The Manor of Steyning: William Penn's Gift to His Children
Near Wilmington, Pennsylvania
In seventeen oh one, William Penn made an unusual gesture: he patented fifteen thousand five hundred acres of Chester County land to his daughter Laetitia Penn as a gift of fatherly love, with an annual rent of exactly one beaver skin. He named the estate the Manor of Steyning, after a town in Sussex, England. Five years later, in seventeen oh six, Penn patented a neighboring tract of fourteen thousand five hundred acres to his son William Penn Junior.
Together the two manors blanketed much of what is now southeastern Pennsylvania with Penn family land. The western boundary of Laetitia's manor runs near this marker. Penn's colony had by then survived nearly two decades of Quaker experiment, and these family grants suggest he expected the Pennsylvania enterprise to endure across generations.
He died in England in seventeen eighteen, deeply in debt, but the land bearing his name outlasted his finances by centuries.
