While the English Quakers were numerically preponderant, counting the neighbourhood of Philadelphia and West Jersey as a unit of population, and were politically in supreme control until late in the eighteenth century, the Welsh and Germans dwelt close beside them and were accorded so large a measure of practical independence in the management of their own affairs that their communities were virtually imperia in imperio. For twenty or thirty years after the founding of Pennsylvania, “the Welsh were the most numerous class of immigrants” and in place names, in blood, in local history, and in architecture their enduring influence is plainly discernible. Before they migrated from the land of their birth, they had entered into an agreement with Penn by which he promised them “a tract of forty thousand acres, where
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LITTLE TAVERN AT IONIC AND AMERICAN STREETS, PHILADELPHIA. 1692. |
WILLIAM PENN HOUSE, FAIRMOUNT PARK, PHILADELPHIA. Formerly in Letitia Court. |
GLORIA DEI GLEBE HOUSE.
Built for clergymen of Weceaco and Kingsessing parishes.
