Hardly had Penn outlined the map of what he hoped his little village of
Philadelphia would grow to be, than he set about planning for the
education of the people he was urging to follow him from Europe. He had
induced William Bradford, a printer of Leicester, England, to make the
sea voyage with him, and set up a printing-press in the province. In
December, 1683, Enoch Flower opened a school in a two-room shack built
of pine and cedar planks, and six years later a public school was
founded, to be known in time as the William Penn Charter School,
destined to continue to the present day. Although the post office had
existed in England for only a few years, Penn thought it so valuable
that he issued orders to have a post office installed in his province
with deliveries once a week, and letters were sent at the very
reasonable cost of twopence from Philadelphia to Chester and sixpence
from Philadelphia to Maryland.
The first frame building that had been completed in Philadelphia was the
"Blue Anchor," which was at one and the same time an inn, an exchange, a
corn market, a post office, and a landing-place. It stood fronting the
river, and was built of heavy rafters of wood and bricks that were
brought from England. The colonists were men of energy and resource;
they built substantial houses rapidly, and before long residences with
pointed roofs, balconies, and porches were common sights, while an
enterprising man named Carpenter built a quay three hundred feet long,
where a ship of five hundred tons could be moored. Penn was justly proud
of the achievements of his colonists. To Lord Halifax he wrote, "I must
without vanity say, I have led the greatest colony into America that
ever any man did on private credit;" while to Lord Sunderland he said,
"With the help of God and such noble friends, I will show a province in
seven years equal to her neighbor's of forty years' planting."
When he had started men to work on his new city, Penn traveled through
West and East Jersey, saw Long Island, and incidentally stopped and
preached to any Quakers he found in that part of North America. It used
to be supposed that he made his famous treaty with the Indians at
Kensington at about that time, but historians now believe that it was
not made until the following year.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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