westward to the Pacific
Ocean and cut off the northern half of the tract afterwards granted to
William Penn. In pursuance of what they believed to be their rights, the
Connecticut people settled in the beautiful valley of Wyoming. They were
thereupon ejected by force by the proprietors of Pennsylvania; but they
returned, only to be ejected again and again in a petty warfare carried
on for many years. In the summer of 1778, the people of the valley
were massacred by the Iroquois Indians. The history of this Connecticut
boundary dispute fills volumes. So does the boundary dispute with
Maryland, which also lasted throughout the colonial period; the dispute
with Virginia over the site of Pittsburgh is not so voluminous.
All these controversies Thomas Penn conducted with eminent skill,
inexhaustible patience, and complete success. For this achievement the
State owes him a debt of gratitude.

Thomas Penn was in the extraordinary position of having to govern as
a feudal lord what was virtually a modern community. He was exercising
feudal powers three hundred years after all the reasons for the feudal
system had ceased to exist; and he was exercising those powers and
acquiring by them vast wealth from a people in a new and wild country
whose convictions, both civil and religious, were entirely opposed
to anything like the feudal system. It must certainly be put down as
something to his credit that he succeeded so well as to retain control
both of the political government and his family's increasing wealth down
to the time of the Revolution and that he gave on the whole so little
offense to a high-strung people that in the Revolution they allowed his
family to retain a large part of their land and paid them liberally for
what was confiscated.

The wealth which came to the three brothers they spent after the manner
of the time in country life. John and Richard do not appear to have had
remarkable country seats. But Thomas purchased in 1760 the fine English
estate of Stoke Park, which had belonged to Sir Christopher Hatton of
Queen Elizabeth's time, to Lord Coke, and later to the Cobham family.
Thomas's son John, grandson of the founder, greatly enlarged and
beautified the place and far down into the nineteenth century it was
one of the notable country seats of England. This John Penn also built
another country place called Pennsylvania Castle, equally picturesque
and interesting, on the Isle of Portland, of which he was Governor