When Thomas Holme arrived in the fall of 1682, the site for Philadelphia was already chosen. It was a fine location, 300 acres on the Delaware River, with abundant streams, a high bank, and a cove where small ships could land.
With the site chosen, the next step, and a tricky one, was to choose where different purchasers would have their land. At first the city lots were not for sale to “the general public”; they were a bonus for the First Purchasers, people who bought from Penn in England. There were 50 groups of First Purchasers, with each group paying for 10,000 acres. Each group was to receive a large city lot; if there were more than one buyer in a group, as there typically was, the lots would be subdivided. The plan was that the lots would be chosen and laid out by random drawing. The drawing was held on September 19, 1682. But before these lots could be laid out, word came that Penn was on his way from England and would arrive the next month. The layout could wait for his approval.
Thomas Holme’s next step was to lay out the grid of streets. The street facing the river Delaware was called Front Street, and this set the pattern for the other north-south streets — Second Street, Third Street, and so forth. The east-west streets were initially named for prominent men like the merchant James Claypoole, Thomas Holme and Thomas Wynne, a Welsh physician. These were soon renamed, as it was not in the Quaker spirit to honor individual men in this way. Today those are Walnut, Mulberry and Chestnut Streets.
Five open squares were cut into the grid, one in the center and one in each quadrant. The center square was to be for public buildings; in fact it still serves that purpose, as the site of City Hall. The other four squares were for public use. They were later named for Franklin, Washington, Rittenhouse and Logan, and still serve as parks today, although Logan Square turned into a circle when the Benjamin Franklin Parkway was laid out.
The First Purchasers bought tracts of land ranging from 125 acres to 10,000 acres, with the most common size as 500 acres. Five hundred acres was more than enough for a family farm, and any tract larger than that would almost certainly be settled by more than one family. Some of the largest tracts, in the northern edges, were sparsely settled if at all, contrary to Penn’s policy, but these were the exception.
The First Purchasers were vitally important to Penn and the settlement of Pennsylvania. They gave him an infusion of money that he needed, much of which he plowed into the province to support the government in its early years. And those who emigrated provided people to clear the land and begin the process of settlement.