Pennsylvania

D

Local Governments

The 67 counties of Pennsylvania make up the basic local units of government. Most counties are governed by a three-member Board of County Commissioners, who are each elected for four years. Various other county officials also are elected. A few counties have adopted an executive form of government. Below the county level the state is divided into cities, boroughs, and townships. The 52 cities each have a population of at least 10,000 people and are governed by a mayor and a city council, elected for four years. In Philadelphia, which in 1854 expanded to include the whole of Philadelphia County, the city government has replaced the former county government.

By Pennsylvania law, a borough may become a city when it has reached a population of 10,000, but many eligible boroughs have not made this change because it requires a more expensive form of government. There are nearly 970 boroughs in the state, most of which are small urban communities. Boroughs are governed by mayors and councils, both elected for terms of four years. Some boroughs and townships have professional managers.

About 1550 townships cover most of the state’s land area and provide local government in suburban and rural areas. First-class townships are governed by township commissioners. Second-class townships are governed by township supervisors. The state has only one town, Bloomsburg, which received its special status by an act of the legislature.

E

National Representation

Pennsylvania elects two United States senators and 19 members of the United States House of Representatives. It has 21 electoral votes.

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VIII

History

A

Early Inhabitants

Before Europeans arrived in what is now Pennsylvania, the area was inhabited by several major Native American groups. In the eastern river valleys lived Algonquian-speaking peoples, including the Delaware, who called themselves the Lenni Lenape, meaning original people. Along the Susquehanna River were the Susquehannock, a group who spoke an Iroquoian language. Originally living in the Wyoming Valley along the upper Susquehanna, the Susquehannock later moved to the lower Susquehanna River basin, until they were mostly absorbed into the Delaware and Iroquois in the 1670s.

Less well-known native peoples existed in the western part of Pennsylvania. In the late 17th century the Shawnee began to migrate into Pennsylvania, and in the early 18th century the Tuscarora and the Nanticoke passed through on their way north to settle among the Iroquois. By that time the Iroquois Confederacy, centered in what is now New York, had established dominance over most of the native groups from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River and from the St. Lawrence River to the Tennessee River, including nearly all the native peoples living in Pennsylvania.

For many years, European settlers in Pennsylvania lived at peace with the native peoples, who exerted an important influence on the colony. William Penn, the founder of the colony, treated the Native Americans as equals and scrupulously paid for land received from the local chiefs. In a treaty negotiated in 1682 in Philadelphia, he established a peace and friendship that lasted half a century. Because the Native Americans aided the early settlers, Penn’s colony suffered no periods of hardship and starvation, which were common in other colonies. The native groups’ trails were the original routes by which traders and settlers reached the interior. But later conflicts, mostly over settlement of traditional native lands, forced the eventual migration of most Native Americans from the state.

B

Early Explorations and Settlements

Much of present-day Pennsylvania was originally included in the land grant for the Virginia colony given in 1606 to the London Company. About 1615 and 1616 French and Dutch explorers traveled parts of Pennsylvania. Étienne Brûlé of France claimed to have explored the Susquehanna River from the north, while Dutch Captain Cornelius Hendricksen sailed up the Delaware River to its junction with the Schuylkill River. The Dutch, with headquarters on Manhattan Island, established a trading post on the Schuylkill in 1633.

Swedes established the first permanent settlement in Pennsylvania. They had already founded a colony, New Sweden, on the western shore of Delaware Bay, and in 1643 they moved the colony’s capital to Tinicum Island near present-day Philadelphia. The Dutch captured New Sweden in 1655 in a contest over control of Delaware Bay and annexed it to their colony of New Netherland. In 1664 the British captured New Netherland, renaming the entire region New York. From this area the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were later formed.

C

Colonial Period

C

1

Founding of Pennsylvania

The founder of Pennsylvania was William Penn, the son of the wealthy English Admiral Sir William Penn. The younger Penn was a rebellious youth who became a free thinker and joined the Society of Friends, or Quakers. When his father died in 1670, Penn inherited a sizable fortune, which he soon began to use to help his fellow Quakers escape religious persecution in England.

Penn helped create a Quaker colony in New Jersey, which encouraged him to seek a colony of his own. As payment of a debt the king owed to Penn’s father, Penn asked King Charles II for a portion of the New York colony. The king, happy to be rid of both the debt and the Quakers, consented. On March 4, 1681, the king signed a charter that made Penn proprietor of Pennsylvania, a name chosen to honor the elder Penn. The grant included much of present-day Pennsylvania. Penn later asked for and received the Lower Counties, now Delaware.

Calling his settlement the Holy Experiment, Penn promised religious toleration and participation in lawmaking to anyone who wished to settle there. In response to Penn’s advertisements, English, Welsh, and Dutch Quakers migrated to the colony. They settled much of the area within 40 km (25 mi) of Philadelphia, which was laid out in 1682 at Penn’s request by Thomas Holme, the colony’s surveyor general. Early in the 1700s a large influx of Germans arrived, many of them members of such persecuted religious groups as the Amish, Mennonites, and Schwenkfeldians, followers of Kaspar Schwenkfeld von Ossig, a dissident 16th-century theologian. They settled the rich farmland between Philadelphia and the Blue Mountains, a region that later became known as Pennsylvania Dutch country (Dutch was a corruption of the word Deutsch, meaning “German”).

Beginning about 1718, large numbers of Scots-Irish arrived, and by the 1740s they had settled the mountain valleys beyond the German belt. Many people from Virginia, Maryland, and Connecticut also settled land that, after boundary adjustments, became part of Pennsylvania. The colony grew rapidly, from about 20,000 inhabitants in 1700 to 300,000 in 1776. Many different nationalities and religions were represented, but the major groups remained geographically separate, with the English in the east, Germans in the middle, and Scots-Irish in the west.

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