Historic Context: Kensington-Fishtown

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Kensington-Fishtown before the American Revolution

The Settling of Penn’s Liberty Lands

Originally part of the “Liberty Lands of Philadelphia City”—an 8,000-acre arc of wooded country to the north and west of Philadelphia where William Penn hoped wealthy gentlemen would establish suburban estates outside the city—unincorporated Northern Liberties Township stretched from the Delaware River to the Schuylkill River between Vine Street and Frankford Creek. In the middle of the eighteenth century there were only 62 houses in Philadelphia’s northern suburbs, but by 1790 Northern Liberties Township was home to nearly 10,000 residents. Much (if not most) of the township’s populace was concentrated near the Delaware River with the remainder dispersed in rural estates, crossroads hamlets, and villages throughout the interior, particularly along the area’s main highways: the Point no Point Road (Richmond Street), the Germantown Road (Avenue), and the Wissahickon Road (Ridge Avenue) (Figure 1). Although Northern Liberties Township grew rapidly during the second half of the eighteenth century, it was not formally recognized until 1791 when the state government authorized a small part of it located east of Fourth Street—between Vine Street and Pegg’s Run (Willow Street)—to elect officials, enact regulations, and tax residents for the purposes of establishing a night watch, erecting street lamps, and installing public water pumps. ¹

Many of the Northern Liberties’ early inhabitants put down roots in Kensington, a rural waterfront village in Shackamaxon. Extending along the west bank of the Delaware River from Cohocksink Creek (Canal Street) to Quessionwonmink (Frankford) Creek, Shackamaxon (“the place where the chiefs meet”) was settled in the seventeenth century by members of the Cock, Rambo, Salung, and Nilsson families of New Sweden and was the purported site of William Penn’s “Great Treaty” with the Lenni Lenape in 1682 (Figure 2). The area took its name from “Kackamensi,” a seventeenth-century Lenape village located there. ²

In 1730, wealthy merchant and Pennsylvania provincial councilor Anthony Palmer (1675–1749), formerly of St. Michael’s Parish, Barbados, purchased the much sought-after Fairman estate—a triangular swath of marshlands and meadows bounded by the Delaware River, the Frankford Road, and the Norris estate. Palmer took up residence at the Fairman mansion, a handsome brick house near the foot of Hanover (Columbia) Street where he lived “in a style suited to his circumstances” (Figure 3). Palmer kept there “a coach, then a great luxury, and a pleasure barge by which he readily made his visits from Shackamaxon to the city.” Hoping to attract tenants and clients to his rural estate, Palmer filled in “some lower places,” laid out a grid of streets, and divided the ground into small lots that he leased on ground rent “for a small sum.” He even talked of establishing a free public cemetery for the villagers—an aspiration his daughter, Thomasine Keith, fulfilled when her will opened the family burial ground on Palmer Street to the residents of Kensington in 1749. As a reputable, virtuous gentleman and member of the provincial council, Palmer undoubtedly socialized at Isaac Norris’ Bachelor’s Hall, that “celebrated place of gluttony and good living” located close by “in Kensington on the main river street.” The hall was a “square building of considerable beauty,” featuring a botanic garden where colonial elites enjoyed dances and tea parties until it burned down sometime before the American Revolution. ³