Despite his contribution to U.S. history and his intentions of founding a colony built on “brotherly love,” William Penn owned 12 slaves in his estate, Pennsbury.

Twelve slaves. As part of my job is fact-checking, I like to double-check numbers like that. Pennsbury Manor, the museum devoted to Penn’s life in his colony, just refers to a slave community and provides five names (Sam, Sue, Yaff, Jack, and Peter). So how has 12 become a cited number? Let’s go diving.

I don’t know FCNL’s sources but a recent editorial submission came to me in recent months citing an August 2020 article by Michaela Winberg in the online publication Billy Penn, “William Penn kept enslaved people. These are some of their names”:

The records that exist aren’t totally clear, but it seems as if Penn enslaved roughly 12 people at his Pennsbury Manor estate, which was located in what is now the Philly suburbs. These people were purchased off the first slave ship known to have arrived in Philadelphia, and were of African and Carribean [sic] descent.

I’m a fan of Billy Penn but it’s not an academic source. Fortunately they gave a link to their assertion, a September 2012 article by Jack H. Schick in… oh dear, my own publication, Friends Journal!In “Slavery in Pennsylvania” he wrote:

Quakers, though concerned and in the forefront of efforts to end the institution of slavery, were not innocent. While living on his estate at Pennsbury Manor, before he returned to England forever in 1701, William Penn kept 12 slaves.

No citation was given but as Jack’s editor I can affirm he is fond of Wikipedia. I’m fairly confident that he got his reference from this entry, “History of slavery in Pennsylvania”:

William Penn, the proprietor of the Province of Pennsylvania, held 12 slaves as workers on his estate, Pennsbury. They took part in construction of the main house and outbuildings. Penn left the colony in 1701, and never returned.

If you ask Google “How many slaves did Penn have?” it gives you “12 slaves” as its instant answer and links to this Wikipedia page. Given that the all-knowing search engine thinks this a vetted answer worthy of a 32-pixel headline, how much can we trust it?

The immediate answer is: not much. Wikipedia has no citation (as of this writing; I should probably go edit it myself). The trail would go cold there if not for the platform’s obsession with keeping its revision history. Through that one can find that the claim on Penn’s slaves dates to the October 2007 creation of the entry.

William Penn, the founder of the Pennsylvania colony, owned 12 slaves on his estate, Pennsbury; however, he gradually became a supporter of the abolition of the institution.

Thirteen years of edits has reworked the sentence quite a bit but the 12 number remains from the beginning and in that first Wikipedia draft there was a citation to a USHistory.org page. This is a still-extant website produced by the Independence Hall Association, a Pennsylvania nonprofit founded in 1942. The process of link rot is at work, alas, and Wikipedia’s 2007 link gives a “page not found” today. Thankfully Archive.org can take us back in the early aughts and let us read it in all of its early-oughts design glory (it takes me back to see a background image used to create a column!). The USHistory post is just a cut-and-paste of a 2003 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer (again, accessible thanks to Archive.org). Reporter Melissa Dribben’s lede goes right to the point:

William Penn owned at least 12 slaves. During his life he gradually came around to advocating abolition, but when he died in 1718, Pennsylvania was a long way from ending the practice.

Further down she mentions Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund and their 1991 book, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. For the first time in this train of citations we’ve actually come to trained historians! And I’d be hard pressed to think of any two academics I would trust more to document this era of colonial Pennsylvania than Nash or Soderlund. It’s long out of print but Google Books’s preview gives us the mother lode:

Quaker proprietor and his associates made no effort to prohibit black slavery in the City of Brotherly Love and its environs. Indeed, Penn owned at least twelve slaves himself and stated at one point that he preferred them to white indentured servants because slaves could be held for life. Though in one early will the proprietor provided for manumission, slaves worked on his Pennsbury estate in Bucks County throughout his tenure. One of these slaves was Black Alice who died in 1802 at age 116. She recalled often lighting the proprietor’s pipe.¹³

The paragraph has a citation [see update, below] but the limited Google Books preview doesn’t include the citation index and used copies are a bit too pricey for me (by chance I am currently reading Nash’s very fascinating Forging Freedom, which is available as a used book for a much more reasonable price).

