The Founding: Penn's Sons and the Town of Reading
Near Reading, Pennsylvania
Stand near the old courthouse square in Reading and you are standing on a town that was laid out by deliberate intention. According to some accounts, in seventeen forty-three Richard and Thomas Penn, the surviving sons of William Penn, sat down with Conrad Weiser, Pennsylvania's most respected frontier diplomat and interpreter, and mapped out a grid. Five years later, in seventeen forty-eight, the town was officially established and given a name borrowed from the English county town of Reading, Berkshire, where the Penn family had roots.
The location was not accidental. The site occupied a broad terrace between the Schuylkill River to the west and the steep ridge of Mount Penn to the east, with reliable water and access to the river corridor that connected the backcountry to Philadelphia, about fifty miles to the southeast. It became the county seat of the newly formed Berks County in seventeen fifty-two, and from that moment it had an administrative gravity that drew settlers and commerce.
The people who filled the town came mainly from the German states, from the Palatinate and other southern regions, migrants who had crossed the Atlantic looking for land and found the Berks County valleys accommodating. They brought their language with them, and for well over a century Pennsylvania German was the common tongue of the region. The dialect, sometimes called Pennsylvania Dutch, a corruption of Deutsch, survived in rural Berks County households into the nineteen fifties.
Conrad Weiser himself settled not far from here, at a homestead in present-day Womelsdorf, to the west, and spent his life translating between the colonial world and the Iroquois Confederacy. His presence in the founding meeting is a reminder of how precarious European settlement still felt in those years, and how much depended on getting the diplomacy right.
Reading grew from that grid into a city. The grid is still there if you look for it.
