When we think of family relationships we often visualize a tree, but when we consider a tree we seldom think of its family. One exception is the Great Elm of Shackamaxon. Its grandchildren reside at the University of Pennsylvania and Haverford College, but its great, great grandchild has returned to its ancestral roots on the Kensington Waterfront. The young tree stands as a living connection to the city’s creation and symbolizes the founder’s principles of virtue and justice, although these ideals were eventually betrayed.

The cultural significance of the Great Elm stems from the influential representation of Philadelphia’s founding myth, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians. The nine-foot panorama painted by Benjamin West in 1771 portrays the moment, 90 years earlier, when Penn and friends, just off the boat, secured land from the Lenape under the branches of the Great Elm. The composition brings two contrasting worlds together into balanced visual harmony.

At the center of the canvas, European merchants present a bolt of white cloth to Chief Tamanend who is enrobed in similar fabric. Penn frames this interaction with open arms, and a cluster of Quakers stand about in drab attire and black hats. Behind them are houses under construction, boats floating on the river, and goods being hauled ashore. The Lenape warriors have laid down their arrows and gaze at the fabric with interest. They are muscular and lightly clothed with accents of colorful feathers. Further back is a shadowy group of natives and wigwams and then, impenetrable darkness. In the foreground, a breastfeeding mother and child accentuate the peacefulness of the scene. One group has just stepped out of the deep forest, while the other has crossed the ocean with bright offerings. They meet under the Great Elm whose branches form a space of mediation and bear witness to the profound meeting.

As a Neoclassical painter, West drew on Enlightenment philosophy and emphasized formal clarity, compositional stability, and heroic nobility. His bold innovation was to paint contemporary scenes in a classical manner, breaking from the tradition of only representing the ancient world. West’s dramatic portrayals of events in the English colonies impressed the court, and in 1772, he became the official “History Painter to the King” for George III.

The painting was displayed in the 1772 Royal Gallery Exhibition in London and struck a resonant chord with the public. Engravers from England, Scotland, Italy, Germany, France, America, and Mexico created reproductions for distribution. Various renditions were produced over the next century and could be purchased as framed pictures, on dishes, candle screens, painted trays, window curtains, whisky glasses, and bed quilts. The Treaty Tree is present in every version, even accompanying Penn to an undefined tropical location.

Penn’s Treaty associates the colonization of America with virtuous intentions. As West described, “The great object I had in forming that composition was to express savages brought into harmony and peace by justice and benevolence, by not withholding from them what was their right, and giving to them what they were in want of.” His attitude reflected the typical European view of Indigenous people confronted through colonial conquest: their primitive lives would obviously benefit from contact with modern society.

The darker side of this scene is that it portends the devastating impact the colonists would inflict on Native Americans. When Penn arrived, the Lenape inhabited New Jersey, southern New York, and eastern Pennsylvania in a loose, nonhierarchical network of tribes. Their lives revolved around the waterways, and they fished, hunted, farmed, and lived relatively free of disease. Within a century of contact with the Europeans, their numbers were decimated by exposure to smallpox, measles, and influenza. Disease, death, and colonial expansion accompanied by violence pushed the remaining Lenape westward, away from their lands and manner of living.

Penn’s intentions were different from those who gained territory through armed confrontation and intimidation. As he wrote prior to his departure from England in a letter addressed to the Kings of the Indians in Pennsylvania, “I am very sensible of the unkindness and Injustice that hath been too much exercised toward you by the People of these Parts off the world, who have sought themselves, and to make great Advantages by you […] and caused great Grudgings and Animosities, sometimes to the shedding of blood, which have made the great God Angry. but I am not such a man, as is well known in my own Country: I have great love and regard towards you, and I desire to win and gain your Love and friendship by a kind, just and peaceable life.”

The Quaker principle of nonviolence required Penn to maintain peaceful relationships with the Native Americans. In his 1681 Concessions to the Province of Pennsylvania he wrote that disputes between the Lenape and the colonists would be resolved through discussion among six members from each society. This was a radical proposition in the history of international conflict resolution. Penn earnestly sought peace, but his colony’s expansion eventually pushed the Lenape from their homeland as much as the colonies that did not claim such love-affirming principles.

