. Most ferries ceased operating by 1938, and the Ferry Branch stopped running the following year. The elevated structure was then dismantled; not a trace remains.

The Belt Line Railroad’s tracks and Delaware Avenue’s crumbling Belgian-block surface made automobile travel on the street perilous for decades. The bumpy street was joked about as a road that could induce a pregnant woman into labor. In 1990, a Philadelphia Inquirer editorial declared: “The roadway is so damn ugly, decrepit and dangerous, no one would want to be anywhere near it.”

Two years later, the Italian community of South Philadelphia persuaded City Council to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus sailing to America by renaming Delaware Avenue after the explorer. Citizens in the northern precincts of the city, aided by members of the local Lenni-Lenape tribe, fought the name change. Although a compromise was reached in which the avenue was renamed only south of Spring Garden Street, street signs reading “C Columbus Blvd” were defaced for years after.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania paved and landscaped Delaware Avenue in the 1990s. Instead of a rough stone roadway filled with ruts and railroad tracks, the street is now smooth and ornamented with greenery. Columbus Boulevard is, indeed, a fulfillment of Stephen Girard’s desire for a wide, tree-lined thoroughfare along the Delaware.

Harry Kyriakodis is the author of Philadelphia’s Lost Waterfront (The History Press, 2011) and Northern Liberties: The Story of a Philadelphia River Ward (The History Press, 2012). He is a founding/certified member of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides and has lived at Pier 3 Condominium since 1997, when and where his fascination with Philadelphia’s waterfront district began. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Delaware Bay does not often get the historical acknowledgement received by its estuarine neighbor, the Delaware River, but it exerted equal weight in shaping the Philadelphia region’s cultural and economic development. Over seven hundred square miles in size and bordered by New Jersey and Delaware, the Delaware Bay is one of America’s premier maritime gateways, connecting the Philadelphia region to both international and domestic trade. While the bay’s extensive salt marshes, along with limited sheltered harbors, prevented certain economic and military uses, its natural resources duly compensated for these environmental obstacles. The bay’s waters fostered an array of navigational skills among shoreline residents, a tradition that would later pay dividends when sail and steam transport expanded in the nineteenth century. Stands of timber lining the bay’s shoreline and tributaries facilitated the growth of shipbuilding, an industry that flourished until almost the end of the twentieth century. Most notable, the use of the bay’s marine resources—from its well-known oysters to salt hay—formed the backbone of its economic fortunes for the four centuries following European contact.

Taking note of what was already apparent to local Native American populations, colonial observers envisioned the bay’s far-reaching potential. Referring to the Delaware Bay as part of a “Terrestrial Canaan,” a 1676 promotional broadside for West New Jersey singled out the bay’s “great numbers of Sturgions, Lobsters, Oysters, and many other Sea-Fish,” as well as its capacity to serve as a gateway for natural resource use “a hundred Miles into the Country.” William Penn (1644–1718) cast the Delaware Bay and its resources as an organizing agent of Philadelphia’s regional dynamics and the city’s rise as an international entrepôt.

Following the pattern of the Dutch and Swedes who preceded them, English settlers continued the practice of harvesting the Delaware Bay’s rich stores of fur-bearing animals and coordinated these activities with trade among the Lenape Indians. But being intent on permanent settlement, the British instituted the commercial use of the bay’s waterborne and terrestrial resources. Wider consumption of shellfish (oysters, clams) and finfish (shad, sturgeon, rockfish) raised concern over the sustainability of these stocks enough to prompt New Jersey to enact in 1719 one of the first laws in America regulating the use of natural oyster beds.

Soils along the bay’s shore were not as fertile as those along the Delaware River, but some areas did produce profitable yields of grain crops and corn, and farmers working along the Delaware Bay and its tributaries during the colonial and early national periods availed themselves of vessel transport afforded by this estuarine system. The environs around Greenwich, New Jersey—which straddled the colony/state’s inner and outer coastal plains—was most notable in this regard, and Greenwich emerged as the Delaware Bay’s most prominent eighteenth-century port and supplier to Philadelphia..

Amid these agricultural developments, construction of earthen dikes and banks enabled farmers to reclaim tidal marshes and meadows, transforming the bay’s shoreline. Once drained, these banked meadows allowed efficient harvesting of cordgrass, provided grazing for livestock and sheep, and, when sufficiently relieved of prior salt water content, could be used to raise a variety of crops. The bay’s moderate climate allowed colonial settlers—particularly those who arrived from New England’s colder temperatures—to pasture animals at longer monthly intervals in salt meadows and reclaimed tidal lands.

