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Reprinted by Maggie Funderburg in April 2000 "Over
the Fencepost"
April 1962
Samuel Powel and Powelton 1738-1793
Sarah Parker
On November 13, 1775, on
the eve of the American Revolution, the young mayor
of Philadelphia, Samuel Powel and his wife Elizabeth
Willing paid 1676 pounds sterling to her kinsmen Thomas
Willing and Tench Francis for96 acres on the West
bank of the Schuylkill. The elaborate parchment deed
now at the Historical Society of Pennsylkvania conveyed
“eighty acres and a half or thereabouts of fast
land and sixteen and a half of marsh land or less”
with “Buildings and Improvements, Ways, Woods,
Waters, Water Courses and all Appurtenances whatsoever.”
The boundaries ran from “a maple tree standing
near a spring on the southern side of a small run
of water... to a poplar... to a post on the Road leading
from Philadelphia to Lancaster, “thence deviously
to the “River Schuylkill and along said River...
to a stake at corner of Willing and Francis lands.”
Roughly in modem terms it lay between the river and
34th Street, Lancaster Avenue and possibly Hamilton
Street.
Powel owned
150 acres in Whitemarsh, 50 in Passyunk, 200 in Roxbury
and a beautiful town house on South Third Street.
Yet it was to these lands above the Schuylkill, the
future site of a mansion comparable to Belmont, Mt.
Pleasant or Woodlands he gave the name Powelton.
Samuel Powel,
son of a prosperous Philadelphia merchant, graduated
in 1759 from the College of Philadelphia (later the
University of Pennsylvania). He accompanied the president,
William Smith, on a fund-raising expedition to England;
and with his friend John Morgan, before Morgan returned
to Philadelphia in 1764 to found the first medical
school in the Colonies, toured universities in France,
Switzerland and Italy.
Voltaire
described his Sunday afternoon guests as “two
amiable young men ... who love investigation and truth.”
In Philadelphia Powel was elected to the American
Philosophical Society and in 1773 trustee ol the University,
member of common council, alderman, a manager of the
Pennsylvania Hospital, and mayor before and after
the Revolution. In 1780 he contributed five thousand
pounds to maintain the Continental Army and in 1792
was made speaker of the Pennsylvania Senate.
Today when
you visit the Powels’ home on South Third Street,
beautifully restored and maintained by th Society
for the Preservation of Historic Landmarks, you can
sense its gracious hospitality. John Adams wrote to
Abigail in 1774, “At Mr. Powel’s... again.
Curds and cream, jellies, sweetmeats, twenty sorts
ol tarts, fools, trifles, floating island, whipped
sillabubs, Parmesan cheese, punch, wine, porter, beer.”
The Marquis de Chastellux in Philadelphia in 1781
for the French government called often and
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