50 Fun Facts About William Penn

For roughly how long did William Penn actually live in Pennsylvania, the colony he founded?

About 4 years is all William Penn spent in America, split across two visits in 1682–84 and 1699–1701. Money troubles and court politics kept pulling him back across the Atlantic, and he never returned after 1701.

After 1909, one cereal company's advertising named William Penn as the man pictured on its boxes of what?

Quaker Oats advertising called its logo figure William Penn, the standard bearer of the Quakers. The company has since said the man on the box does not depict Penn.

Which childhood disease cost William Penn his hair, leaving him to wear wigs for most of his life?

Smallpox struck William Penn as a small boy and took his hair with it. The illness also prompted his parents to move the family out to a country estate in Essex, where he picked up a lifelong love of gardening.

At his 1670 trial for street preaching, William Penn was jailed for contempt after refusing to remove what?

His hat stayed on because Quakers would not bare their heads to social superiors, holding that all men were equal under God. The gesture sent Penn to Newgate jail.

The most authentic portrait of the pacifist Quaker William Penn shows him at 22 dressed in what?

A suit of armor appears in the 1666 portrait, painted after Penn helped put down a rebellion as a young soldier. Soon afterward he joined a faith that renounces the use of force.

The Curse of Billy Penn, begun when a tower outgrew William Penn's statue, ended with a 2008 title in which sport?

Baseball's Phillies won the 2008 World Series a year after builders fixed a tiny Penn statuette to the top beam of the city's new tallest skyscraper. No major Philadelphia team had won a title since 1983.

Which Philadelphia icon's inscription may mark the 50th anniversary of William Penn's Charter of Privileges?

The Liberty Bell carries a Bible verse about proclaiming liberty, picked by Assembly speaker Isaac Norris in 1751. Penn's 1701 charter had promised Pennsylvanians religious freedom and a real say in their own government.

The University of Pennsylvania was founded not by William Penn but by which later Philadelphian?

Benjamin Franklin founded the academy that grew into the University of Pennsylvania, decades after William Penn died in 1718. The school's short name comes from the state, not from the man.

Pennsylvania's name honors not William Penn but his father, a man celebrated in which profession?

Admiral Sir William Penn had helped bring the monarchy back in 1660, and the King insisted on honoring him. The younger Penn had proposed plain Sylvania; the King added the family name himself.

William Penn named his capital city Philadelphia, a name built from Greek words with which meaning?

Brotherly love is what the Greek roots phílos and adelphós add up to. Penn, who had been jailed for his beliefs, wanted a town where nobody would be persecuted for theirs.

Which king granted William Penn the charter for Pennsylvania in 1681, clearing money the Crown owed his family?

Charles II signed the charter on 4 March 1681, cancelling about £16,000 the Crown owed the Penn family. In return the King was promised a fifth of any gold and silver mined there, of which there was almost none.

With which Native American people did William Penn make his land purchases and his famous treaty of peace?

The Lenape sold land to William Penn while keeping the right to travel over it to hunt, fish and gather. Penn insisted on paying for territory the King had already handed him on paper.

A 37-foot bronze statue of William Penn has stood since 1894 on top of which Philadelphia building?

City Hall carries the largest statue on top of any building in the world, hoisted up in fourteen sections. Its sculptor was annoyed that Penn was set facing northeast rather than south into the sun.

William Penn was expelled in 1662 from which university after rebelling against compulsory chapel?

Oxford expelled William Penn for religious nonconformity, and his furious father beat him with a cane and turned him out of the house. His old college, Christ Church, displays his portrait in its dining hall.

After publishing The Sandy Foundation Shaken in 1668, William Penn spent eight months in solitary confinement where?

The Tower of London held William Penn in an unheated cell while the Bishop of London waited for him to recant. Handed paper to write a retraction, he wrote another defiant book instead.

Which name did William Penn give his plan to run Pennsylvania on Quaker ideals of peace and tolerance?

Holy Experiment was Penn's term for a colony offering religious freedom to Quakers and other persecuted minorities. For all his sincerity, he also expected the venture to make him rich, and it never did.

William Penn wanted a spacious country town and so had Philadelphia's streets laid out in which pattern?