Shallops and flatboats brought agricultural commodities from the bay shore to Philadelphia, as well as a variety of products derived from the region’s timber supply. Eighteenth-century newspaper accounts and wills from the Delaware Valley highlight the importance of woodlots, particularly important in bay shore areas where soil conditions hindered profitable agriculture. Among those who prepared timber for market were the area’s Swedish and Finnish settlers. Having brought their well-known woodman’s skills to the New World, they were conspicuous participants in the Delaware Bay region’s wood economy. Delaware Bay residents harvested merchantable cordwood for export to Philadelphia and provided other wood products such as barrel staves, ship planking, naval stores (tar, pitch), and charcoal. The bay region’s impressive stands of Atlantic white cedar provided valuable roof shingles and house sheathing as well as material for boatbuilding, a regional tradition that endured until the end of the twentieth century.

While agriculture and wood harvesting carried forward into the nineteenth century, joined by an increasing emphasis on truck farming that continued into the twentieth century, the economic ambitions gripping the Philadelphia region transformed the use of the bay’s waters. Central to these commercial and industrial goals was the need to move commodities, particularly in bulk, to and from Philadelphia through the Delaware Bay to points all along the East Coast of the United States. The Navigation Act of 1817 limited such shipping, known as the coastwise trade, to American-flagged vessels. Duly incentivized by shipping demand and legal protections, bay shore residents from New Jersey and Delaware built, crewed, and owned coastal schooners (principally two- and three-masted). Experienced in working the water, they seized on the opportunities presented by this emerging maritime economy.

Arguably the Delaware Bay’s most significant tributary, New Jersey’s Maurice River sported a robust schedule of coastal schooner and barkentine construction between the 1830s and 1880s. An important 1882 survey of U.S. shipbuilding by Henry Hall (1845–1920) showed the Maurice River towns of Mauricetown, Dorchester, and Leesburg were the beneficiaries of these activities and singled out Mauricetown as “being dependent on building [vessels] and navigation [coastwise trade]” with “50 to 60 sea captains living in the place, [where] almost everybody owns shares in vessels.”

These same economic ambitions ultimately impacted the Delaware Bay’s most valuable marine resource—the oyster. Well-established as a culinary staple throughout the Delaware Bay/River corridor—from Philadelphia’s finest dining rooms to an array of oyster bars and cellars serving ordinary citizens—New Jersey stood ready to exploit the market potential of its rich oyster beds. Legislation in the mid-nineteenth century authorized the transplanting of seed oysters from natural spawning areas to barren bay bottoms privately leased from the state. Oystermen found that transplanting oysters to the higher salinity levels of Maurice River Cove improved growth, enhanced the quality of their meats, and offered greater control in cultivating their product for market.  When ready for market, schooners and sloops transported oysters to Philadelphia.

The arrival and improvement of rail connections along New Jersey’s Delaware Bay shoreline, from the 1870s through the early 1900s, dramatically transformed the oyster industry and attracted unprecedented levels of investment from throughout the region. The West Jersey and Seashore Railroad (WJSR), a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Central Railroad of New Jersey (CRRNJ) financed the construction of modern shipping facilities at, respectively, “Maurice River” on the eastern side of the Maurice River and at “Bivalve” on the river’s western side. Servicing far-flung markets from rail connections in Philadelphia and New York City, these facilities helped drive an ever-increasing volume of oyster harvests. Each of these multiunit facilities teemed with activity as workers bagged, barreled, and shipped oysters and, eventually, removed them from their shells and canned them in new shucking houses. This work linked Philadelphia’s commission merchants and restaurateurs—many of whom operated from the city’s Dock Street Market—to vessel captains, policy makers, and scientists, as well as to African Americans who arrived from the Chesapeake to work on oyster boats and as shuckers. All this activity reflected the oyster industry’s one-time status as the economic bedrock of the Delaware Bay region with its inextricable ties to Philadelphia.

New transportation methods also transformed the Delaware Bay’s shad and sturgeon fisheries. Each species returned to its natal grounds to spawn in the spring, a ritual that energized a number of small communities on the New Jersey and Delaware sides of the bay. Of all these fishing sites, Bayside—outside of Greenwich—was arguably the most prominent due to CRRNJ rail connections linking it to Philadelphia and New York markets. The combination of shad and sturgeon skiffs, floating cabins, and shoreside processing buildings defined this amphibious extension of Philadelphia’s economic sphere. But neither fishery was immune from overfishing and pollution. When sturgeon fishermen met in Philadelphia around 1900 to organize the Sturgeon Fishermen’s Protective Society, it was too late to stem the tide of depletion. The combined effect of pollution and fishermen unwilling to curb their catch meant that the sturgeon fishery—once plentiful enough to allow people to affordably purchase caviar sandwiches—was in the midst of its final days.

