The Printzhof: Pennsylvania's First European Capital

Long before William Penn ever set foot in Pennsylvania, long before Philadelphia existed, a different flag flew on the Delaware shore. Here at Tinicum Island in sixteen forty-three, Governor Johan Björnsson Printz of the colony of New Sweden built himself a two-story log mansion and made it the capital of the first permanent European settlement in what would become Pennsylvania.

Printz had arrived that February aboard two Swedish ships, the Fama and the Swan, carrying settlers, soldiers, and royal ambitions. He was an enormous man, reputedly weighing more than four hundred pounds, so large that the Lenape called him Big Belly. He moved the colonial capital north from Fort Christina, which sat in what is now Wilmington, Delaware, and chose Tinicum Island for its strategic position commanding river traffic.

He called his new fort Nya Gotheborg, New Gothenburg, and at the center of it rose the Printzhof, furnished with glass windows and draperies sent from Sweden. For ten years, Printz governed New Sweden from this building, overseeing a colony that stretched along the river into present-day Delaware and New Jersey. The settlement never grew large, perhaps only a few hundred people at its peak, but it was the first continuous European presence on Pennsylvania soil.

Fire took the original Printzhof in sixteen forty-five, and colonists rebuilt it more solidly. Printz finally left for Sweden in sixteen fifty-three, exhausted and frustrated by the lack of reinforcements from Stockholm. Two years later, the Dutch under Governor Peter Stuyvesant sailed up the river and absorbed the colony by force. The English absorbed it in turn nine years after that.

The site, known today as Governor Printz Park in Essington, was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-one. A stone marker and a statue of the governor stand here now, commemorating Sweden's forgotten footprint on American soil.