Excerpt from Two Centuries of Pennsylvania History Pennsylvania justly merits the proud title, "The Keystone State." Her history more than her geography gave her commanding relations to the sister colonies clustered along the western margin of the Atlantic. Her great founder and first English owner, William Penn, is the noblest character in America's colonial history. In Pennsylvania every creed and every nationality was not only tolerated but welcomed. Her colonial life was more complex than that of any sister colony. To mould this life, so unlike in nationality, in religion, in civic ideals, and in industrial experience, into a unified people is one of the noblest records in the annals of any nation. To the credit of her people this was done without persecution and without coercion. Three great groups of people laid the foundations of the Commonwealth. The Quakers, under the great Penn, occupied the territory within a radius of thirty-five miles, giving themselves to commerce in Philadelphia and to agriculture in the fertile valleys of Bucks, Chester, and adjacent counties. Beyond these, in a zone fifty miles wide, settled the sturdy and patient Germans, giving birth to German-American literature, establishing Protestant missions among the Indians, tilling with signal success the fair acres of Berks, Lancaster, Lebanon, Cumberland, and contiguous counties, founding the great textile industries of the Schuylkill Valley, and developing a home life unique for its strength and its simplicity. Beyond these, in the valleys between the Blue and the Alleghany Mountains, lived the sturdy Scotch-Irish pioneers, pushing the frontier to the Ohio Valley, repelling Indian attacks, provoking strife by their restless haste to penetrate the wilderness, and establishing churches and schools in every valley and upon every hill-top of the interior. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.