Rail and steamship service operating from Philadelphia opened the Delaware Bay to recreational activity during the second half of the nineteenth century, and this trend continued in the twentieth as automobiles further democratized leisure pursuits. Hotels, such as the Warner House at the confluence of the Delaware Bay and New Jersey’s Cohansey River, were emblematic of this enthusiasm and accommodated visitors from throughout the mid-Atlantic region and beyond. But smaller guesthouses and cottages were more the norm. By the late nineteenth century, Fortescue, New Jersey—centrally located on the Delaware Bay—epitomized the modest accommodations that typified vacation life along the bay. Some visitors swam, others engaged in recreational fishing and crabbing, while others simply sat on the beach and gazed at the bay’s glistening waters. The bay shore’s plentiful waterfowl and shore birds attracted hunters from Philadelphia’s most prominent social circles, and they frequented plush accommodations such as the Sora Gun Club on the Cohansey River. Thomas Eakins’s (1844–1916) paintings of hunting scenes on the bay brought national attention to these activities and, in turn, fostered interest from the Philadelphia Sketch Club, the Philadelphia Watercolor Society, and a host of documentary photographers and writers motivated by the region’s local color. The Delaware Bay inspired participants of the nature study movement, including writer Dallas Lore Sharp (1870–1929), a Delaware Bay native whose rise to national prominence was grounded in experiencing the bay’s natural endowments. The cumulative effect of cultural and environmental commentary laid the foundation for conservation of the bay’s tidal marshes throughout the twentieth century, as well as promoting the roots of ecotourism at birding sites whose reputation garnered international fame.

When, in the early nineteenth century, federal and state authorities began planning the implementation of modern navigational aids in the Delaware Bay and along its shorelines, they unabashedly signaled this estuarine system’s critical role in advancing the fortunes of the greater Philadelphia area. The city’s status as America’s largest freshwater port underscored the urgency of these measures, and the Delaware Bay became a crucible for some of the nation’s most important developments in lighthouse technology and a focal point of work conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Anchored to the bay’s floor, channel lights at Brandywine Shoals (1850), Fourteen Foot Bank (1885), Cross Ledge (1877/78), Miah Maull Shoal (1909), and Ship John Shoal (1877) epitomized the environmental dominion and economic ambition that drove these engineering measures. Joining these channel lights were a collection of shoreline lighthouses whose appearance conformed to regional vernacular building idioms in New Jersey and Delaware. These navigational aids form a technological backdrop of longstanding challenges that have confronted the Delaware Bay, such as biological invasions—most notably oyster diseases MSX (haplosporidium nelsoni) and dermo (Perkinsus marinus).

This technological context has been central to historical debates over the effects of water diversion farther up the Delaware Estuary and ecological concerns surrounding the dredging of a deeper ship channel and barge traffic on the bay’s tributaries. Passage of federal legislation in the 1880s made dredging a focal point of efforts to improve the navigability of the Delaware Bay and River. While deepening the channel allowed larger vessels greater access to Philadelphia, it also punctuated the environmental cost of accidents (oil spillage, fires) involved in such shipping. Deepening the bay and river channel also raised the possibility of elevated salinity levels farther up the estuary and the potential ecological toll of changes in its water chemistry.

Starting in the 1950s, modern environmentalism reframed the utopic vision of the Delaware Bay cast by European settlers four centuries earlier. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Delaware Bay was still an ever-present backdrop of economic ambitions driving redevelopment of the Port of Philadelphia, along with similar initiatives at ports in Salem, Paulsboro, Gloucester, and Camden, New Jersey, and Wilmington, Delaware. With intermodal shipping now firmly ensconced in Philadelphia’s economy, the Delaware Bay’s shipping lanes assumed renewed importance in regional planning. But greater environmental consciousness contributed to revised perspectives on the bay’s future. Operation of the Salem and Hope Creek Nuclear Generating Station (construction started in 1968) in Lower Alloways Creek, New Jersey, did not go unchallenged. Studies in the 1980s documented the generating station’s role in Delaware Bay fish mortality. Environmentalism’s most conspicuous impact led to unprecedented emphasis on recreational uses of the Delaware Bay and the rise of ecotourism in the region. These priorities led to renewed interest in the Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge (1937) in Delaware and the creation of the Cape May National Wildlife Refuge (1989) in New Jersey. Complementing these federal measures was the active acquisition of shoreline areas by the states of New Jersey and Delaware for public use. In the twenty-first century, the bay’s present and future remained immersed in contested perspectives over how its human use and ecological health could best be sustained.

