Plantations in Early Pennsylvania

Within five years after settling on the banks of the Schuylkill River on their "patented" lands north of the Manatawny Creek, Mouns Jones and his neighbors petitioned [see record #MJTXT5] the Royal Governor in 1709 for a road for the convenient passage to and from their "plantations", indicating both their individually surveyed farmlands and the agrarian settlement community they had "planted" in the Manatawny "backcountry". The term "Plantations" was used in both senses in various contexts in early documents: In his 1681 "Account of the Province Of Pennsylvania In America", William Penn explicitly and repeatedly used "plantations" [the "seeds of nations"] as a synonym for "Colonies" [the "Greeks planted many parts of Asia…"]. Regarding his vast wooded Province,acquired by virtue of the King's indebtedness to Penn's Royal Navy Admiral father, Penn was unequivocally describing the settled and occupied areas of the colony to which the First Purchasers had "transplanted" themselves, their families, and their cultural traditions. Penn's First Purchasers were figuratively "taking root" in the lands and emerging provincial communities they occupied. Penn published a tract called "The Benefit of Plantations or Colonies...", a virtually synonymous use of the terms in the context of encouraging immigration for the promotion of commerce benefitting the Mother Country. Penn was the most prominent but not the only literate English Quaker to use "Plantation" in its broader sense. In 1682 William Coddington issued a tract meant to refute "such who ignorantly Brow-beat or Tongue-beat the American Plantations." The essay was entitled in part "Plantation work…of this Generation. Written …to All Such as Are Weightily Inclined to Transplant Themselves and Families to Any of the English Plantations in America…" [Quoted in Meeting House and Counting House, The Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia 1682-1763, by Frederick B. Tolles, Univ. of North Carolina Press (1948), reprinted by Norton, 1963, at p. 35]. Tolles implicitly defines "Plantation" in this context to mean the emigration of Quakers and their families in order to "Transplant" themselves, their culture, religion, and socio-political precepts to Penn's neo-feudal colony. According to the journals of Evans, Bartram{n}, and Weiser describing their 1743 journey from Bartram's homestead SW of Philadelphia [formerly Mouns Jones' first "plantation" in Penn's Province] through Tulpehocken to Onondaga, NY, the three journalists perceived a lack of development of "arts and sciences" by Natives in America before its "plantation by the whites...", an unequivocal reference to the settlement and development of Penn's expansive "Sylvania" by European immigrants. {n}Bartram, John, A Journey From Pennsylvania to Onondaga in 1743, Barre, MA: Imprint Society (1973 reprint). However, in the same set of narratives, Lewis Evans used "plantation" to designate agricultural land holdings, observing that "Tulpohoocking [sic] is settled by High Dutchers, who have fine plantations , raise great quantities of wheat", milled to "very fine flour, which they bring in the spring and fall seventy or eighty miles to Philadelphia." The 18th century wagon road from Tulpehocken to Philadelphia traversed north-central Berks County, joined the "Oaley" road near the Boone family's land holdings and mill, passed the Black Horse and White Horse Taverns in Morlatton, then turned to the southeast through Perkiomen and Germantown to the bustling market hub of Philadelphia. The British noblemen appointed to supervise trade between England and the colonies, unofficially known as the "Lords of Trade", were officially designated the "Committee of Trades and Plantations." Although semantically ambiguous, the Lords' jurisdiction related to commerce with all communities in Penn's colony, not merely to the farmers living on and working their cleared and "planted" fields. The term "plantation" soon expressed a related but different meaning: a tract of land with a significant proportion of its acreage seasonally "planted" with subsistence produce, barter-goods, and cash crops. Amos Long, author of The Pennsylvania German Family Farm [Pennsylvania German Society, 2d series, Vol. 6, 1972] has observed that "Large farmsteads were frequently referred to as a plantation on early legal descriptions and deeds." The Annals of Swedes on the Delaware by Clay, Jehu Curtis, 1835 [and subsequent reprints] described the "manner in which a colony from Sweden was first planted here…", a clear use of the term as denoting a communal immigrant settlement. The use of "Plantation" persisted in the riverside settlement, which was first called "Manatawny" [sometimes "Mahanatawny" in entries in the Logan Ledgers from about 1712 to about 1727]; later, by mid 18th century, becoming known as "Molatton", then "Morlatton", through the 2d half of the 18th century. A 1751 advertisement for the sale of the White Horse Tavern, then located in the riverfront house formerly occupied by Marcus Huling a short distance down-river from Mouns Jones house, included the Tavern-owner's entire "plantation, which lies on the Schuylkill River." It is apparent from contemporary sources that "plantation" conveyed two distinct meanings during the first century of settlement in Pennsylvania. Penn wrote that the first "planters" in these parts were the Dutch and soon after the Swedes and Finns, both skilled and productive in "husbandry", according to Penn. The term concurrently designated both the populated communities developing within Penn's Province and the substantial family farmsteads spreading across the cleared tillable ranges of Penn's vast rolling piedmont. Laurence Ward, April 2019, editied June 2023