Colonial Philadelphia-a photo essay

While I blog quite frequently about Pittsburgh, I only have a few posts devoted to my hometown of Philadelphia which you can access by clicking here and here and here. One of the things that I love most about my city of birth is its rich historical past. Although Pittsburgh has a pretty fascinating background, its history is more “recent,” and by recent I’m talking about the late 19th to early 20th centuries. Philadelphia’s however, goes back a lot further.

I won’t bore you with a history lesson but when Pittsburgh was just a small, remote outpost essentially on the western “frontier” (in the early to mid 18th century, the area of Pittsburgh really was considered to be “the west”), Philadelphia was already a long established city, a “jewel” of the New World. Historical fiction is one of my favorite reading genres and its no surprise considering that my “backyard” was the location of countless famous events in the history of the United States.

There’s so much to see and do in Philadelphia but the one thing I would recommend to everyone is to take a walk through the historical section, also known as Old City. It’s free, lovely, and a great way to literally walk in the footsteps of some of America’s past greats- Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington; the list goes on and on.