Michael J. Chiarappa is Professor of History at Quinnipiac University and co-editor (with Brian C. Black) of Nature’s Entrepot: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds (Pittsburgh University Press, 2012). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Issuing from two neighboring locations in the Catskills region of New York state, the Delaware flows for 330 miles to the Atlantic Ocean. The West Branch of the river starts in the town of Jefferson southwest of Albany, New York, while the East Branch springs from a small pond nearby in the village of Grand Gorge. Those two headwaters join together to flow southward, picking up additional water from tributaries, including the Lehigh River, the Schuylkill River, and the Brandywine Creek, before finally emptying into the Delaware Bay.

The river’s massive watershed—covering 13,539 square miles of territory within the states of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware—was once the homeland of the Lenape, who based their collective identity as a people on the fact that they all fished in its waters, drank from its feeder streams, and relied on its currents to transport their canoes over long distances. They called it “Lenape Wihittuck,” meaning the rapid stream of the Lenape. So closely did the early Europeans identify the indigenous people with the great river that, once they had renamed the river for the English Lord De La Warr (1577-1618) in the mid-1600s, the newcomers began referring to the native inhabitants as the Delaware people.

Henry Hudson Arrives

Among the first Europeans to encounter the Lenape, the English navigator Henry Hudson (c. 1565-c. 1611) arrived at Delaware Bay while sailing up the coast of North America for the Dutch. In 1640 the Dutch established their first trading post at Fort Nassau (near present-day Gloucester City, New Jersey), exchanging Dutch cloth and goods for beaver pelts.

When in 1682 the English Quaker William Penn arrived with his charter from Charles II (1630-85), making him sole proprietor of the colonial territory, he deliberately sited his commercial center of Philadelphia where it could serve the needs of settlements up and down the river, but also connect the colony to more distant markets. Early settlers quickly began to produce commodities, not just to support their own needs, but also for export.

They built ferries across the river to enable easy travel over large stretches of the province. The Quaker village of Bristol was established in 1697 as a market town for Bucks County farmers. The ferry there took passengers from the Pennsylvania side to Burlington, New Jersey. Eventually, Bristol grew into an important commercial and ship-building center. Farther north on the New Jersey side of the river, the town of Lambertville began as the site where in 1733 Coryell’s Ferry connected New Jersey travelers to the Pennsylvania village of New Hope. Lambertville gradually developed across the centuries into a manufacturing center for paper, rubber, spokes, and wheels.

Undoubtedly, the most famous crossing was George Washington‘s (1732-99) daring decision to transport his troops across the river at McConkey’s Ferry on Christmas night 1776 and lead them to a successful surprise attack against the Hessian troops quartered at Trenton, New Jersey, the morning of December 26.

The River Underpins Industrialization

The creeks that fed into the Delaware River spawned some of the earliest water-powered mills in the area. Where the city of Trenton now stands, a gristmill was built in 1679 to process the grain produced by local farmers. Once milled, the grain was sent downriver to Philadelphia for export. In the eighteenth century iron mills and forges sprang up along the river, and by 1760 there was a thriving colonial iron industry that exploited the ore, wood, and water power found there. By the 1840s, sawmills were located at most of the major tributaries in the upper Delaware River Valley, rafting their lumber down the river.

To transport other commodities from the Upper Delaware, however, producers needed more than the swift flow of the river. Riverboats, barges, and rafts carrying lumber, produce, and other commodities to market had to make their way through a succession of rapids, falls, and shallows impassable during large parts of the year. The steep waterfall located at Trenton discouraged large boats from traveling from the Upper Delaware all the way south to Philadelphia.

The pressure to overcome these obstructions increased dramatically with the discovery of valuable anthracite coal in northeastern Pennsylvania. That motivated the Pennsylvania legislature to build a canal alongside the Delaware River. By 1830 anthracite coal mined in northeastern Pennsylvania was gaining a growing market in Philadelphia because it burned hotter than other coals in factory furnaces. To connect the coalfields of northern Pennsylvania to urban manufacturers, builders completed the Delaware Division of the Pennsylvania Canal in 1832. That sixty-mile-long Delaware Canal ran from Bristol in lower Bucks County all the way north to Easton, along the right bank of the Delaware River, connecting at its north end to the Lehigh Canal and opening the anthracite coalfields to markets in Philadelphia. In fact, anthracite made up more than 90 percent of the Delaware Canal’s cargo.

