Pennsylvania History Swedes were the first European settlers in the area that was to become Pennsylvania. Traveling up the Delaware from a settlement at the present site of Wilmington, Del., Governor Johan Printz of the colony of New Sweden established his capital on Tinicum Island in 1643, within the boundaries of modern Pennsylvania. Other Europeans, principally the Dutch, established trading posts within Pennsylvania as early as 1647, although the Swedes remained at Tinicum until 1655. In that year, rivalry and fighting between the Dutch and the Swedes led Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Netherland, to seize New Sweden. Dutch control of the region ended in 1664, when the English seized all of New Netherland in the name of the Duke of York. The Quaker colony In March 1681 King Charles II of England signed a charter giving the region to William Penn in payment of a debt owed by the king to Penn's father, Admiral Sir William Penn. The charter, which was officially proclaimed on April 2, 1681, named the territory for Admiral Penn and included also the term sylvania ("woodlands"), as the younger Penn requested. William Penn intended that the colony should provide a haven of religious tolerance for his fellow Quakers. While still in England, he drew up the first of his "frames of government" and sent his cousin, William Markham, to establish claim to the land and also to establish the boundaries of what became the city of Philadelphia. Penn arrived in 1682 and called a General Assembly to discuss the first Frame of Government and to adopt the Great Law, which guaranteed freedom of conscience in the colony. Under Penn's influence, fair treatment was accorded the Indians, who responded with friendship in return. When Penn returned to England in 1684, the new Quaker province had a firmly established government based on religious tolerance and government by popular will. source info ENCYC.BRITTA.2000 MJ