Visualizing Colonial Philadelphia
This digital exhibit details the history of urbanization in colonial Philadelphia using maps and 3D visualizations.
[Header Image: "North View of Philadelphia," Edwin Whitefield. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Digital Library.]
Then and Now: Use the toggle to view what Philadelphia looks like now (left) and a georeferenced map of Philadelphia created by Thomas Holme in 1681 (right).
What was Philadelphia?
"In general, this city [New York City] has more of an urban appearance than Philadelphia."
In 1744, Dr. Alexander Hamilton (not this Alexander Hamilton, this one.) wrote the above statement in what would become a travelogue long-used by historians to understand the early American experience. Hamilton traveled along the Atlantic coast from Maryland to Maine, recording his four-month journey throughout the northern colonies.
Both times he was in Philadelphia Hamilton noted how much the city was under construction, how the eventual layout of the town would be tidy, and how rural it felt compared to some of its counterparts, like New York City. If this was the perception of the city in 1744, why was Philadelphia considered urban in the seventeenth century, and by whom did the city get this description? Should we go by these descriptions, and does recreating the area help us understand that period better? The earliest decades of settlement reveals what "urban" looked like in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and how the process of urbanizing panned out for the city.
[Right: "South East Prospect of the City of Philadelphia," Peter Cooper, 1718. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia]
The Problem with "Urban"
We can't think about urbanization from our modern interpretation of the term. "Urban" was not part of the lexicon of early modern words. The closest iteration of the term was "urbanity," which meant good manners or gentleness. Where was the best place to find people who were good mannered and gentle? The city.
Thinking about Philadelphia as a town and city is a way to think about the urban question. Anglo-settlers thoughts of spaces in relation to what they knew. Philadelphia was a city compared to its surroundings: farms and villages. It had many people, social and cultural resources, and was central to international trade. To others, it was a mere town when held up against the vast man-made landscapes of London or Paris [see the video to your right, which is a VR replication of seventeenth-century London]. This is why some records call Philadelphia a city, and others call it a town. It often depended on the writer's experience with other places. Philadelphia offered cultural, international, and social opportunities, but it may not have looked much like other early modern cities, like London.
[Right: Partial viewing of Pudding Lane's VR model of pre-1666 London, a good example of a seventeenth century city. Created by students at De Montfort University, UK.]
The Beginning: Building a Town
In 1681, the first European settlers set sail to colonize and construct Philadelphia. William Penn, the governor and proprietor of the new Pennsylvania territory had set up the land between the Delaware River and the Schuylkill to be the heart of the colony.
Over the course of the first decade, the region around Philadelphia transformed from a muddy, tree- and creek-speckled land into a populated area. Dutch and Swedish settlers had already lived in the area for decades, but Penn motivated hundreds of English, Welsh, and other European subjects to colonize the area. He used religious freedom, commercial opportunity, and healthfulness as reasons to sail the Atlantic to build a better life. It was Penn and those that worked for him that pushed the idea that Philadelphia was going to be a tolerant and prosperous city.
[Right: "Alms House on Spruce Street, Philadelphia," William Birch. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Digital Library.]
Surveys and Dreams
The map to the right is a well-known survey of the Philadelphia region, created by Thomas Holme and published in 1683. Does this map represent the area as it stood in 1683? This survey, and other maps of the region from the seventeenth century, often reflect the dreams and ideas for that region, rather than the reality of that moment. Even those that may have reflected a mapmakers understanding of an area may end up being months-old by the time they make it across the Atlantic to be printed.
[Right: "Portraiture of the city of Philadelphia in the province of Pennsylvania in America," Holme, 1683. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Digital Library.]
The Reality of Penn's Vision
The extent of Penn's vision to make a "green country towne" can be seen when we study the maps of the city in the seventeenth century and compare them to the land records that come from the same era.