Early mills and lumberyards coexisted with abundant fish populations. During the colonial period, the river and bay boasted more than three hundred species of fish including catfish, lamprey, eel, trout, smelt, perch, and pike. Sturgeon and shad figured especially prominently in the diets of the colonists. For example, the shad was said to have saved George Washington’s troops from starvation. At the river’s southern extreme, Delaware Bay spawned a legendary oyster industry, which prospered until the end of the nineteenth century when harvests started shrinking. None of these aquatic populations remained as plentiful once the river became industrialized.

Railroads Arrive

Railroads gained popularity in the mid-1800s, reducing the waterway’s value for transporting goods and travelers. But at the same time, railroads enlarged the market area for the manufacturing plants that lined its banks. Gradually the stretch of river from Trenton south to the Delaware Bay became one of the most highly industrialized regions of the United States, producing textiles, rubber and leather goods, ships, railroad equipment, and steel. Early manufacturers clustered along the shore in industrial villages like Frankford, Kensington, and Bridesburg. In the 1870s Henry Disston developed the entire Tacony neighborhood surrounding his northeast Philadelphia saw works. In Camden, prior to the Civil War, factory owners built housing for workers close to their waterfront mills, sawmills, lumberyards, and railroad companies.

The industrial neighborhood of Frankford in Philadelphia offered a good example of the river’s role in Philadelphia’s industrial development. In the 1660s, Swedes built a gristmill on the northeast bank of Frankford Creek. Then in the early nineteenth century larger factories began to appear in Frankford, attracting more workers, which in turn led to the building of more housing, shops, and services. Like the majority of the factories in the rest of the city, many of those plants produced textiles. In the period just before World War I, Frankford boasted over 150 mills.

Many locations along the river developed industrial specialties. In 1848 German immigrant John Roebling (1806-69) built a plant in Trenton making wire rope that became one of New Jersey’s famed factories, building suspension bridges that included the Brooklyn Bridge. By 1904, when the business needed a larger site with access to the water, it built a new facility on the river at Kinkora, some ten miles from the Trenton plant. Bridesburg spawned a concentration of chemical companies during the Civil War that later became serious polluters.

Major shipyards along the Delaware River included the Cramp Yard in Kensington, the New York Shipbuilding Yard in Camden, and the Sun Shipyard in Chester. Other manufacturers on its banks included oil refineries, food-processing companies, and sugar refineries. In Wilmington, the DuPont Company chose to locate its heavily polluting Chambers Works in New Jersey across the Delaware River from Wilmington. There they produced dyes, petroleum chemicals, Freon, and other substances. Many of these companies chose the river location because it could supply large quantities of water used in production or to dispose of effluents easily and cheaply.

Recreation on the River

The coming of railroads served not only to transport goods, but also passengers, including some who rode the rails to enjoy the scenic beauty of the Delaware Water Gap, a notch that the Delaware River cut into the Kittatinny mountain ridge about seventy-five miles west of New York City. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, the Delaware Water Gap became one of the most popular summer resorts in the eastern United States. In 1856 the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railways opened a line from New York City when only one hotel served the water gap. Soon a dozen more hotels served visitors who came to enjoy the scenery, hiking, rafting and boating.

Closer to Philadelphia the river spawned an entirely different kind of recreation at the turn of the twentieth century when trolley companies invested in amusement parks as a way to increase their weekend traffic. The Delaware River became a favored spot for the popular new pastime, attracting many city dwellers. In Gloucester County, New Jersey, Lincoln Park opened in 1890, followed by Washington Park in 1895. For several decades, both attracted thousands of visitors. In Salem County, Riverview Beach Park opened in 1891 with picnic tables, a dance hall, carousel, and eventually a Ferris wheel; here, most visitors from Philadelphia and Wilmington came by river. In Burlington County, the owner of land on Burlington Island built a pier, pavilion, bathhouse for swimmers, and ice cream stand in 1900. This became the Island Beach Amusement Park whose roller coaster, “the Greyhound,” proved to be its most popular attraction.

Another popular recreation spot, the seventy-mile stretch of the Delaware and Raritan Canal, became a state park in 1974—a recreational corridor for canoeing, jogging, hiking, bicycling, fishing, and horseback riding. Built in the 1830s to connect the Delaware and Raritan Rivers in order to transport coal from Pennsylvania to New York City, the canal towpath ran from New Brunswick to Trenton; a canal towpath/rail trail from Trenton to Bull’s Island; and a rail trail from Bull’s Island to Frenchtown. Its wooden bridges and historic remnants of locks make this walkway an attraction for history lovers.

