First Permanent Settlement and Earliest Church, Dedicated September 4, 1646

The first European settlement in what is now Pennsylvania was made on Tinicum Island, now Essington, not far distant from the mouth of Darby Creek on the Delaware River. The beautiful buildings of the Corinthian Yacht Club are now located on this historic spot.

A monument was unveiled June 14, 1923, to mark the place where the first permanent settlement in what is now Pennsylvania was made. This shaft was erected by the Swedish Colonial Society and was unveiled by Miss Nancy J. Paxson, tenth in descent from one of the original founders of the colony.

Here it was that Colonel John Printz, a Swedish military officer of note, who had recently been knighted by the Swedish Government for the conspicuous role he enacted in the Thirty Years’ War, accompanied by a few adventurers of the same nationality, located in 1643, erected a fort of green logs and named the settlement he founded New Gottenberg. The fort was mounted with four cannon. Provisions were made for the planting of corn and tobacco.

A short time thereafter Printz built a pretentious mansion on Tinicum Island, “very splendid,” with an orchard and pleasure house, and it bore the name of Printz Hof or Printz Hall. This mansion house was two stories high and built of hewn logs, while two or more fireplaces and ovens were made of bricks imported from Sweden for that purpose. There were even glass windows. The utensils were of copper and tin. Their light was candle. Printz Hall also contained a 609fine library and every convenience known at that period. This great house stood 160 years, when it was accidentally destroyed by fire.

Printz planted orchards, cleared fields and firmly established himself on the place he determined should be the seat of government for the Swedish colony on the South River, as the Delaware was then known.

Printz sent Maus Kling, the engineer for the colony, to make a settlement on the Schuylkill. Log houses were built there, and Kling built on the east bank of the Schuylkill, near its mouth, probably on what was afterward called Providence Island, a small fort which was called New Korsholm.

These operations of Kling, the plantation and the fort, form the first authenticated occupancy by Europeans of the site of the City of Philadelphia.

On April 17, 1640, the Swedish ship Kalmer Nyckel sailed into the Christiana Creek. Among the immigrants was the Reverend Reorus Torkillus, a clergyman of the Swedish Lutheran Church, who thus became the first minister of the gospel on the Delaware River. Soon after this preacher’s arrival in the colony a meeting house was built, in which the services of the Lutheran Church were conducted.

Governor Printz built a church on Tinicum Island, which had a bell and belfry. It was succeeded by a more imposing and commodious edifice in 1646, built of logs, with a roof of clapboards and an altar with a silver cloth. This church was dedicated by the Reverend John Campanius on September 4, 1646.

Printz reported to his home Government he had the church finished and dedicated, “adorning and decorating it according to our Swedish fashion, so far as our limited means and resources would allow.”

There was a graveyard located adjacent to the church, in which was interred the corpse of Andrew Hanson’s daughter Catherine, who was buried October 28, 1646. This was the first burial of any European in Pennsylvania, certainly the first in any regularly established cemetery.

The marriage of Governor Printz’s daughter, Armegot, to Johan Papegoja, the commandant at Fort Christina, was solemnized in this old church at Tinicum, in 1644, and it is believed to have been the first instance in which a matrimonial ceremony was performed between Europeans within the limits of the present State of Pennsylvania.

The Old Swedes’ Church called the worshippers together with the sound of the first “church-going bell” on the American Continent. But in May, 1673, Armegot Papegoja was in such dire distress for funds that she sold the bell to the congregation of the adherents of the Augsburg Confession, at Laus Deo.

The worshippers believed this bell should be nowhere but in their own Swedes’ Church and they determined to repurchase it, when the members of the congregation gave their labor for two years at harvest 610time as the consideration. The bell was brought back to Tinicum, but the facts relating to its subsequent history are lacking.^[6]

It is quite probable that this Old Swedes’ Church remained the active center for worship long after the Swedes were swept from power on the Delaware.

Peter Stuyvesant, at the head of a large fleet and formidable expedition, September, 1654, captured Fort Cassimer, or Trinity, as the Swedes called it, then after a siege of fourteen days compelled the surrender of Fort Christina, which was defended by Governor Johan Claesson Rysingh.

In the articles of capitulation, which were formally drawn up and signed September 25 by the two commanders on the “parade ground” outside the fort, it was agreed that the Swedish soldiers were to march out with the honors of war.

The “guns, ammunition, implements, victuals and other effects belonging to the Crown of Sweden and to the South Company,” in the fort or its vicinity, were to remain their property. The Swedish settlers might stay or go, as they chose, and for a year and six weeks, if they stayed, need not take the Dutch oath of allegiance. Swedes who remained should enjoy the Lutheran faith, the “liberty of the Augsburg Confession,” and have a minister to instruct them.

When the English came to the South River in the fall of 1664, the Swedes at Tinicum still were worshiping in their Lutheran Church.

After the departure of Governor Rysingh, in 1653, there was only one minister among the Swedes on the river, the man who was variously called Laers, Laurentius Carolus, Lock, Lokenius, etc., was a poor fellow whose missteps and mischances, moral lapses and legal misdemeanors are repeatedly mentioned in the scanty chronicles of the time. He preached in the Swedes’ Church at Tinicum and at Crane Hook, between Christina and New Castle, where a log church was built about 1667. Lock died in 1688.

When Governor Andros visited the Delaware, in 1675, the New Castle Court decreed, when designating places of meeting for worship, “that the church at Tinicum Island do serve for Upland and parts adjacent.”

Great Tinicum Island stands with Jamestown and Plymouth as one of the birthplaces of America.

Lewis, in the history of Chester County, says that the Swedes came from New Castle and places along the Delaware, both above and below, to worship in that building.

About this time the settlement at Upland, now Chester, began to thrive, and it was not long before it became a more important place than Tinicum.

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