I do wish that this trail of citations didn’t end at a book that’s celebrating its thirty year anniversary. I’m sure we’ve had a number of ambitious historians digging through basement archives since the early 90s. Surely they’ve uncovered more evidence. (For example, Black Alice, a fascinating figure, seems not to have been Penn’s slave at Pennsbury but instead was enslaved by fellow-Quaker Samuel Carpenter, a friend of Penn, and owner of an oyster house where Alice worked from age five.) But at least this one assertion—that Penn owned exactly or around or over twelve slaves—has a solid academic source at its root.

Update March 18, 2021:

I emailed Jean R. Soderlund, who gave me the sources for that paragraph in Freedom by Degrees!

The citations in note 13 are: Dunn et al., eds, Papers of William Penn, 3:66–67; 4:113–14; Hannah Penn to James Logan June 6, 1720, and Logan to Hannah Penn, May 11, 1721, Penn Papers, Official Correspondence, 1:95, 97, HSP; Samuel P. Janney, The Life of William Penn (reprint 1970), 421; Nash, Forging Freedom, 12.

She did quite a bit of work digging through the records concerning Pennbury after publishing the book and says “I don’t remember being concerned about the reference to ‘at least twelve’ in Freedom by Degrees.”

I’ve also edited Wikipedia. Thirteen-plus years after their stat showed up on the “History of slavery in Pennsylvania” page, Nash and Soderlund finally get the citation.

This guy in Streetview is standing near the spot where the world’s first #selfie portrait was taken in 1839.

Robert Cornelius was one of the first people to try to reproduce Louis Daguerre’s photographic technique after news of the breakthrough reach Philadelphia. A chemist working at his family’s gas lighting company, Cornelius started experimenting with different chemical combinations until he found a way to reduce exposure times so that a person to sit still long enough for a portrait. In October 1839 he took a picture himself “in the yard back of his store and residence, (old) 176 Chestnut Street, above Seventh (now number 710), in Philadelphia,” according to an oral history published half a century later (PDF). Cornelius recounts:

It was our business to make a great variety of articles of plated metal. Very soon afterwards, I made in the factory a tin box, and bought from McAllister, 48 Chestnut Street, a lens about two inches in diameter, such as was used for opera purposes. With these instruments I made the first likeness of myself and another one of some of my children, in the open yard of my dwelling, sunlight bright upon us, and I am fully of the impression that I was the first to obtain a likeness of the human face.

Remarkably, in 2014, the Cornelius and Co. building is still there on Chestnut Street, though barely recognizable, with an extra floor on top and extensive facade changes. It’s a discount drug store. The back is the narrow alley named Ionic Street, home to dumpsters and people wanting to stay out of sight. The yard is to the right of these dumpsters. With #selfie such a popular hashtag, Cornelius’s picture has circulated on a lot of internet lists as the “world’s first selfie.” But it’s historical significance is far greater: it is the first photographic portrait of our species. I’m not typically one for hyperbole, but we humans started seeing ourselves differently after that portrait.

I originally assumed the building on the right of the alley stood where the yard had been but a satellites turns up a surprise: the yard is still there! Looking at the 710 property from above, the buildings facing Chestnut and Ionic are separate–with a large open space in between! There are two sections that look almost to be garden beds.

Yo Philly, how has 710 Chestnut Street not been snatched up and turned into a museum of photographic history? The first floor could focus on nineteenth century Philadelphia innovation, with the still-existent inner courtyard turned into a tourist destination? It would be like catnip. What self-respecting modern tourist wouldn’t walk the few blocks from Independence Hall to take their picture at the very site of the world’s first selfie? I know Philly typically doesn’t respect any history past 1776 but come on!

