The Birthplace of the United States

Earth Observatory Science Earth Observatory The Birthplace of the United… Earth Earth Observatory Image of the Day EO Explorer Topics All Topics Atmosphere Land Heat & Radiation Life on Earth Human Dimensions Natural Events Oceans Remote Sensing Technology Snow & Ice Water More Content Collections Global Maps World of Change Articles Earth Matters Blog Blue Marble: Next Generation EO Kids Mission: Biomes About About Us Subscribe 🛜 RSS Contact Us Search June 1, 2013 Editor’s note: In honor of America’s 250th birthday, Earth Observatory is revisiting stories about the landscapes that helped shape U.S. history. The images and text on this page were originally published on July 4, 2017. Explore the full collection here. Situated between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, Philadelphia was founded in 1682 by William Penn as the seat of a Quaker colony. Later, its location just upstream of the Delaware Bay and Atlantic Ocean made it an industrial, commercial, and cultural hub of the American colonies. When the area’s original inhabitants, the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) Indians, lived here, much of the land was forested. Swedish and Dutch settlers had already traveled in the area when Penn finally came to it and signed a treaty with the Lenape to establish a city. He called his colony—now the state of Pennsylvania—Sylvania, after its sylvan, wooded appearance. Current-day Philadelphia had “a high and dry land next to the water, with a shore ornamented with a fine view of pine trees growing upon it,” according to a historical account. More than 300 years after Penn’s arrival, this landscape remains verdant, despite its urban development. The natural-color image above shows Philadelphia and the surrounding area as it appeared on June 1, 2013, when the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite passed overhead. Nearly a hundred years after Philadelphia was established, the Founding Fathers of the United States met in this thriving city roughly at the geo