Centering Penn in the Eighteenth-century City

Visitors to Penn in 2025 walk into a series of green quadrangles with academic buildings dating from the late 1800s to the present, standing apart from nearby city spaces. In the eighteenth century, however, the school occupied a very different place: it was in the center of the largest city in British North America.

Philadelphia in 1750 had just over 13,000 inhabitants: rich and poor; gentry and servants; ministers and lawyers; doctors and midwives; merchants and artisans; tradespeople and sailors; enslaved and free Blacks; families, widows, and orphans, all of diverse backgrounds, faiths, and ethnicities. Most of them lived and worked in a concentrated section of the city clinging tightly to the Delaware River, the vital commercial lifeline. Farms, landed estates, and Indigenous territories stretched to the north and west. The population more than doubled by 1776.

This digital project, based upon extensive deed and documentary research, has traced all known owners of properties in colonial Philadelphia, linking to the City’s 1775 Constable Returns to show where people were living. What may be surprising to modern viewers is the densely occupied urban space around today’s familiar historic sites. The College of Philadelphia, later the University of Pennsylvania, sat in the midst of this compact city, at 4^th and Arch Streets. According to a British Army intelligence report, the greater city had 6,057 houses and 21,767 inhabitants in October 1777.^[1] Most scholars estimate that in 1776 Philadelphia had above 30,000, New York around 25,000, and Boston and Charleston around 12 to 16,000 inhabitants.

Evans’s charming image is based upon the Du Simitière pencil sketch, shown nearby. The original buildings of the Academy, College, and Charity School were subdivided in the 1830s and demolished in 1844.^[2]

This picturesque map was the most frequently published early cartographic image of the Philadelphia region. The city is rendered only in its ideal grid outline; the surrounding areas highlight the houses and estates of elite families. The first version of the map was published in 1752, and this reissue makes the map into a Revolutionary document. It was included in the popular London Gentleman’s Magazine in 1777, accompanying an article detailing the movements of British troops in and around Philadelphia during the prior months, which included the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown, and the occupation of the city.^[3]

Based upon a 1754 large-scale view by Scull and Heap, this engraving, from in a popular English magazine, depicts Philadelphia as a thriving and prosperous commercial city, stretching along the Delaware waterfront. The new Academy and College sits at its heart, the spire (slightly exaggerated) numbered 3, just to the right of the dominant spire of Christ Church. The accompanying article summarizes the founding of the school and its curriculum.^[4]

By the second half of the eighteenth century, Philadelphia was the largest city in English North America: in this view from the shore of New Jersey, the harbor is full of traffic, and the city looks over a vibrant commercial waterfront. The new Academy and College sits at its heart, the spire (slightly exaggerated) numbered 3, just to the right of the dominant spire of Christ Church. This elegantly colored image was based on a 1752 original drawing. The hand-coloring is in gouache and was done in Bowles’s print shop.^[5]

The first university campus was located at the southwest corner of 4th and Arch Streets. This manuscript, the only surviving site plan, dates from the end of the eighteenth century, just before the school moved to new quarters on 9^th and Chestnut Streets. Visible are buildings labeled University and Charity School (in the former dormitory), and houses occupied by Rev. John Ewing, the Provost; James Davidson, Professor of Greek and Latin; and William Rogers, Professor of oratory and English. Also shown are adjacent properties owned by Jacob Downing and Rev. William Sansom, which the University had sold off in the 1790s.

A City Occupied

This diminutive map of Philadelphia was issued, unusually, with a fully engraved almanac, with an image of the Pennsylvania State House (later Independence Hall) on the title page. Expensive to produce, the almanac was printed during the city’s period of British occupation, late in 1777. The Academy and College buildings are not noted on the map, and they were temporarily closed during this period, with the buildings turned into a British military hospital.^[6] The engraver may have been John Norman, who later had a successful career in Boston. This copy contains some interleaved notes.

1. Joseph Galloway, “An Account of the Number of Houses and Inhabitants &c. in the City of Philadelphia, the Northern Liberties, and district of Southwark”, 9 October 1777 in Benjamin R. Stevens, B.F. Steven's Facsimiles of Manuscripts In European Archives Relating to America, 1773-1783: With Descriptions, Editorial Notes, Collations, References And Translations, vol. 24 (London: [Photographed and printed by Malby & sons], 1895), no. ??↑

2. Turner, 204-205. ↑

3. Snyder, City of Independence, no. 16A; see pp. 36–41, 99–104. Wainwright, “Scull and Heap’s Map of Philadelphia.” 1777 version issued with The Gentleman’s Magazine (December 1777): 573. ↑

4. Snyder, City of Independence, no. 25; see pp. 42–47, 57–59; Wainwright, “Scull and Heap’s East Prospect of Philadelphia”; Lane and Cresswell, Prints of Philadelphia, 14–15 ↑

5. Snyder, City of Independence, 119–20; Lane and Cresswell, Prints of Philadelphia, 20. ↑

6. Dallett, “A Calendar of Events”: what is his source? ↑