Update March 2021: Katie Park in the Inquirer reporting an all-too-predictable story: Philly L&I approves demolition of Chestnut Street properties that preservationists had tried to protect. It’s not Cornelius’s house at 710 but it’s just a few doors down the block at 730–732. The article has some great info from Justin Brooks, a lawyer who’s been trying to organize historic recognition for the 600, 700, and 800 blocks of Chestnut. One tidbit: in 1891 Chestnut Street was widened by the city, requiring “building owners to tear down their own facades to move farther back.” (You could write a tome on Philly history that’s been lost to road widening projects but at least this was “just” the 700 block facades.)

The object of the question this time was an antique teapot. White china with a blue design. It wasn’t in great shape. The top was cracked and missing that handle that lets you take the lid off without burning your fingers. It had a folksy charm, but as a teapot it was neither practical nor particularly attractive, and neither of us really wanted it. It was headed for the oversized trash bin outside her room.

I turned it over in my hands. There, on the bottom, was a strip of dried-out and cracked masking tape. On it, barely legible and in the kind of cursive script that is no longer taught, were the words “Recovered from ruins of fire 6/29/23 at 7. 1067 Hazard Rd.”

We scratched our heads. We didn’t know where Hazard Road might be. Google later revealed it’s in the blink-and-you-miss-it railroad stop of Hazard, Pennsylvania, a crossroads only technically within the boundary of our mother’s home town of Palmerton, Pennsylvania. The date would place the fire seven years before her birth.

We can only guess to fill in the details. A catastrophic fire must have taken out the family home. Imagine the grim solace of pulling out a family heirloom. Perhaps some grandparent had brought it carefully packed in a small suitcase on the journey to America. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it had no sentimental value and it had landed with our mother because no one else cared. We’ll never know. No amount of research could tell us more than that masking tape. Our mother wasn’t the only one losing her memory. We were too. We were losing the family memory of a generation that had lived, loved, and made it through a tragedy one mid-summer day.

I stood there and looked at the teapot once again. It had survived a fire ninety years ago. I would give it a reprieve from our snap judgement and the dump. Stripped of all meaning save three inches of masking tape, it now sits on a top shelf of my cupboard. It will rest there, gathering back the dust I just cleaned off, until some spring afternoon forty years from now, when one of my kids will turn to another. “What do you think of this?”

Update March 2017

Beyond all odds, there’s actually more information. Someone has put up obituaries from the Morning Call newspaper. It includes the May 1922 notice for Alvin H. Noll, my mother’s great grandfather.

Alvin H. Noll, a well known resident of Palmerton, died at his home, at that place, on Sunday morning, aged 66 years. He was a member of St. John’s church, Towamensing, and also a prominent member of Lodge, No. 440, I.O. of A., Bowmanstown. He is survived by two daughters, Mrs. Lewis Sauerwine, Slatington, and Mrs. Fred Parry, this city; three sons, Purietta Noll, Samuel Noll and Thomas Noll, Palmerton. Two sisters, Mrs. Mary Schultz, Lehighton; Miss Amanda Noll, Bowmanstown; two brothers, Aaron Noll, Bowmanstown, and William Noll, Lehighton. Ten grandchildren also survive. Funeral services will be held at the home of his son, Purietta (sic) Noll, 1067 Hazard Road, Palmerton, on Wednesday at 1.30 p.m., daylight saving time. Further services will be held in St. John’s church, Towamensing. Interment will be made in Towamensing cemetery.

And there it is: 1067 Hazard Road, home of my mother’s grandfather Puriette Franklin Noll one year before the fire (now more commonly called Mauch Chunk Road). So I’ll add a picture of Puriette and his wife Elizabeth with my Mom eight years after the fire, at what the photo says is their Columbia Avenue home. Wow!

Update May 2026

My wife pulled the teapot from our cabinet this weekend and suggested we didn’t need it because its lid was cracked. The miracle of superglue fixed that, 100-plus years after the fire.

Also, the modern magic of image AI suggests that the teapot probably hails from Arita (Saga Prefecture) or Seto (Aichi Prefecture) in Japan and was produced between the 1890s and 1930s: “These regions are globally famous for their cobalt-blue underglaze decoration on white porcelain.” There goes my earlier supposition that it might have been packed in anyone’s suitcase during a transatlantic voyage. Nice versions of these antiques go from $40-$80 on eBay.