One resource that sheds light on the makeup of early Philadelphian land is the quit-rent roll. This type of document recorded the annual rents and occupation of land by renters in the first decades of settlement in Pennsylvania. The quit-rent system was an imperial system to keep track of land occupation details, such as the annual rents, amount of land rented, when plots were surveyed, and who was occupying them. The system itself was colonial because it was often the way for proprietors, but more importantly, the crown, to monitor and profit off of the new colony. This process occurred across the English colonies in North America, and it faced many obstacles that led to its demise in the eighteenth century. Documentation was disorderly, payments were given in different forms (coin, bushels of wheat, or other resources), and the process of collecting rents was haphazard, at best. The quit-rent system was a particular failure in Pennsylvania because of the disconnect between William Penn and the people who were renting and settling the land.
Patent signed William Penn Inrolled 19/8/84 lot 43 Engl[ish] silver shill[ing] or valued in coyn current for every hundred acres as p[er] firstt mont[h].
The quit rents that remain hint at a highly turbulent first few decades by a growing population of people who were moving to the Philadelphia area in the late seventeenth century. The above quote refers to the land grant of Robert Adams, a purchaser of 495 acres of land in 1684. The quit rent was set for five years, with an annual rate of 9 pounds 5 shillings. The land itself, however, was not surveyed until 1687. The potential chaos over land borders and occupation felt for those three years before the survey hint at the lag of governmental organization around the quickly-populating region.
[Right: First page of the 1688/9 collection of Quit Rent rolls housed at the American Philosophical Society. Courtesy of the APS Digital Library.]
From Town to City? Growth in the Eighteenth Century
It is hard to tell when, or if, Philadelphia ever transitions from a town into a city over the course of the eighteenth century. Some have argued that before the nineteenth century, the location was its own form of a city: a not-so-urban urban place.
What exactly do we mean when we call an early American place urban, a town, or a city? What places are we actually trying to compare it to in that period? What does it mean for its history, its society, its culture to place it on a slide scale of rural to urban? How does a drastically changing landscape, like Philadelphia's, influence the events and perspectives of that city? For Philadelphia, its size, location, and bustling environment played a major role in the1780s-90s debate over where to have the capital of the new nation. Urbanization was an integral factor in the outcomes of making our country's capital, and the landscape of cities (and potential cities) by the turn of the nineteenth century.
[Right: "A View of the New Market from the Corner of Shippen & Second Streets Philadelphia, 1787," James Thackara, 1787. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Digital Library.]
"A Plan of Philadelphia," M. Drury, 1776. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Digital Library.
A new age in visualizing historical spaces?
In recent years, historians, geographers, and digital humanists have begun to recreate historical places to better understand societies, cultures, architecture, and spaces of the past. As 3D modelling and Virtual Reality (VR) software have become more accessible to researchers and academics, the attempt to understand early American spaces through VR and 3D visualizations has begun. Using maps like the 1777 map of Philadelphia can help historians begin to recreate colonial spaces and better answer questions about the urbanization of cities.
3D model of a colonial single-room rowhouse (left) and the textured VR model of the same building (right). Screenshots of part of the early VR model of colonial Philadelphia, by Molly Nebiolo
3D models and VR recreations of colonial spaces, like pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia, can help us to ask --- and answer --- questions about lived spaces, movement, and landscapes of that era. The process of recreating colonial Philadelphia in VR allows for historians to grasp, in a hands-on way, the interdisciplinarity needed to full understand a space. For example, recreating colonial Philadelphia began with studying the architecture and style of its brick rowhouses.
Here (above) is an example of what a typical rowhouse in eighteenth century Philadelphia looked like, with textures to replicate some of the materials used in making the houses. With VR, we can attempt to recreate one of streets that are mapped out, like in the 1777 map.
They also let users experience the surroundings of a colonial location when the ability to visit cities is unavailable. We can "jump into" images, like those below that hint at the density or openness of the city. With 3D and VR depictions of the past, we can better understand the ever-changing cities of the present.
All images courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Digital Library. Hover over each "i" in the top-left corner of each sketch for image information.
For more information about the 3D-modelling and VR aspects of this project, please visit the Background and Methodology page .
Interested in more digital projects about colonial American cities?
Welikia Project : View what Manhattan and its surroundings looked like before the Dutch built New Amsterdam. Much of the Philadelphia region might have looked liked parts of Mannahatta before Penn acquired it. Credits .
Mapping West Philadelphia - View the owners of West Philadelphia as the land boundaries stood in October 1777. Researched and prepared by J.M. Duffin, University of Pennsylvania.
