50 Fun Facts About Pennsylvania Colony

William Penn's charter set the yearly rent for Pennsylvania at two of which items, delivered to Windsor Castle?

Beaver skins were due at the castle every New Year's Day, along with a fifth of any gold or silver found, a token price for about 45,000 square miles.

Which English king granted William Penn the charter for Pennsylvania in 1681 to clear a debt owed to Penn's father?

Charles II owed the late Admiral Penn £16,000 and settled the bill with American land instead of cash, making the son a vast landowner overnight.

William Penn named Pennsylvania's capital Philadelphia; what do the Greek roots of that name mean?

Brotherly love joins the Greek philos, dear, and adelphos, brother, a fitting name for a town Penn planned as a refuge for the persecuted.

The 'sylvania' in the name Pennsylvania comes from a Latin word with which meaning?

Woods, or forests, is what the Latin means; Penn wanted plain Sylvania, but the king put Penn in front to honour the founder's admiral father.

Which Philadelphia icon, ordered from London by Pennsylvania's Assembly in the 1750s, cracked on its first test strike?

The Liberty Bell was recast twice by two local workmen, and it still spells the colony's name 'Pensylvania', an accepted spelling at the time.

A 1754 cartoon in the Pennsylvania Gazette urged the colonies to unite by drawing them as which animal cut in pieces?

A snake in eight pieces stood for the colonies, playing on a folk belief that a cut-up serpent would come back to life if rejoined before sunset.

Which toy did Benjamin Franklin reportedly fly in a 1752 Philadelphia storm to show that lightning is electricity?

A kite carried a pointed wire up toward the storm clouds and drew the charge down its wet string, with Franklin's son William helping.

Which young Virginia officer surrendered Fort Necessity, in western Pennsylvania, to the French in 1754?

George Washington was getting his first taste of combat, and the defeat at the stockade he had built opened the French and Indian War.

The Pennsylvania State House, where the colony's assembly met in Philadelphia, is known today by which name?

Independence Hall took its modern name from the 1776 vote to break with Britain, and the Constitution was signed in the same building in 1787.

Which branch of the US military traces its birth to recruiting at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia in November 1775?

The Marine Corps still toasts the colonial inn every 10 November, the day Congress ordered two battalions raised in the city.

Which famous boundary was surveyed in the 1760s to settle a land quarrel between the Penn and Calvert families?

The Mason–Dixon line took two English astronomers four years to run, and it later became shorthand for the border between North and South.

Which Pennsylvania city grew up on the site of Fort Duquesne, a French fort at the head of the Ohio River?

Pittsburgh got its name in 1758, when General John Forbes took the forks and named the spot for the British statesman William Pitt.

From which present-day country did most ancestors of the Pennsylvania Dutch emigrate in the 1700s?

Germany, above all the Palatinate region, sent most of them, with others from Switzerland and Alsace; their dialect is also known as Pennsylvania German.

Pennsylvania's 1776 constitution swapped the colonial title of province for which word, still its official style?

Commonwealth is the word the constitution of September 1776 used when it swept away the Penn family's rule in favour of a single elected assembly.

Pennsylvania's central position among the original thirteen colonies inspired which enduring nickname?

The Keystone State has been the nickname since 1802, borrowing the builder's word for the central stone that holds an arch together.

Which present-day state began as the three 'Lower Counties' of William Penn's Pennsylvania?

Delaware won its own assembly in the early 1700s yet went on sharing a governor with its bigger neighbour until 1776.

Which 1776 pamphlet by Thomas Paine, urging a break with Britain, was first published in Philadelphia?

Common Sense, drafted under the working title Plain Truth, appeared anonymously that January and was read aloud in taverns and meeting places.

Which frontier dwelling reached the Pennsylvania region with settlers decades before William Penn arrived?

The log cabin became such an icon of the American frontier that it is commonly taken for a home-grown invention instead of a European import.

Which yearly booklet of weather forecasts and witty sayings did Benjamin Franklin launch in 1732?

Poor Richard's Almanack came out under the invented name Richard Saunders and sold as many as 10,000 copies a year.

Which 1737 deal let the Penns claim all the Lenape land that hired runners could cover in a day and a half?

The Walking Purchase promised the distance a man could go on foot, but the Penns cleared a straight path and hired the three fastest runners in the colony.

Cresap's War of the 1730s was a violent border dispute between Pennsylvania and which neighbouring colony?

Maryland read the charters as giving it everything up to the fortieth parallel, a line that runs north of Philadelphia itself.

Settlers from which New England colony fought the Pennamite–Yankee Wars over Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley?

Connecticut argued that its 1662 charter ran west all the way to the Pacific, which overlapped the land later granted to William Penn.

Which frontier vigilantes marched on Philadelphia in 1764 after killing unarmed Native villagers?

The Paxton Boys turned back a few miles short of the city after meeting a delegation led by Benjamin Franklin.

After William Penn's strokes in 1712, which relative took charge of running Pennsylvania until 1726?

His wife, Hannah, managed the colony's affairs from England for fourteen years and saw off a lawsuit from Penn's eldest son, who wanted control.

In which famous prison was William Penn held in 1668 after publishing a tract attacking Church doctrine?

