Printz sent Maus Kling, the engineer for the colony, to make a settlement on the Schuylkill. Log houses were built there, and Kling built on the east bank of the Schuylkill, near its mouth, probably on what was afterward called Providence Island, a small fort which was called New Korsholm.
These operations of Kling, the plantation and the fort, form the first authenticated occupancy by Europeans of the site of the City of Philadelphia.
On April 17, 1640, the Swedish ship Kalmer Nyckel sailed into the Christiana Creek. Among the immigrants was the Reverend Reorus Torkillus, a clergyman of the Swedish Lutheran Church, who thus became the first minister of the gospel on the Delaware River. Soon after this preacher’s arrival in the colony a meeting house was built, in which the services of the Lutheran Church were conducted.
Governor Printz built a church on Tinicum Island, which had a bell and belfry. It was succeeded by a more imposing and commodious edifice in 1646, built of logs, with a roof of clapboards and an altar with a silver cloth. This church was dedicated by the Reverend John Campanius on September 4, 1646.
Printz reported to his home Government he had the church finished and dedicated, “adorning and decorating it according to our Swedish fashion, so far as our limited means and resources would allow.”
There was a graveyard located adjacent to the church, in which was interred the corpse of Andrew Hanson’s daughter Catherine, who was buried October 28, 1646. This was the first burial of any European in Pennsylvania, certainly the first in any regularly established cemetery.
The marriage of Governor Printz’s daughter, Armegot, to Johan Papegoja, the commandant at Fort Christina, was solemnized in this old church at Tinicum, in 1644, and it is believed to have been the first instance in which a matrimonial ceremony was performed between Europeans within the limits of the present State of Pennsylvania.
The Old Swedes’ Church called the worshippers together with the sound of the first “church-going bell” on the American Continent. But in May, 1673, Armegot Papegoja was in such dire distress for funds that she sold the bell to the congregation of the adherents of the Augsburg Confession, at Laus Deo.
The worshippers believed this bell should be nowhere but in their own Swedes’ Church and they determined to repurchase it, when the members of the congregation gave their labor for two years at harvest time as the consideration. The bell was brought back to Tinicum, but the facts relating to its subsequent history are lacking.[[6]]
[6]. Colonel Henry D. Paxon says this original bell was recast, with some additional metal, and now hangs in “Gloria Dei,” Old Swedes’ Church, Philadelphia.