By the time William Penn first stepped onto the land called Pennsylvania in 1682, it already had been explored—decades earlier—by Dutch and Swedish colonists.
Back in 1623, a Dutch stockade and trading post were the only structures in the busy city we know as Philadelphia. The region still was a place of dense, deep green forests. Bears, foxes, and other wildlife were abundant, and the rivers were rich with fish. Most of the inhabitants were Lenni-Lenape Indians, a branch of the Delaware Tribe of the Algonquin Indians. Shawnee, too, were here, living in villages of 100 to 300 people along the Delaware River.
As treaties with Indians were signed mid-century, land was purchased and, beginning in 1643, Swedes, Dutch, Finns, and English settlers came and built cabins on the fertile farming land near the Delaware. The Indians were a presence—cordial neighbors, for the most part, trading with settlers for furs and tobacco.
William Penn, a Quaker, cleared the way for more organized settlement when he accepted the title to Pennsylvania in a land grant from King Charles II of England. Penn delegated the task of finding a site for Philadelphia, instructing his committee to find a spot with good river frontage, and Penn personally arrived to inaugurate and design the city in October 1682.
Using a rectangular grid pattern on just 1,200 acres, Penn planned the city streets between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers—a 22-by-8-block pattern, with a town square (now the location of City Hall) and four public squares. Penn had survived the terrible London fire of 1666 and knew well the perils of narrow streets lined with wooden buildings, so he laid out Philadelphia along broad boulevards. Wanting to treat European settlers and Native Americans equally, he specified that no city walls or neighborhood borders be used. Penn named east–west streets after trees and plants (though Sassafras was changed to Race Street for the horse-and-buggy races held there), with Front Street and subsequent numbered streets running parallel to the Delaware River. Penn’s urban design was meant to facilitate future growth and served as the basic format for dozens of future cities across America.
In March 1683, Philadelphia was named capital of the colony of Pennsylvania. Because of the region’s fertile lands and riverside location, Philadelphia’s population multiplied quickly to 7,000 residents by the early 1700s—mostly Quakers, or “Friends,” from England, with growing numbers of Scottish, Irish, and German immigrants. Before the American Revolution began, Philadelphia had become a strategic port and a major city.
Despite the working windmills that still power a number of the farms that dot the rolling green hills of Lancaster and surrounding counties, the term “Pennsylvania Dutch” refers to neither Holland nor the Netherlands. Historians tend to agree that Dutch is an Anglicized version of the word Deutsch, meaning “German,” a reference to the language spoken by many of the settlers who came here in the early 1700s.
While many people associate Pennsylvania Dutch with the Old Order Amish, a religious group that differentiates itself from others by dressing in simple, dark clothing, eschewing the use of electricity in their homes, and choosing the horse and buggy as their primary mode of transportation, there is actually a wide range of other nationalities and religions represented here. This diversity is what actually gives Pennsylvania Dutch Country its unique flavor. But it is still the Amish and the other “Plain People” who give the area its special mystique.