The Tower of London held him in an unheated cell, where he was handed paper to recant and wrote the defiant No Cross, No Crown instead.

Which university expelled the young William Penn in 1662 for his religious nonconformity?

Oxford expelled him from Christ Church college after he rebelled against enforced worship, years before he formally joined the Quakers at 22.

What name did William Penn first propose for his American colony before the king settled on Pennsylvania?

New Wales was Penn's first choice; he then tried plain Sylvania before the king added the family name in front.

What two-word name did William Penn give his plan to run Pennsylvania as a haven for fellow Quakers?

Holy Experiment was his phrase for a colony meant to set an example to the nations, though Penn also expected the venture to make him rich.

By tradition, William Penn made his peace treaty with the Lenape at Shackamaxon beneath which kind of tree?

An elm marked the spot until a storm blew it down in 1810, and the riverside site has been Penn Treaty Park since 1893.

Which Lenape chief, later nicknamed the Patron Saint of America, is said to have made peace with William Penn?

Tamanend became a folk hero in Philadelphia, and the Tammany societies, including New York's Tammany Hall, took their name from him.

Which country's colonists settled around present-day Chester, Pennsylvania, decades before William Penn's charter?

Sweden founded its river colony in 1638, and the settlement that became Chester was long called Upland after a Swedish province.

In 1688, Quaker settlers near Philadelphia drew up the first formal American petition against which practice?

Slavery broke the Golden Rule, the petition argued, but the meeting set the paper aside and it lay forgotten in the archives until 1844.

William Penn's plan for Philadelphia laid out the streets in which pattern, unlike the tangle of London he knew?

A grid kept houses and businesses spread apart with room for gardens and orchards, since Penn pictured something like an English country town.

After what did William Penn name many of the east–west streets in his plan for Philadelphia?

Local trees gave the city its Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine Streets, while the streets crossing them were simply numbered.

By the 1750s, Philadelphia had overtaken which New England port as the largest city in British America?

Boston lost the top spot as Philadelphia became the busiest port in the colonies and, by some counts, second only to London in the British Empire.

Which famous frontier firearm was first developed by gunsmiths in southeastern Pennsylvania in the early 1700s?

The Kentucky rifle picked up that nickname only around the 1820s, long after Lancaster County workshops began turning out the long-barrelled guns.

Which horse-drawn freight carrier took its name from a river valley in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania?

The Conestoga wagon could haul up to eight tons behind a team of four to six horses, carrying farm produce and goods between farms and towns.

In which Philadelphia building did the First Continental Congress meet in the autumn of 1774?

Carpenters' Hall still belongs to the craft guild that built it, the oldest surviving trade guild in the country.

Which rare honour did the United States grant William Penn in 1984, three centuries after he founded Pennsylvania?

Honorary citizenship came by proclamation from President Ronald Reagan in November 1984, 266 years after Penn died penniless in England.

Which Pennsylvania town did Moravian settlers found and name on Christmas Eve in 1741?

Bethlehem was christened by the Moravian bishop Nicolaus Zinzendorf at the first settlers' evening worship, beside the Lehigh River.

Despite owning Pennsylvania, where did William Penn end up at age 62 over money claimed by his manager's family?

Debtors' prison was soon eased to house arrest after a wave of sympathy; his manager, Philip Ford, had embezzled large sums from Penn's estates.

Which grain, grown beside rye on newly cleared land, was a chief crop and export of colonial Pennsylvania?

Wheat, milled into flour and shipped out through Philadelphia, helped earn Pennsylvania and its neighbours the nickname of the breadbasket colonies.

Pennsylvania belonged to which traditional grouping within British America, alongside New York and New Jersey?

The Middle Colonies were the most ethnically and religiously mixed in British North America, with a tolerance that was unusual at the time.

From William Penn's charter until the Revolution, Pennsylvania was almost always which type of colony?

Proprietary colonies were run almost like private estates: the Penns appointed the governors and collected rents from settlers.

What did Benjamin Franklin's Junto club found in 1731 after its debates kept stalling on points of fact?

A library let fifty subscribers pool forty shillings each to buy books, with ten shillings more due from every member each year.

Which British general was killed in 1755 leading a doomed march across western Pennsylvania toward Fort Duquesne?

Edward Braddock was mortally wounded near the Monongahela River, died four days later on the retreat and was buried under the road his men had cut.

What was the name of the ship that carried William Penn on his first voyage to Pennsylvania in 1682?

Welcome reached the riverside village of Upland in late October, and Penn renamed the place Chester after the English city.

Which 1701 document, William Penn's last frame of government, guided Pennsylvania until 1776?

The Charter of Privileges strengthened the elected assembly, and Penn accepted it on the eve of sailing back to England to defend his charter.

Quakers, who shaped colonial Pennsylvania, belong to a church formally called the Religious Society of what?

Friends probably comes from the early labels Friends of the Light and Friends of Truth, used before the formal title was adopted.

Which artist painted the best-known image of William Penn's treaty with the Lenape, finished in the 1770s?

Benjamin West was hired by Thomas Penn, the founder's son, and copied Penn's face from a portrait carved from memory after his death.