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Memoir 200
The odyssey of Thomas Holme, William Penn’s first surveyor general, began when Holme, a young yeoman from the Lancashire Lake District, enrolled in the war against Charles I & proceeded through England, pausing at the garrison at Tewkesbury, & thence into the Irish campaign &, finally, to William Penn’s Province of Pennsylvania. He was a captain in Cromwell’s army, an official in the Down Survey of Ireland, a Quaker minister, author, & administrator, & landholder & merchant with continental &, apparently, Barbadoan trade. It was from this life that William Penn drafted him to be the first surveyor general of his province. There he laid out the city of Philadelphia, superintended the surveying & settlement of southeastern Pennsylvania, & drafted a map of all of the then settled part of the province, recording the names of all purchasers on their surveyed property, & participated in the formation of the govt. that has been called the protopye of the govt. of the U.S. Throughout the economic, religious, & power struggles of the first dozen years of Pennsylvania he was a partisan & defender of the interests of William Penn. Maps.
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