But when local landowners objected, Penn instead chose a site farther north that became Philadelphia. He held Pennsylvania’s first General Assembly there, and even tried to make it his capital. Initially dubbed Upland when it was settled in the 1600s by Swedish and, then, Dutch traders who lost control of the area after the Anglo-Dutch War of 1674, the town was renamed Chester by William Penn, who rechristened the village upon his arrival in 1682. This 1885 map shows a well-populated industrial city with a busy seaport.
Chester’s population grew rapidly after the Civil War as migrants were drawn in by plentiful employment opportunities. The municipality’s fortunes shifted many times over the 334 years of its existence, evolving from a small Swedish settlement to the near-capital of the Pennsylvania colony to a neglected village to a manufacturing powerhouse and then into dire post-industrial decline.
Located 30 miles down the Delaware River from Philadelphia, the small but once industrially mighty city of Chester emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century as but a shadow of its former prominence in the county and the region.