Environmental Degradation

From colonial days, run-off from tanneries and slaughterhouses contaminated the river. Down through several centuries, increasing numbers of people and enterprises along the river used it as a public sewer to carry untreated waste from their properties. With the growth of manufacturing, the danger to the river increased markedly. Sewers that mixed together stormwater and sewage in a single pipe emptied directly into the river, dumping industrial wastes. Waterborne diseases, particularly cholera and typhoid fever, sickened thousands of Philadelphians during the years between the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century. Especially deadly outbreaks of those diseases during the 1890s forced the city to open the Torresdale sand filtration plant in 1908 as a way to clean water taken from the Delaware. By 1912 the city was chlorinating all city water.

Despite such measures to treat the water taken out of the Delaware, the river itself remained an open sewer, filled with industrial and human wastes. In the early 1900s, Philadelphia’s sewers were dumping more than two hundred thousand tons of solids into the Delaware each year. A 1934 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer complained that the few remaining shad found in the river tasted like petroleum.

In 1948, Congress passed the federal Water Pollution Control Act making federal dollars available for river cleanup. That helped Philadelphia to construct three primary sewage treatment plants, the last of which was completed by 1953. Those plants removed solids from the city’s sewage going into the river, but did not eliminate the waterborne bacteria that continued to consume all the available oxygen, depriving fish of the oxygen they needed to thrive in the Delaware. Suburban growth during the 1950s and 1960s in popular riverside locations like the Levittown housing development and the nearby U.S. Steel Plant at Fairless Hills added to the load carried by the Delaware.

The largest water users were power plants. Other large water-using industries were steel, petroleum, chemicals, and paper. More water was used for cooling than for all other industrial purposes. And since warm water contains less dissolved oxygen than cooler water, fish and other aquatic life were suffering from rising water temperatures in addition to contaminants in the river water. Although the river’s defenders tried to mount clean-water campaigns in the early 1920s and late 1930s, industrial lobbyists resisted those efforts.

Managing Spillover Effects

Disputes arose when the actions taken in one state affected the citizens and enterprises located in other states. As the population of the basin increased over time, some of the most bitter disagreements involved droughts and floods. For example, in 1928 New York City started to draw water from several tributaries of the Delaware River, putting New York in direct conflict with villages and towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania that were using the Delaware for their water supply. In 1929 New Jersey initiated (and Pennsylvania joined) a bill of complaint asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stop New York City from diverting water from the Delaware River basin. In 1931, the Supreme Court ruled that the interests of each of the four river-basin states—Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania—should be given equal consideration in the management of the shared waterway. The court allowed New York City to draw 440 million gallons of water a day from the Delaware and its upstream. That decision, however, did not resolve the competition for river water.

To resolve such disputes over the river’s shared resources, in 1936 the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and New York formed the Interstate Commission on the Delaware River Basin (Incodel) to control and prevent water pollution, plan the conservation of water supply for the use of the cities, and plan development along the banks of the entire river.

Incodel proceeded aggressively to press all four state legislatures to pass pollution-control measures. To support its campaign it prevailed on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to conduct scientific water pollution studies and to work with regional companies on a new voluntary plan to reduce oil and refuse dumping. However, industrial production during World War II reversed the modest improvements achieved during the 1930s. During the war years companies were allowed to dump more waste than at any other time in history. Regulators were unwilling to restrain producers supporting the war effort. The Port of Philadelphia became so vile that a number of ships simply refused to dock at their scheduled destination. Tests indicated that the river water entering the city’s water treatment plants was the most polluted of any major U.S. city.

Delaware River Basin Compact

Seeking a new approach to shared management of this critical resource, the four states in 1961 joined with the federal government to create a successor organization. In that year President John Kennedy (1917-63) signed the Delaware River Basin Compact creating the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), which absorbed the staff and assets of Incodel. In addition to the basin’s four state governors, the compact also included the regional U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—becoming the first equal partnership between federal and state governments in river basin management. The DRBC was not intended to coerce participating jurisdictions to comply with the majority preference, but to serve as a framework for negotiating tensions and conflicts in the management of the river.

As the first ever federal-state watershed compact, the DRBC was the first agency to specify load allocations for river polluters in 1968, holding them to standards more stringent than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued years later. The DRBC’s efforts were strengthened in 1972 when Congress passed the Clean Water Act, making it illegal to dump pollutants into the nation’s rivers without a permit from EPA and required wastewater treatment plants to improve their standards. The key to that law’s success in the Delaware watershed, as elsewhere in the U.S., was that Congress supplied 75 percent of the money needed to upgrade local plants. Between 1972 and 1990, over $1.5 billion was spent on wastewater treatment plants along the Delaware between Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Trenton, noticeably improving levels of dissolved oxygen.

