sylvania he found that the commissioners had not been idle; at their direction Thomas
Fairman had already taken soundings of the river channel and had "placed Philadelphia"
at the narrowest part of the relatively high and well-drained peninsula formed by the
Delaware and Schuylkill rivers ( Fig. 1 ). ^* Extending south along the Delaware was the set-
tlement of Wicaco, later included in the District of Southwark. Settled early by Swedes, this
was the oldest part of the county and the first to develop extensively beyond the limits of
the city. Further to the south and west were the areas known, then as now, by their Indian
names Passyunk and Moyamensing, which would be organized as townships at an early
date. To the north and west of the city lay a tract of land that William Penn had originally
intended to include within the boundaries of his great town and which, when that proved
impracticable, he set aside as "the liberty land of free lots" to be divided as a kind of divi-
dend among the first purchasers of property in the new colony. This appears to be the
origin of the term "Liberties" as applied to this tract and, by extension, to much of the area
outside the city proper. In 1854 all these outlying districts were made a part of Philadel-
phia when the county was consolidated with the city.

The final form given by the new Surveyor-General to Penn's "Capitall Citty" did not
differ essentially from that indicated on the Scull and Heap map of 1777, noted above. Act-
ing upon his instructions "to Settle the figure of the Towne so as that the streets hereafter
may be uniforme downe to the Water from the Country bounds," Holme based his plan for
Philadelphia upon a rigid grid system. In lieu of the 10,000 acres that Penn had envisaged,
however, the commissioners contented themselves with a rectangle approximately two
miles long and one mile wide, bounded on the east and west by the two rivers, and cover-
ing about 1,280 acres. Along each of the rivers ran a Front Street, and through the approxi-
mate center of the town, bisecting it from east to west and from north to south, were two
main thoroughfares, each one double the fifty-foot width of the other streets, labeled
respectively High and Broad streets ( Fig. 2 ). Somewhat later the streets that ran east and
west were given the names of the principal trees found in "Penn's Woods," and those run-
ning north and south were numbered consecutively from both rivers to the center of the
city. As an aid to remembering the sequence of the major east-west streets, Philadelphians
early evolved a useful jingle:

High, Mulberry, Sassafras, Vine
Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine.

The second line still applies well enough, but later changes have made the first badly
out of date; High is now called Market, Mulberry has become Arch, and Sassafras is known
as Race. As time went on, the large original blocks were also subdivided by the numerous
small streets and alleys that exist today, and in 1839 the streets west of Broad were renum-
bered to continue the sequence of those on the east.

In the center of his plan, at the junction of High and Broad streets, Holme designated
an area of ten acres as the site of the market and town hall that Penn had mentioned in

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