A grid of wide, straight streets kept houses far apart, with five public squares left open as parkland. The cramped capital he grew up in had been ravaged by plague and the Great Fire in the 1660s.

William Penn's plan for Philadelphia crossed its numbered streets with streets named after what?

Trees gave their names to Chestnut, Walnut and Mulberry Streets, laid east to west across the numbered ones. Mulberry has since been renamed Arch Street, but most of the others survive.

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

Delaware's three counties won their own assembly in 1701 after years of clashes with Penn's government in Philadelphia. They still shared a governor with Pennsylvania until 1776.

Which famous surveyed boundary finally settled the feud William Penn began with Lord Baltimore?

The Mason–Dixon line was surveyed in the 1760s for the Penn and Calvert heirs, ending some eighty years of dispute. Penn had never checked where his charter's southern boundary, the 40th parallel, actually ran.

The colony name Pennsylvania joins William Penn's family surname to a Latin word meaning what?

Woods, or forests, is the meaning of the Latin Sylvania, so the name reads as Penn's Woods. The royal charter handed Penn more than 45,000 square miles of them.

Which name did William Penn first propose for his colony, before Sylvania and long before Pennsylvania?

New Wales was William Penn's first choice, dropped for Sylvania before the King had the final say. Welsh settlers came anyway, among the many persecuted minorities drawn by his prospectus.

Which founder of the Quaker movement became William Penn's close ally and travelling companion across Europe?

George Fox began the movement in the 1650s, and William Penn became its first theologian and legal defender. Penn later wrote the introduction to Fox's published journal.

William Penn's fellow Quakers belong to a faith formally known by which name?

Society of Friends is the formal name; outsiders coined 'Quakers' after the movement's founder told a judge to quake before the authority of God. In Penn's day they worshipped in silence, with no clergy.

Which book did William Penn write behind bars in 1668–69, citing 68 authors from memory?

No Cross, No Crown was supposed to be a retraction: Penn's jailers gave him paper hoping he would recant. Instead he wrote a call to self-denial that became a classic of Christian literature.

William Penn's laws for Pennsylvania kept the death penalty for only two crimes: treason and which other?

Murder and treason alone carried death in Penn's code, at a time when English law listed some two hundred capital crimes. His jails were meant to reform inmates through work in workshops.

William Penn himself presided over the trial of Margaret Mattson, a Swedish-Finnish settler accused of what?

Witchcraft was the charge, brought by neighbors who claimed Mattson had bewitched their cattle. She was found guilty only of having the reputation of a witch, not of being one, and was released.

Tradition says William Penn made his treaty of friendship at Shackamaxon in the shade of a great what?

The Treaty Elm stood on the riverbank until a storm blew it down in 1810. The spot is now Penn Treaty Park, where a descendant of the original was planted in 2010.

Which Pennsylvania-born artist painted the famous scene of William Penn's treaty for Penn's son Thomas?

Benjamin West, born into a Quaker family near Philadelphia, painted it in England nearly ninety years after the event. He put brick buildings in the background that did not exist in 1682.

After strokes disabled William Penn in 1712, who ran Pennsylvania's affairs until 1726?

His wife Hannah acted as proprietor from 1712 until her death in 1726, beating a lawsuit from Penn's eldest son along the way. She was later the first woman named an honorary US citizen.

Which US president proclaimed William Penn and his second wife honorary citizens of the United States?

Ronald Reagan signed the proclamation in November 1984, 266 years after Penn's death. The honor is very rare: other recipients include Winston Churchill, Lafayette and Mother Teresa.

William Penn sold land to the lawyer Francis Daniel Pastorius, who laid out which Philadelphia neighborhood?

Germantown was settled in 1683, though nearly all of its first thirteen families were in fact Dutch. It stayed a separate borough until Philadelphia absorbed it in 1854.

Which 1737 deal let William Penn's sons claim as much Native land as men could cover in a day and a half?

The Walking Purchase turned into a swindle when the Penns cleared a straight path and hired three of the fastest men in the province. They took about 1.2 million acres.

William Penn's 1670 trial led to a landmark ruling protecting the independence of which courtroom figures?

