Pennsbury Manor is the colonial estate of William Penn, founder and proprietor of the Colony of Pennsylvania, who lived there from 1699 to 1701. He left it and returned to England in 1701, where he died penniless in 1718. Following his departure and financial woes the estate fell into numerous hands and disrepair. Since 1939 it has been the name of a reconstructed manor on the original property. Penn had his manor built on an parcel, part of his much larger grant of land from the Crown. It was located about 25 miles north of Philadelphia along the Delaware River in present-day Falls Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In 1929 the Pennsylvania legislature authorized acquisition of the property by gift. In 1932 the Warner Company donated nearly ten acres of the property to the state of Pennsylvania as a site for a permanent memorial to Penn. The Pennsylvania Historical Commission was given responsibility for it. The legislature appropriated money to reconstruct the buildings of this estate in a historically accurate manner, to create a house museum in 1939. Over the decades, more land was acquired, and the property now has a total of . The property was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 28, 1969. The manor house and grounds are administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission in association with The Pennsbury Society, and are open to the public. History William Penn (1644-1718) of England, the new Proprietor of the King's Grant for the Province of Pennsylvania, traveled to the New World of "The Americas" in 1682 to start his dream of a "Holy Experiment" free from religious persecution for his "Religious Society of Friends" ("Quakers"). He was granted an tract by King Charles II of England. Penn met with the local Native American Lenape tribes to negotiate fairly and sue for peace, seeking not merely their blessing but cooperation in settling the land. He achieved amicable relations and platted the village of Philadelphia north of the confluence of the large southerly flowing Delaware River and easterly Schuylkill, a smaller tributary entering from the northwest. The manor of Pennsbury, a summer home for Penn and his family, was established along the Delaware twenty-five miles north of Philadelphia, between the river's west bank and what was later named Van Sciver Lake. Construction was begun soon after his arrival in the Colony in 1682 and completed around