This street honors William Penn (1644-1718), founder of the province (now state) of Pennsylvania. (The -sylvania suffix comes from the Latin for “woods”; thus Pennsylvania means “Penn’s Woods”.) Penn was a wealthy young Englishman who joined the fledgling Quaker movement (officially the Religious Society of Friends) in 1666, yearning for purpose and meaning after the great plague and fire that had just devastated London. In 1681, Penn, already a co-owner of a Quaker colony in western New Jersey, was granted an enormous chunk of land in the American colony – some 45,000 square miles – by King Charles II, who dubbed the land “Pennsylvania”. (It’s said that the king was financially indebted to Penn’s family and so the land was a payoff.) Penn sailed across the Atlantic the following year to establish Philadelphia as Pennsylvania’s Quaker capital. Two centuries later, the town of Whittier was founded by Quakers, which is why several of its early streets (including Philadelphia) reflect its religious roots. See Whittier Avenue for more about the name.
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