In the 1960s and again in the early 1980s, the DRBC focused much of its effort on mediating among the states during a series of punishing droughts. Then in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the river experienced three major floods in three years (2004–2006) that severely damaged homes and land along the river banks. Enraged residents of towns along the Delaware, mainly from the Water Gap south to the Lambertville/New Hope area, blamed the floods on New York City leaders who insisted on keeping the water levels too high in the reservoirs that served their city, as a hedge against shortages. In response to the standoff the DRBC crafted a Flexible Flow Management Program in 2007. The plan allowed a seasonal drawdown of a specific volume of water from the reservoirs, based on forecasts of likely snowpack buildup during the winter.

Although this approach to meeting the conflicting goals of the state governments did not satisfy all parties equally, local governments along the river worked in association with DRBC and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to implement the plan.

Shared Governance of the Philadelphia Port

Like the river’s shared hazards, its infrastructure also called for coordinated management. Among the most important installations have been the bridges that connect Pennsylvania with New Jersey. In 1919 the two states created the Delaware River Bridge Joint Commission to build a bridge connecting central Philadelphia with downtown Camden and to collect tolls to maintain that bridge. To great fanfare, the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) opened in 1926 just days before Philadelphia celebrated the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Over the decades, the agency renamed itself the Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA) and constructed three more bridges across the river—the Walt Whitman, Commodore Barry, and Betsy Ross—along with a bistate rail line (PATCO) to carry riders from the New Jersey suburbs into and out of Philadelphia.

The mainly constructive relations between the two states within the DRPA hit a snag in the mid-1990s over a controversial plan to deepen the Delaware to forty-five feet by dredging the river bottom. Since 1941, the river’s main channel from Philadelphia and Camden southward to the mouth of the Delaware Bay had been maintained at a depth of forty feet. But in the final decade of the twentieth century, port planners recognized the ship channel needed to be deeper if Philadelphia’s port wanted to compete against other East Coast ports like Baltimore and Norfolk, Virginia, that could accommodate larger ships coming from Asia through the Panama Canal.

Political leaders in both Delaware and New Jersey strenuously opposed digging up the riverbed for fear that toxic dredge materials from the river bottom would be disposed of in their states. Prominent environmental groups including the Sierra Club also worked to block the project. To meet those objections, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell (b. 1944), a champion of the project, agreed to allow those dredge spoils to be deposited in abandoned coal mines in Pennsylvania. Ultimately, the federal government made the decision, based on the principle of federal supremacy over navigable waterways. In October 2009 the Army Corps of Engineers decided to allow the project, and dredging began in March 2010. The project to deepen the Delaware River main channel to forty-five feet was completed in February 2020.

Despite periodic disagreements about how the river’s assets should be preserved, examples of regional cooperation like the Delaware River Basin Commission and the Delaware River Port Authority showed that broad consensus existed about the river’s value to all parts of the region.

However, government alone, even when working across jurisdictional boundaries, could not carry the entire burden of protecting the river. In 2014 the William Penn Foundation launched a Delaware River Watershed Initiative committing $100 million to coordinate the work of over sixty community associations and nonprofit organizations. All these nongovernmental groups agreed to work on land preservation and restoration projects on the river’s banks as a way to reduce runoff from farm fields, stem the loss of forests, and prevent the depletion of groundwater. The partners agreed to monitor water quality at five hundred sites in the watershed and share information.

In the Supreme Court decision of 1931 allocating rights to the waters of the great Delaware River to the four states comprising its watershed, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935) remarked, “A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.” As a treasure held in common, the Delaware River provided those living on its banks with countless opportunities to make use of its bounty. In so doing, this treasure that crosses local, county, and state boundaries, tested the region’s capacity to cooperate in preserving its waters from overuse and even destruction. Through a combination of local initiative and federal resources, the region’s inhabitants largely proved themselves capable of meeting that challenge.

Carolyn T. Adams is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University and associate editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Among noteworthy cultural institutions within Fairmount Park are the Philadelphia Zoo, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Please Touch Museum, the Horticulture Center, and the Shofuso Japanese House and Garden as well as historic houses and industrial sites such as Mount Pleasant, Woodford, and Strawberry Mansion, and the Fairmount Waterworks. Boathouse Row, on the east bank of the Schuylkill, is an international center for competitive rowing.

