CHAPTER IV
WILLIAM PENN’S FIRST VOYAGE TO HIS PROVINCE IN 1682 – THE CHANGE OF THE NAME UPLAND TO CHESTER, AND THE REASON IT WAS MADE
As stated in the preceding chapter, as soon as Penn had acquired title to the three lower counties,* the present State of Delaware, he made his arrangements to visit his colony, and so energetically did he act that in less than one week after th execution of the deeds by the duke on the 30th day of the Sixth month (August, for the Friends of those days computed the year as beginning on the 1st of March), he sailed for Pennsylvania from Deal in the ship “Welcome,” of three hundred tons burden, Robert Greenaway, commander, accompanied by about one hundred companions, mostly Friends, from Sussex, England. The voyage was lengthy (smallpox having broken out on the vessel, of which disease thirty of the emigrants died on the passage), and on the 27th day of October, 1682, the ” Welcome” stopped at New Castle, where Penn landed, and took possession of the three lower counties with all the pomp and circumstance usual at that time in the formal transfer of estates. It is known he stayed at New Castle all night, and the next day the vessel stood up the river and cast anchor off the mouth of Chester Creek, opposite the house of Robert Wade, for, as is stated in the manuscript book of Evan Oliver, a passenger on the “Welcome,” “We arrived at Upland in Pennsylvania in America, ye 28th of ye 8th month, 82.”***
Dr. Smith, in referring to the landing of Penn, says, “He landed at Upland, but the place was to bear that familiar name no more forever. Without reflection, Penn determined that the name of the place should be changed. Turning round to his friend Pearson, one of his own society, who had accompanied him in the ship ‘Welcome,’ he said, ‘Providence has brought us here safe. Thou hast been the companion of my perils. What wilt thou that I should call this place?’ Pearson said, ‘Chester,’ in remembrance of the city from whence he came. William Penn replied that it should be called Chester, and that when he divided the land into counties one of them should be called by the same name. Thus for a mere whim the name of the oldest town, the name of the whole settled part of the province, the name that would have a place in the affections of a large majority of the inhabitants of the new province, was effaced to gratify the caprice or vanity of a friend. All great men occasionally do little things.”(4*)
Although Dr. Smith cites Clarkson’s Life of Penn and Hazard’s Annals in support of this statement, it will not bear investigation. We know that Penn issued his proclamation three weeks after his arrival at Chester to the several sheriffs of the counties of Chester, Philadelphia, and Bucks, as well as the three lower counties, to hold an election for a General Assembly, to convene at “Upland.” The original letter of Penn, now in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, addressed to several gentlemen requesting them to meet him on the following “so-called Thursday, November 2, 1682,” is dated” Upland, October 29, 1682,” the day after his arrival, clearly indicating that he did not change the name of this city in the dramatic manner tradition has stated. There is no authentic list of the passengers on the “Welcome” extant, although Edward Armstrong has gathered the names of several of Penn’s companions in the ship, which are generally accepted as well established by evidence, excepting that in that list the name of Pearson appears, to which is added, “supposed to be Robert,” a statement that may well be questioned. As this mythical personage is represented to be an eminent member of the society of Friends, the records of meetings ought to disclose his Christian name, but it has never been found among the list of the early settlers. Hence we have reason to believe that the first person of the name of Pearson in this province was Thomas, and we know that neither of the Thomas Pearsons – for there were two of that name – came here until the following year, 1683.(5*) The second of that cognomen in a diary memorandum written by himself; also in the Historical Society’s collection, clearly states when he came. To quote his own words, after setting forth his various adventures, he says, “On ye 25th day of July, in ye year 1683, I set sail from Kingroad, in ye ‘Comfort,’ John Reed, Master, and arrived at Upland in Pennsylvania ye 28th of September 1683,” almost a year after Penn’s arrival. In the report of the vestry of St. Paul’s Church, Chester, to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, in the year 1704, occurs this sentence: “The people of Chester County showed very early zeal to have the Church of England worship settled among them. This county is so called because most of the inhabitants of it came from Cheshire, in England. Chester, the chief town of the county, is finely situated on the river Delaware.”
Bampfylde Moore Carew, the celebrated “King of the Mendicants,” who, while escaping from banishment in Virginia, passed through Chester in 1739, in relating his, adventures, records that he came “to Chester, so called because the people who first settled there came for the most part from Cheshire. . . The place is also called Upland.” Thirty years previous to Carew’s coming, Oldmixon stated, in 1708, when mentioning the town of Chester, “This place is called Upland,” and when he alludes to Chester County he gives the like and true reason for the name that Carew did: “so called because the people who first settled here came for the most part from Cheshire in England.”(6*) The Labadist missionaries, Danckers and Sluyter, record, nearly three years before Penn’s coming, in describing their journey down the Delaware in 1679, that “it clearing up towards evening we took a canoe and came after dark to Upland. This is a small village of Swedes, although it is now over run by English.”(7*)
In a letter from Penn, Nov. 1, 1682, the epistle is dated from Upland; but subsequently, Dec. 16, 1682, from West River, Md., Penn writes, “That an Assembly was held at Chester, alias Upland.” These circumstances clearly establish that the official change of name had taken place previous to the last date and subsequent to the preceding one. In the letter of December 16th is the first time we have record of the name of Chester as applied to the old Swedish settlement at Upland.