The common interpretation of West’s painting is that it represents the moment when Penn first arrived in America in October of 1682. However, before he met with the Lenape, Penn rushed about attending to affairs with other colonists. His first stop was in New Castle, in present day Delaware, where he gathered the inhabitants to assure them of their rights. Over the next month, he inspected the site of future Philadelphia, went to New York to help mediate a political dispute, visited the governor of New Jersey, attended a Friends Meeting on Long Island, and convened the first meeting of the Pennsylvania Assembly in Chester.

The earliest Pennsylvania land treaties were arranged in the months before Penn arrived. The treaty documents include a description of the boundaries to the land that was “Bargained Sold & Delivered […] unto the Said William Penn his Heirs & Assignes forever.” The treaties also included a long list of items given to the Lenape in exchange, such as kettles, guns, coats, shirts, stockings, axes, knives, glasses, shoes, copper boxes, scissors, combs, fishhooks, needles, tobacco, rum, and beer. 

Penn was 38 when he arrived, far younger than the portly gentleman portrayed in West’s painting, and there is no record of him meeting with the Lenape in Shackamaxon. Although Chief Tamanend has a primary role in the painting, he also was not part of the Shackamaxon land deal. Tamanend signed a treaty for land further up the river between Neshaminy and Pennypack Creeks. The arrangements for that treaty took place in the recently constructed Friends Meeting House in Philadelphia. After the conference, Tamanend and the other chiefs stayed overnight and attended worship with Penn the next day. Clearly, West intended his painting to be allegorical rather than a historical representation.

The scene was invented, but the setting was real. The Great Elm was over 150-years-old at the time of the treaty and 250-years-old when the scene was painted. The tree was a well-known figure on the riverfront and stood in the area known to the Lenape as Shackamaxon, which has been translated as both “the place where the chiefs meet” and “the place of eels.”

In three years, Penn and his deputies assembled enough land through treaties to form the counties of Philadelphia, Bucks, and Chester. In 1684, Penn was compelled to return to England to support his claim over the Lower Counties (future Delaware) which was disputed by Lord Baltimore. The treaty arrangements halted shortly after Penn’s departure and did not resume until after his death in 1718.

Penn administered his colony from England for the next 15 years and expressed frustration in his many letters that his “holy experiment” was not sufficiently lucrative. In 1699, he traveled to Pennsylvania a second time, but it was just two years until legal problems again forced his return to England. These did not subside. To add to his misfortunes, Penn suffered a stroke in 1712 and was largely incapacitated until his death six years later. During much of that time, his wife, Hannah, made the proprietor’s decisions for his colony.

After Penn’s death, Thomas, the second son from his second marriage, took over the leadership of the Pennsylvania enterprise, but only after years of legal wrangling with the offspring of Penn’s deceased, first wife. He finally arrived in Philadelphia in 1732 to great fanfare and set to work on his primary objective, which was to extract as much money as possible to pay the staggering family debt. Thomas’s conversion to Anglicanism simplified the undertaking for it liberated him from Quaker principles when dealing with the Lenape.

Thomas had his sights set on unsold land in the Lehigh Valley, but the Lenape were not cooperating with his plans. To overcome their resistance, in 1737, he and James Logan presented a questionable draft of a 1686 treaty, which described an exchange of land that extended northwestward the distance a man could walk in a day and a half from a point in Bucks County (current Wrightstown). Historians consider the 60-mile run of the “Walking Purchase,” the subsequent northeasterly extension of the treaty’s boundaries, and the resulting 1.2-million-acre land transfer to have been an elaborate scheme of fraud which displaced the Lenape without their consent.

The relationship between the Pennsylvania Assembly and Thomas soured over his efforts to decrease their power and increase his own. He returned to London after 10 unpleasant years and continued to administer the colony from afar. In 1757, the Assembly sent Benjamin Franklin to London to persuade the government to abandon the proprietary arrangement and place Pennsylvania under direct control of the crown. Their complaints about Thomas included the inefficiencies of his distant control, the imposition of unjust financial penalties, the vetoing of Assembly bills, and the tax-exempt status of the proprietor’s land.

Franklin was unsuccessful, but his attempt to unseat the proprietor explains the context in which Thomas commissioned Benjamin West to paint his famous scene. The painting would serve to reinforce the family’s claim on the colony and West was the obvious choice for the job. He was born in Pennsylvania and moved to London after touring Italy to study the masters of the Renaissance. He was a founding member of the Royal Academy of Art and served as its second president. The influence of West’s depiction of Penn’s Treaty under the Great Elm endured, but the proprietorship did not. In the early 1770s, land sales in Pennsylvania were finally bringing wealth to the family, but it all came to an abrupt end when the Assembly voted to join the other 12 colonies and declare independence from England and the Penns.

