Pennsbury Manor

Pennsbury Manor is the colonial estate of William Penn, founder and proprietor of the Colony of Pennsylvania, who lived there from 1699 to 1701. He left it and returned to England in 1701, where he died penniless in 1718. Following his departure and financial woes, the estate fell into numerous hands and disrepair. Since 1939 it has been the name of a reconstructed manor on the original property. Penn had his manor built on an parcel, part of his much larger grant of land from the Crown. It was located about 25 miles north of Philadelphia along the Delaware River in present day Falls Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In 1929, the Pennsylvania legislature authorized acquisition of the property by gift. In 1932 the Warner Company donated nearly ten acres of the property to the state of Pennsylvania as a site for a permanent memorial to Penn. The Pennsylvania Historical Commission was given responsibility for it. The legislature appropriated money to reconstruct the buildings of this estate in a historically accurate manner, to create a house museum in 1939. Over the decades, more land was acquired, and the property now has a total of The property was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 28, 1969. The manor house and grounds are administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission in association with The Pennsbury Society, and are open to the public.

William Penn (1644 1718) of England, the new Proprietor of the King's Grant for the Province of Pennsylvania, traveled to the New World in present day United States in 1682 to start his dream of a Holy Experiment free from religious persecution for his Religious Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers. Penn was granted an tract by King Charles II of England. At some time before 1820, a farmhouse today known as the Crozier House was built over part of the original Pennsbury foundations.

In the 1920s and 1930s there was considerable interest in preserving buildings and history of colonial America, due in part to the country's celebration of its sesquicentennial and the stresses of waves of immigration, a world war, and the Great Depression. Sites relating to Founding Fathers were reconstructed in this era, including Abraham Lincoln's former home in New Salem, Illinois in the 1920s and the long destroyed Northern Virginia birthplace of George Washington known as Wakefield, in 1930. The result is two stories, with a dormered hipped roof serving as an attic. The design is Georgian influenced Colonial Revival, five bays wide and two piles deep. A white wooden door and windows contrast against red brick laid in an English bond. Support buildings in either matching brick or whitewashed wood frames surround the home. Early anachronisms that were part of the original construction project, such as a white picket fence and brick walkways, have been replaced by more appropriate styles of pale fencing and graveled walks. Bricks were too expensive at the time of Pennsbury Manor's original construction to be used for walkways, and not even the original house was fully constructed in brick. Okie did not get the final contract for the landscape, but had submitted a proposal. Historic horticulture was little developed at this time,