Origins

“Fairmount” is the prominent hill located on the east bank of the Schuylkill River just north of the original boundary of Philadelphia. It was named by William Penn (1644-1718) when he claimed it as part of his Springettsbury manor. During the eighteenth century, the Schuylkill district was celebrated for the rural estates and elegant villas that lined the river banks west of the evolving city. In 1812, Philadelphia City Council’s watering committee purchased Fairmount for a new waterworks facility. Development of the park began in the 1820s, when gardens and walkways were laid out around the waterworks. The park was expanded in 1844, when the city purchased the nearby Lemon Hill estate. The 1854 Consolidation Act directed the development of public parks, and in 1855 Lemon Hill was dedicated as “Fairmount Park.” In 1857, the city acquired the adjoining Sedgeley tract. A year later, James C. Sidney (ca. 1819-81) and Andrew Adams (ca. 1800-60) were hired to relandscape the conjoined estates. Some new roads and plantings were completed, but the project was suspended in the mid-1860s, when park advocates successfully lobbied the state to authorize the development of a much larger park on both sides of the river.

Acts of Assembly in 1867 and 1868 created the Fairmount Park Commission (FPC) with authority to expropriate properties along the Schuylkill and the Wissahickon for recreation and to protect the city’s water supply. Although commission members consulted landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and Calvert Vaux (1824-95) about viable strategies for reconfiguring the park landscapes, the FPC decided to make minimal changes so as to protect the “scenic contours” of the historic river estates. This plan was also cheaper. The FPC relied on appropriations from the city, and while funds were made available to compensate landowners whose properties were expropriated, the city resisted financing comprehensive landscape improvements.

Expansion

The rapid acquisition of properties enabled Philadelphia to host the 1876 Centennial Exhibition on a four-hundred-acre exhibition site in West Park. Funding from city, state, and federal governments as well as private sources enabled the FPC to open roads and build drainage systems within the park as well as to build two new cultural facilities: the Horticulture Hall conservatory and Memorial Hall, which subsequently housed the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art.

By 1900, the Schuylkill and Wissahickon park areas encompassed some three thousand acres, and Philadelphians boasted of having created the country’s largest urban park. During the twentieth century, more land was added to East and West Parks and the Wissahickon until the three areas comprised roughly 4,500 acres. By acquiring so much acreage so quickly, the FPC assembled disparate landscape spaces that ranged from well-tended gardens to broad greenswards and forests. Some cohesion was provided by the Schuylkill and Wissahickon waterways that bisected these spaces, but the lack of a comprehensive plan for landscaping improvements or management produced some unique features. For example, preexisting railroads and major streets were allowed to remain within the park; at a later date parkways and streetcar lines were added to improve access. Fairmount Park’s boundaries varied from the hard edges of city streets to permeable dells along the Wissahickon. The presence of railroads and other thoroughfares left the park areas vulnerable to additional intrusions, most notably I-76, the Schuylkill Expressway, which was cut through the West Park in the 1950s.

Recreation

The creation of Fairmount Park did not introduce recreational areas into Philadelphia’s urban landscape because both the Schuylkill and the Wissahickon had been popular recreational destinations since the eighteenth century. Many property owners at the Schuylkill and Wissahickon permitted public access to their lands: in the early nineteenth century Henry Pratt admitted the public to his extensive gardens at Lemon Hill. In the late 1850s, newspapers reported hundreds of residents, “white, yellow, brown and Black,” assembled for civic festivals in the newly dedicated Fairmount Park. After 1867, both organized sports and more informal forms of recreation continued throughout park areas.  Spectators flocked to the Schuylkill to watch competitive rowing races until baseball supplanted this as a spectator sport. Cyclists first entered the park in the 1880s. Equitation was always popular. During the twentieth century, the FPC added more formal recreational facilities such as ball fields and basketball and tennis courts, as well as entertainment venues, including the Lemon Hill band shell, the Robin Hood Dell, and the Mann Music Center.

By the mid-twentieth century, when city government and the FPC had established numerous parks in other areas of the city, the Schuylkill and Wissahickon parks were considered the nucleus of what became known as the “Fairmount Park System,” encompassing some ten thousand acres citywide. Following the disestablishment of the FPC in 2010, the term “Fairmount Park system” was retired, the Wissahickon was designated as an independent entity, and “Fairmount Park” was redefined to describe only East and West Parks along the Schuylkill.

Elizabeth Milroy is Professor and Department Head of Art & Art History at the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, Drexel University. She is the author of The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682-1876 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016). (Author information current at time of publication.)