Jurors who acquitted Penn were locked up without food and then fined; juror Edward Bushel refused to pay and won his freedom. Bushel's Case settled that a jury cannot be punished for its verdict.

William Penn commuted to Philadelphia from his country estate in which vehicle, prized above "all dead things"?

A barge rowed by six men carried Penn some 25 miles downriver from Pennsbury Manor. The manor was rebuilt on the original property in the 1930s and is open as a museum.

Where did William Penn end up at 62 after the widow of his business manager Philip Ford sued him?

Debtors' prison was the price of signing papers unread: one turned out to be a deed handing Pennsylvania to Ford. Public sympathy cut the sentence to house arrest, and fellow Quakers settled the claim.

In a 1693 essay, William Penn proposed which institution to settle disputes between states without war?

A European parliament of deputies, Penn argued, could hear and settle quarrels before they became wars. He is often called the first thinker to propose one, centuries before the European Union.

After his expulsion from university, the teenage William Penn was sent to the court of which French king?

Louis XIV was himself a young man when Penn reached Paris. Penn admired French manners but disliked the show of wealth, and still came home with a taste for fine clothes that he never lost.

In which country did William Penn manage family estates, serve as a soldier and first hear Quaker preaching?

Ireland held the Penn family's estates, and at meetings near Cork the preacher Thomas Loe won the young Penn over. Arrested at one of them, he declared himself a Quaker at 22 rather than deny it.

Which fact about William Penn led a Quaker group to rename William Penn House in Washington, D.C., in 2021?

He owned slaves and even traded them, though like many Quakers he pledged to free his own at his death. The Washington hostel reopened under a new name in 2022.

Which secretary arrived with William Penn in 1699 and went on to be mayor of Philadelphia and chief justice?

James Logan crossed on the Canterbury with the Penns and looked after the family's interests in the colony for decades. Philadelphia's Logan neighborhood, where his house Stenton stands, is named for him.

William Penn lies beside his first wife at a Quaker meeting house in which Buckinghamshire village?

Jordans has one of the oldest Quaker meeting houses in England, and Penn's grave draws many American visitors. He had died penniless a county away, at Ruscombe in Berkshire.

Which famous diarist lived next door to William Penn's family and sneered at the young Penn's first pamphlet?

Samuel Pepys sat on the Navy Board with Penn's father and called Truth Exalted a ridiculous, nonsensical book he was ashamed to read. He had also remarked on the French airs Penn brought back from Paris.

Which future Hollywood star played William Penn's wife in the 1941 British film Penn of Pennsylvania?

Deborah Kerr was not yet 20 and shared top billing with Clifford Evans, who played Penn. The film was made partly as propaganda to coax the United States into the Second World War.

Which museum object is cited as evidence that William Penn's Shackamaxon treaty meeting took place?

A wampum belt held by the Philadelphia History Museum is the main physical evidence, because no written treaty survives. One historian argues that Penn's own sons destroyed the document.

William Penn's 1682 Frame of Government included which feature, later Article V of the US Constitution?

An amendment process let the constitution change with the times: six-sevenths of the legislature and the governor had to approve. Penn worked through some twenty drafts of the Frame.

The sculptor of the giant William Penn statue was the grandfather of an artist best known for which artworks?

Mobiles made Alexander Calder famous in the 1930s. His grandfather Alexander Milne Calder, a Scottish tombstone carver's son, made more than 250 sculptures for the same Philadelphia building over thirty years.

The chief said to have made peace with William Penn gave his name to which notorious political machine?

Tammany Hall took its name from Tamanend, who became a folk hero around Philadelphia as Saint Tammany. Societies named for him spread across the United States after the Revolutionary War.

Which Quaker folk painter put William Penn's treaty in the background of his Peaceable Kingdom pictures?

Edward Hicks painted 62 versions of the Peaceable Kingdom, with settlers and Native Americans signing a treaty in the distance. In his lifetime he was better known as a minister than as an artist.

William Penn first stepped ashore in Pennsylvania at the Swedish-named town of Upland, which he renamed what?

Chester took its new name from the English city and is the oldest city in Pennsylvania. Upland was already the most populous town in the province when Penn landed.