Pennsylvania

Penn’s Woods

Pennsylvania’s name pairs the family name Penn with the Latin sylvania, woods, so it means “Penn’s Woods.” In 1681 King Charles II granted the land to William Penn to settle a debt owed to Penn’s late father, Admiral Sir William Penn, and the name honors the admiral rather than the colony’s Quaker founder. Penn himself was uneasy about it. In a 1681 letter he wrote that he had wanted something like “New Wales” or simply “Sylvania,” had asked the king to strike out “Penn,” and could not get the under-secretaries to change it, even for twenty guineas.

Cradle of the nation

Pennsylvania was at the center of the nation’s founding. Its assembly met in the State House in Philadelphia, now Independence Hall, from the 1730s, and lent its Assembly Room to the Second Continental Congress and later to the Constitutional Convention, so the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were both debated and signed there. On December 12, 1787, a state convention ratified the Constitution by a vote of 46 to 23, making Pennsylvania the second state, after Delaware.

The state’s nickname reflects that role. Pennsylvania sat in the middle of the 13 original states, like the keystone at the top of an arch that locks the other stones in place, and by the early 1800s it was widely called the Keystone State.

Moving west to Harrisburg

Philadelphia was the capital from colonial times, apart from a stay in Lancaster during the British occupation of 1777 and 1778. In 1799 the legislature moved to Lancaster, as the population shifted west and amid concern over disease in Philadelphia. In 1812 it settled in Harrisburg, on the Susquehanna River, on land that the town’s founder, John Harris Jr., had donated for public use. The Capitol there, dedicated in 1906 with a dome modeled on St. Peter’s in Rome, was also the center of a notorious graft scandal. The capital page tells the story.

Virtue, Liberty and Independence

The state’s coat of arms, designed by Caleb Lownes of Philadelphia in 1778, carries the motto “Virtue, Liberty and Independence.” It shows a shield with a ship, a plow and three sheaves of wheat, held by two horses under an eagle, and it sits on the blue state flag, adopted in its current form in 1907. The state song, “Pennsylvania,” was adopted in 1990.

Grouse, laurel and hemlock

Pennsylvania has 21 official state symbols. In 1931 the Legislature named the ruffed grouse as state game bird, now presented as the state bird, and the eastern hemlock as state tree; the mountain laurel followed in 1933. The white-tailed deer is the state animal and the brook trout, the only trout native to the state, the state fish. Pennsylvania also honors its industries and history, with the Pennsylvania Railroad’s K4s and GG1 locomotives, the U.S. Brig Niagara, Commodore Perry’s flagship at the Battle of Lake Erie, the Piper J-3 Cub and the Pennsylvania long rifle. See them all on the Pennsylvania symbols page.

Land and people

Pennsylvania covers 46,054 square miles, 33rd among the states, and had about 13.06 million residents in 2025, 5th in the country. It borders New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia and Ohio, and has a shoreline on Lake Erie, across which it shares a water boundary with Canada. Philadelphia, with about 1.57 million people, is the largest city, followed by Pittsburgh, Allentown, Reading and Erie. Harrisburg has about 51,000.