The Manor of Steyning - PLAQUE
New Garden Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
The Manor of Steyning of 15,500 acres patented by William Penn for "fatherly love" and one beaver skin yearly to his daughter Laetitia Penn at Philadelphia, October 23, 1701 is here marked on its western line adjoining a tract of 14,500 acres which the proprietor patented to his son WILLIAM PENN, JUNIOR May 24, 1706
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
This line marks the edge of the Manor of Steyning, a 15,500-acre tract William Penn patented to his daughter Laetitia in 1701 for the token yearly rent of a single beaver skin and "fatherly love." Beside it lay a companion tract granted to his son William Penn Jr. in 1706. Such proprietary manors were how the Penn family reserved and parceled great blocks of colonial Pennsylvania among their heirs.
Why it matters
These grants show how land — and with it wealth and standing — was distributed in a proprietary colony, and how even in that era substantial estates could pass to a daughter.
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Related people
- · William Penn
- · Laetitia Penn
- · William Penn Jr.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Indian Hannah (1730-1802) - PLAQUE
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Indian Hannah, born nearby around 1730, is remembered as the last of the Lenape (Delaware) Indians of Chester County, descended through her mother and grandmother from the Unami people of the Turtle clan. She lived out her long life under the protection of the Quaker assemblyman William Webb, in a county from which nearly all her people had already been displaced. Her story is that of a Native community's twilight in a corner of Penn's colony.
Isaac & Dinah Mendenhall (1806-82 / 1807-89)
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Isaac and Dinah Mendenhall were Quaker abolitionists whose Chester County home, Oakdale, sheltered freedom seekers moving north on the Underground Railroad. When their Old Kennett Meeting split over slavery, they helped found the reform-minded Longwood Progressive Meeting in 1853. Dinah joined a delegation that pressed President Lincoln in 1862 to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and the couple championed women's right to vote as well.
Ann Preston, M.D. (1813-1872)
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Born on this Chester County land in 1813, Ann Preston broke barrier after barrier in a world that barred women from medicine. A graduate of the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, she became its dean in 1865 — the first American woman to hold such a post — and in 1860 founded the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia, later adding one of the nation's earliest nurses' training schools. A Quaker, she was also an abolitionist tied to the Underground Railroad.
Eusebius Barnard (1802-1865)
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