William Penn once wanted Chester to be Philadelphia. Here’s what happened.

In an all but forsaken park, with a humble, weather-sculpted granite marker bearing a barely legible script, the City of Chester commemorates a momentous event in the nation’s history: the moment that William Penn took his first steps on the soil of the New World.

The day would come when the city would yield the rights to the name “Penn’s Landing” to the upriver metropolis of Philadelphia, but the true landing occurred 340 years ago near the intersection of the Delaware River and Chester Creek, says Carol Fireng, with the Chester Historical Preservation Committee.

The monument, said Fireng, an organizer of an event held Friday afternoon in the park to celebrate the anniversary of Penn’s arrival in Chester, marks “the beginning of everything that America was to become.”

It also might be viewed as a monument to what could have been. Penn envisioned Chester as the capital of the Pennsylvania territory granted to him by King Charles II, according to at least one well-regarded historical account.

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Thus, Chester might have been the venue for Independence Hall, and the likes of Franklin and Jefferson might have roamed its streets. It might have become the nation’s capital, and the host of the convention that produced the U.S. Constitution.

Who knows? Elton John might have declared in song that he lived and breathed “this Chester Freedom.“

William Penn’s ship, the Welcome, arrived in New Castle, Del., after a horrific 57-day journey from England, in which 30 of the 100 who had boarded died of smallpox. But Penn did not disembark until he docked in Chester, said the Delaware County Historical Society’s Paul Hewes. (The actual date is believed to have been Oct. 29, but Chester held its event Friday.)

Penn evidently loved the place that the Indigenous inhabitants called Mecoponaca. Penn rhapsodized about finding the land “good, the air serene.” At the time the fall foliage would have been near or just past peak, the colors so different from the more muted trees of the English woods.

With some work, he said, the area would rival “the best reputed places of Europe.”

The Swedish settlers knew it as “Upland,” after “Uppland” in their homeland. Penn eventually named it “Chester,” Pennsylvania’s first incorporated municipality, for the city in Cheshire County, England.

Penn had grand visions for it, according to the late historian Henry G. Ashmead, and summoned the settlement’s largest landowner, James Sandelands, “to confer with him to the end that the capitol of the province should be located at this point.”

They evidently didn’t hit it off. The specifics of their disagreement were unclear, but Sandelands drove a hard bargain. “The conclusion of this interview was that Penn had to look elsewhere for a site for the future metropolis of Pennsylvania,” Ashmead wrote in the history he assembled for the Penn bicentennial in 1882, the year the 5-foot-tall monument was erected.

“This error of the chief owner of land at Chester was disastrous in its results,” according to Ashmead.

After his father’s death, Sandelands’ son attempted to make amends with Penn, 20 years later. However, by then Penn’s Rubicon had been crossed, and Philadelphia was on its way to becoming one of the most important cities in the British Empire.

“I think it’s a little more complicated than perhaps he [Ashmead] suggested,” said Jordan B. Smith, history professor at Widener University.

Fireng concurred, although she said the inability to reach an agreement with Sandelands was certainly a factor.

Penn ultimately chose a site where the navigation channel is half that of Chester’s, according to the Delaware River Port Authority, and a good 15 miles farther from the Delaware Bay. The river narrows as it squeezes north. Where George Washington crossed the Delaware from Bucks County on Christmas night 1776, the river is only about 300 yards wide.

But Philadelphia had other assets, said Smith, notably access to another body of water more substantial than Chester Creek — the Schuylkill. Water was paramount to transportation in those days. Penn almost certainly would have known about the Schuylkill before he departed on the Welcome since this area already had been occupied by the Dutch, Swedes, and Scots.

He quite possibly had the more northerly site in mind, said Smith. The southern boundaries of Penn’s Pennsylvania holdings were hotly disputed, and locating farther north would have been to Penn’s advantage, said Smith.

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Ashmead, however, was unequivocal in holding that Chester was Penn’s first choice, and that the Sandelands impasse unsealed the deal.

“It is now generally accepted as an historical fact,” he wrote, “that Philadelphia was not determined on as the site of Penn’s city until he found that no arrangement could be made with Sandelands for lands for that purpose, at this place.”

Over a half-century of fits and starts hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in Philadelphia’s Penn’s Landing, sprawling from Vine to South Streets, with recent plans calling for construction of a $225 million park at Front Street.

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By contrast, Chester’s William Penn Landing Site, near Second and Penn Streets, is situated in a less-than-an-acre park, in an industrial neighborhood at a site that would be hard to find without Google maps.

Fireng said that at one time it was well-lit and equipped with comfortable benches. However, the park has been vandalized, and three bronze plaques have been stolen.

In 1970, Chester Mayor Jack Nacrelli ceded the Penn’s Landing naming rights to Philadelphia, according to the late Robert F. O’Neill, a former Inquirer correspondent and former Nacrelli aide.

The current marker is situated several hundred feet from the Delaware, and Nacrelli said the city had a modest plan for a park and marina nearer the landing area but couldn’t afford it.

The city has no further plans to make its Penn site a major tourist destination, says Stefan Roots, Chester’s director of public property and recreation, although it would like to move the monument to the actual landing site.

As it was in 1970, the problem is a familiar one in a city with one of the state’s highest poverty rates.

No money.