10/14/2022
William Cooper's Pyne Poynt plantation site and "ferry" to Shackamaxon
William Cooper made one of the first known settlements on the Delaware River within the limits of Camden. William Cooper was born in England in 1632, and for many years prior to his emigration had resided at Coleshill, in the parish of Amersham, county of Hertford, England. Upperside Monthly Meeting, to which he belonged, contained within its limits the home of William Penn, whose projects for a settlement on the Delaware thus became well known to its members.
Cooper, attracted by the prospects, and wearied by religious persecution at home, concluded to emigrate in early 1679, with his wife, Margaret, and five children. He arrived at Burlington in the spring or summer of 1679, and soon after built his first home and temporarily settled his family.
Conversant with the project of planting a city near Shackamaxon (now Kensington, Philadelphia), he located a tract of three hundred acres immediately opposite, at the junction of the Delaware with Aroches Creek, which now bears his name, and obtained a certificate for the same from the commissioners June 12, 1682. He built his second house and established his family on a high bank above Coopers Point, called by him Pyne Point, from a dense pine forest which then grew there.
This site is now washed away and is near where Fifth Street touches the river. "The remains of this house," says Mickle, writing in 1844, "were visible a few years ago." It was built, according to reliable family tradition, of brown sand-stone, which, no doubt, was quarried at Pea Shore, north of the creek. It had a stone portico, and a door opened out from the second story hall to the roof of the portico. Benjamin Franklin, who was a guest there nearly a century after it was built, styles it "a large house." His son Joseph, a few years later, built a house a short distance east of his father’s, on the bluff near the creek, and that, too, has disappeared.
On his arrival the place he selected was occupied by a small band of friendly Indians, under a chief named Arasapha. The title to the land on the Delaware between Oldmans Creek and Rancocas Creek had been purchased of the Indians in 1677, but William Cooper extinguished what rights they still might possess at Pyne Point by a conveyance from the chief Arasapha. This deed was a few years ago in the possession of Joseph W. Cooper, but is now unfortunately lost. In*******se between Shackamaxon, where the pioneers of Penn’s colony, under Fairman, the surveyor, and Markham, the deputy-governor, and Pyne Point had long been established by canoe ferry between the Indian settlements at those places, and the settlers on both sides of the river could therefore well meet together for religious worship.
At a Yearly Meeting of Friends held at Salem, Second Month 11, 1682, for both Jersies and Pennsylvania, it was therefore ordered "that the Friends at (Pyne Point) and these at Shakomaxin do meet together once a month on the 2d and 4th day in every month, the first meeting to be held at William Cooper’s, at Pyne Point, the 2d and 4th day of the 3d month next, and the next meeting to be at Thomas Fairman’s, at Shakomaxin, and so in course." This meeting was alternately held at Cooper’s house until the arrival of Penn, when it was removed to Philadelphia.
SOURCE: Page(s) 403-424, History of Camden County, New Jersey, by George R. Prowell, L.J. Richards & Co. 1886
Published 2010 by the Camden County Genealogy Project