Meanwhile, the Great Elm flourished. Its canopy was 150-feet in diameter, and the circumference of its trunk was 24 feet. An 1800 engraving by Thomas Birch portrays the tree at its full extent. The print served as the frontispiece of the first comprehensive visual guide to the city, William Birch & Son’s The City of Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania North America. Other pages depict “the buildings, of any consequence […] and the street-scenes all accurate as they now stand,” but for the introductory image, the Birches chose the famous tree standing on Kensington’s industrial waterfront.

Sadly, this graceful giant was violently uprooted by a storm in 1810. As reported by Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, “During the tremendous gale of Monday night last, the Great Elm Tree at Kensington […] was torn up by the roots. The celebrated tree […] is at length prostrated to the dust!” Over the next month, the story of the tree’s demise was circulated in newspapers from Maine to South Carolina. The fallen tree attracted onlookers and souvenir hunters who harvested its wood to make chairs, picture frames, and gift boxes. Cuttings and seedlings were planted at the Pennsylvania Hospital, the University of Pennsylvania, and Haverford College. Through the tree’s mythical participation in an iconic episode of constructed memory, the relics and its living descendants were imbued with the values of peace and justice.

In 1827, the Penn Society erected an obelisk, “to mark the site of the Great Elm Tree,” which was inscribed into the stone. Unfortunately, industrial activities prevented it from being placed at the tree’s original location. Changing circumstances in the surrounding lumber, coal, and marble yards forced at least one other relocation. The inappropriate conditions of the site of the famous treaty and its lost tree disturbed civic leaders. The Philadelphia Inquirer complained that “The Penn treaty grounds are a wharf property which is a scene of dirt, old carts, stray chickens, broken-down fences, [and] a shanty or two…”

The desire to create an appropriate setting for the associated memories gathered momentum and City Council voted to place Penn Treaty Park on the city plan in 1892. They allocated $85,000 to condemn and purchase two acres of land and plans were drawn up for site improvements. On October 28, 1893, thousands crammed into the new park to watch an enactment of Penn sailing up the river to land on the banks and meet Chief Tamanend.

The timing of the park’s creation was fortuitous.It offered a compromise solution to a very large Penn problem. In 1894, City Hall was ready for the mounting of Alexander Milne Calder’s 36-foot statue of William Penn. The architectural drawings prepared 20 years earlier by John McArthur and Thomas U. Walter oriented the statue squarely north, which they considered the building’s primary facade. However, one of City Hall’s peculiar attributes is that it has four fronts, and Calder insisted the statue should face southward so it would be illuminated by the sun. If not, he wrote in a letter to the Philadelphia Times, it would, “Instead of being a graceful statue of William Penn […be] a monument to the indifference and shortsightedness of everyone in charge.”

The City Commissioners refused Calder’s request, but devised a slight compromise. They rotated Penn one-eighth of a turn eastward to face the newly created park up the river. His gaze would forever memorialize the mythical location of Penn’s Treaty under the Great Elm. Although the summer morning sun would almost illuminate his statue, Calder was not appeased. Neither was the Philadelphia Inquirer, which declared the Commissioner’s decision to be “a farce to those who have the intelligence to understand the difference between the right and wrong way of doing a thing.” 

The angular rotation of the founder’s figure is a source of puzzlement to city visitors. One explanation to offer is that the founder’s non-orthogonal orientation references the time of Penn’s arrival, prior to the urban grid, when the land was forested and inhabited by the Lenape. This could be compared to the diagonal streets, such as Passyunk Avenue, that are remnants of ancient Lenape pathways. Penn’s gaze toward the mythical site of his colony’s founding reflects his initial intentions and an alternate history in which peace is prioritized, treaties are maintained, and Indigenous people are respected. It is a world that remains disappointingly elusive.

West’s painting is a powerful cultural artifact with contradictory associations. It is a memorialization of Penn’s desire to form a society guided by virtue and justness, and a powerful piece of propaganda that masks the shameful treatment of Native Americans. Although the story of the Lenape and Quakers meeting under the tree is largely fictional, the Great Elm of Shackamaxon remains a symbol of peaceful intentions. The fall of the tree in 1810 echoed the unraveling of Pennsylvania’s founding myth, but the tree’s descendants maintain the meaning associated with their ancestor. These living connections to pre-colonial times remind us how nature quietly bears witness to human values and actions, and their consequences.

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