PENNSYLVANIA , which, but for a
small stretch on Lake Erie is the only landlocked state in the
northeast, was explored by the Dutch in the early 1600s, settled
by the Swedes forty years later, and claimed by the British in
1664. Charles II of England, who owed a debt to the Penn family,
rid himself of the potentially troublesome young William
Penn , an enthusiastic advocate of religious freedom,
by granting him land in the colony in 1682. Penn Jr. immediately
established a "holy experiment" of "brotherly"
love and tolerance, naming the state for his father and setting
a good example by signing a peaceful cohabitation treaty with
the Native Americans. Most of the early agricultural settlers
were religious refugees: Quakers like Penn himself, Mennonites
from Germany and Switzerland, to be joined later by Irish Catholics
during the potato famines of the nineteenth century..
"The keystone state" was crucial in the
development of the US. Politicians and thinkers like Benjamin
Franklin congregated in Philadelphia - home of both the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution - and were prominent
in articulating the ideas behind the Revolution. Later, the battle
in Gettysburg, south Pennsylvania - best remembered for Abraham
Lincoln's immortal Gettysburg Address - marked
a turning point in the Civil War. Pennsylvania was also vital
industrially: Pittsburgh, in the west, was the world's leading
steel producer in the nineteenth century, and nearly all the nation's
anthracite coal is still mined here.
The two great urban centers of Philadelphia
and Pittsburgh , both lively and vibrant tourist
destinations, are at opposite ends of the state. The three hundred
miles between them, though predominantly agricultural, are topographically
diverse. There are over one hundred state parks, with green rolling
countryside in the east, brooding forests in the west, and in
the northeast, the rivers, lakes and valleys of the Poconos. Lancaster
County , home to traditional Amish farmers, and the Gettysburg
battlefield both heave with busloads of day-trippers, while the
Hershey chocolate factory, minutes away from Harrisburg
, the capital, draws thousands of cocoa-loving visitors each year.
