On October 27, 1682, William Penn stepped ashore here at Penn's Landing, on this bank of the Delaware River, after a two-month voyage from England, and took possession of the land King Charles II had granted him. Penn was a Quaker, a member of the Religious Society of Friends that had been persecuted in England for its rejection of the established church and its refusal to take oaths, pay tithes, or doff hats to authority. He designed his colony as a holy experiment in religious freedom and just governance, negotiating peaceful treaties with the Lenape people and attracting settlers from across Europe who were fleeing religious persecution.
Philadelphia — from the Greek for brotherly love — grew with remarkable speed. Within a decade it had several thousand inhabitants; within a generation it was the largest city in British North America. The Delaware River you see before you was the highway of colonial commerce: the wharves that once stood here received ships from England, the Caribbean, and around the Atlantic world.
Today Penn's Landing is a public waterfront park with docking for tall ships, a skating rink in winter, and views of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge downstream.