Letitia Street House
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Letitia Street House is a modest eighteenth century house in West Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Built about 1715 in Old City, it was relocated to its current site in 1883. Once presumed to have been the residence of William Penn, it is now known that he never lived there.
History
King Charles II granted William Penn a royal charter for a 26-million-acre (110,000 km2) tract of land – west of New Jersey and north of Maryland – on which to develop an English colony.[1] Penn and a group of Quaker families arrived at the tiny settlement of Philadelphia in October 1682. Penn and his family – wife Gulielmas Springetts (1644–1696) and four children – stayed in America for less than two years, before returning to England. By the time of Penn's second visit, Gulielmas and all but two of their eight children had died. He arrived in 1699, with his second wife, Hannah Callowhill, who gave birth to their son John in the colony. Penn again stayed for two years before returning to England, never to see Pennsylvania again.
During his first visit, Penn built himself a country house along the Delaware River, more than 20 miles outside the city. He also reserved a prime piece of Philadelphia real estate for himself – a full city block bounded by High (Market), Front (1st), Chestnut and 2nd Streets – close to the waterfront and beside the market. Following his return to England after his second visit, he gave this as a wedding gift to his 25-year-old daughter Letitia in 1703. (She also never saw Pennsylvania again.) A street cutting through the Philadelphia block was named for her.
By the time of the 1876 Centennial Exposition, a small two-and-a-half-story brick house at Letitia Street and Black Horse Alley was a tourist attraction, claimed to have been the city residence of William Penn during his 1699-1701 second visit. At that time it was not known where Penn had stayed when in the city. As the 1882 two-hundredth anniversary of Penn's colony approached, there was a desire to honor him with a monument. That monument was to be the Letitia Street House.[2]
Measured drawings
See also
References
- ^ Randall M. Miller and William Pencak, ed., Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth, Penn State University Press, 2002, p.59, ISBN 0-271-02213-2
- ^ "Letitia Street House relocated," Kenneth Finkel, Philadelphia Then and Now, (Courier Corporation, 1988), pp. 106-07.
External links
- Letitia Street House, from Philadelphia Architects and Buildings.
