📘 The grid is the first thing you see

What you’ll learn

1. Grid and riversRead Penn's grid between the Delaware and Schuylkill and the Fall Line.Two rivers and a published plan shaped where Philadelphia could spread.
2. Plan and capitalTrack Holme's east-side build-out, Independence Hall, and temporary capital status.The built city hugged the Delaware long before it filled the western grid.
3. Water and working edgeFollow Fairmount water supply, Fairmount Park, City Hall, and the Delaware docks.Philadelphia turned west to drink the Schuylkill and bought banks to protect the supply.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• American Society of Civil Engineers — Historic Civil Engineering Landmark: City Plan of Philadelphia (Penn directed the city from the Schuylkill to the Delaware, about two miles by one mile; Thomas Holme, Surveyor-General, published the plan in London in 1683; gridiron; central public square; principal axis streets 100 feet, river-front streets 60 feet, remaining streets 50 feet; four open squares for recreation besides Centre Square)
• Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia — Public Parks (Holme’s 1683 Portraiture: two-square-mile grid in quadrants; ten-acre centre square for public buildings and four eight-acre squares; Center later Penn Square, Southeast Washington, Northeast Franklin, Southwest Rittenhouse, Northwest Logan; squares vacant or used as pasture, dumps, and potter’s fields for more than a century)
• Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia — Trees (1683: Penn reserved five public squares; intended every house to have a garden, orchard, or field, “that [Philadelphia] may be a greene country town which will never be burnt and always be wholesome”; east-west streets named for trees: Cedar/South, Pine, Spruce, Walnut, Chestnut, Mulberry/Arch, Sassafras/Race)
• Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia — Philadelphia and Its People in Maps: The 1790s (Holme’s 1683 grid between the two rivers with five squares; in the 1790s residents clustered within eight or nine blocks of the Delaware rather than filling west to the Schuylkill; yellow fever 1793, 1797, 1798, 1799; 1793 estimated 5,000 dead)
• Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia — Yellow Fever (1793, while the city was capital of Pennsylvania and of the United States; estimated 5,000 dead)
• Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia — U.S. Congress (1790–1800) (Residence Act of 1790; Congress sat in Congress Hall, the former county courthouse, 1790–1800)
• National Park Service — Independence Hall (construction begun 1732 as the Pennsylvania State House; Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution debated and signed here; Washington appointed Commander in Chief 1775; Articles of Confederation took effect 1781)
• U.S. Geological Survey Hydrologic Atlas 730-L — Regional summary (Fall Line is the boundary of Piedmont and Coastal Plain; falls and rapids form where streams cross from hard rock onto soft sediment; that gradient sited mills and towns)

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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