The most rational conclusion is that Penn, when he changed the name of the town, doubtless within a few weeks after his arrival, and also designated the county of the like name when he divided the settled parts of Pennsylvania into three divisions, he did so in deference to the desire of the English settlers who had “overrun” the town, the major part of whom had come from that locality in England. As stated in the extracts quoted, the name of the shire-town soon became Chester, although its ancient name did not entirely disappear from familiar use until nearly three-quarters of a century had elapsed after William Penn’s first visit to the province. The Pearson story for the first time appeared in our annals in Clarkson’s “Life of Penn,” a work which was not published until more than a century had elapsed after the incidents therein first recorded are said to have occurred. Until the publication of the work just alluded to, no writer makes any mention of the change of name having been suggested to Penn by “his friend Pearson.”
The Swedes, we are told by Acrelius, received the English proprietary and his companions with great friendliness, carried up their goods and furniture from the ships, and entertained them in their houses without charge, “as many aged Quakers still relate with great pleasure.”(8*)
Penn, when he landed, resided temporarily at the dwelling-house of Robert Wade, and that fact has rendered the “Essex House” famous in our State annals. Penn remained but a short time there as the guest of Wade, for after his return to Chester from New York, whither he had gone to “pay his duty” to the Duke of York by a visit to the latter’s representative in that place, as well as from his visit to Maryland, he lodged, according to tradition, at the Boar’s Head Inn, a noted public-house at Chester in the early days, which stood until March 20, 1848, when it was destroyed by an incendiary fire.
* Col. Graham states that the want of a proper demarkation of boundaries between States is always a source of inconvenience and frequently of great trouble to parties residing therein, who are uncertain as to which State their taxes and personal services, jury duty and the like, are due. He tells us that they found that William Smith, who had served as a member of the Legislature of Delaware, resided fully half a mile within Pennsylvania, measured on the shortest direction from his dwelling-house to the circular boundary.
** Futhey and Cope, in a note to their History of Chester County, page 20, state, “Although the territory west of the Delaware had been governed by the Duke of York, he at the time held no valid title to any part of it. King Charles II. made a regular conveyance to him of the country comprised within the present territorial limits of the State of Delaware on the 22d of March, 1683; the deeds from the duke to Penn for the same country were executed on the 24th of August, 1682. See Hazard’s Register, vol. i. p. 429, 430; vol. ii. p. 27.”
*** Note in Martin’s “History of Chester,” p. 62.
(4*) Smith’s “History of’ Delaware County,” p. 139.
(5*) Martin’s “History of Chester,” page 499. See” Queries,” Penna. Mag. of History, vol. iii. page 358, where the ubiquitous Mr. Pearson presents himself once more in a new light and demanding unexpected honors. The statement in the volume just cited is that in a recent life of Benjamin West it is said, “In the year 1677 or 1678, one Thomas Pearson, from England, settled in a cave on the west bank of the Delaware River, now below Philadelphia. He was a blacksmith by trade, and, it is said, wielded the first smith’s hammer in Pennsylvania. About the first work done was to make small axes for his Indian neighbors, who in their short way termed him Tom or Tommy. In their language the word hawk signifies any tool used for cutting, hence the origin of the word tomahawk.” That this was “the Pearson” is settled by the statement in the same book quoted from that he was the grandfather of Benjamin West. Here then is the man who, before Penn came, was the only blacksmith in Pennsylvania making “little hatchets” for the Indians, and from his Christian name and that of the article he produced caused the savages to coin the word “tomahawk.” Pearson (supposed to be Robert) turns up in 1682 a passenger on the ship “Welcome,” and the proprietary, especially for this – Pearson’s benefit, changes the name of “Upland” to “Chester” instantly and without reflection. In the future some enterprising historian may yet discover the man who swallowed the first oyster, and I have no doubt that Friend Pearson will have his claims present for that noteworthy act, and in all probability have that claim allowed.
(6*) “The British. Empire In America,” etc., by J. Oldmixon, in Hazard’s Register, vol. v. p. 180.
(7*) “Journal of a Voyage to New York in 1679-80,” by Peter Sluyter and Jasper Danckers; Memoirs of the Long Island Historical Society vol. i. p. 183.
Source: Page(s) 20-22, History of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, by Henry Graham Ashmead, Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co. 1884
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