History and Research

Bartram’s Garden is the site of Philadelphia’s oldest excavated findings. Archaeological evidence reveals that the Garden was occupied seasonally by indigenous people as early as 3000 BCE. There is no way to determine who these people were, as there were many waves of migrations over the millennia, but we can speculate that they relied upon the river and nutrient-rich tidal wetlands as a reliable source of food. Fishing would have been significant, especially during large seasonal fish runs, as well as hunting mammals and birds in the marshland and harvesting marsh plant resources like wild rice, spatterdock, sagittaria, arrow arum, and cattails. Objects found during digs include stone tools, ceramic vessels, fire hearths, and pit features. These objects are available to view in the John Bartram Bowman Special Collections Library by appointment. 

Today, our neighborhood is still referred to as Kingsessing, a Lenape name likely dating from around 1500 meaning “place where there is a meadow” or “boggy meadow.” A village known as Arronemink was located on the banks of the Tidal Schuylkill within Kingsessing, at the mouth of what is today known as the Mill Creek. A possible meaning for “Arronemink” is “place where the fish cease,” which may refer to the presence of natural waterfalls in the area; it was alternatively spelled “Aroenameck and “Arromink.”

During this period, the Lenape were not the only native or First Nations people to live in the Delaware Valley. Algonquin peoples may have been present, and Iroquoian-speaking groups were common, particularly to the west in the Susquehanna Valley and north towards what is now New York. By the 1640s, the Lenape had largely abandoned this area and relocated to the east bank of the Delaware River, due to the almost-yearly wars of the Susquehannock and Iroquois, sometimes also called the Beaver Wars.

Beginning in 1648, a 1,000-acre tract of riverfront that included the land now known as Bartram’s Garden was settled by the Swedish as “Aronameck” or “Aronameck Plantation,” a colonial outpost in New Sweden. The ethnic population of Europeans in the colony was probably less than half Swedish, also including people of Dutch, Finnish, German, Danish, French, and English descent. Unlike most European colonists in North America, the Swedes maintained a friendly and cooperative association with the remaining Lenape in the region, with some settlers learning the Lenape language. The Swedes engaged in the fur trade, which was beneficial for the Lenape people, and they provided some political stability against the encroaching Iroquois. 

Aronameck was eventually divided along natural boundaries and creek valleys, and further small clearings developed later in the 17th century, including a piece that became the site of John Bartram’s farm and garden. The Bartrams held the property for three generations, from 1728 until 1850, when Philadelphia industrialist Andrew Eastwick purchased Bartram’s Garden from John Bartram’s granddaughter Ann Bartram Carr and her husband, Colonel Robert Carr. Eastwick reportedly loved Bartram’s Garden and vowed to preserve the botanical gardens and historic buildings, hiring as head gardener the English nurseryman and botanist Thomas Meehan, who had previously worked at The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

After Eastwick’s death in 1879, his descendants faced pressure to convert the full site for industrial use, which would likely have been very profitable for them but would have destroyed the gardens entirely. Instead, Meehan collaborated with Charles Sargent of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston on a national campaign to preserve the site for public access. It succeeded! In 1891 Bartram’s Garden became part of the Philadelphia public park system. The non-profit John Bartram Association was founded in 1893 by John Bartram’s descendants to support the city’s management of the site.

Since the 1890s, both the site and the organization have grown. Land reclamation and environmental mitigation efforts have restored natural spaces that were once originally part of the Bartram family’s estate but were developed for industrial use in the 19th and 20th centuries. For instance, today’s 17-acre hillside Meadow was reclaimed in 1987 after serving as the site of the Warner Company, a cement factory, from 1925 to 1977. Many of the skyscrapers and highway bridges you can see across the river were constructed with concrete manufactured right here. Similarly, although both archaeological and documented history reveal that this riverfront’s tidal wetlands have been valued for millennia, today’s 1.5-acre freshwater Tidal Wetland was created in 1997 and restored and expanded in 2013. The Sankofa Community Farm and the Greenhouse Complex were established on underutilized recreational fields in 2011, and the Bartram’s Mile Trail opened in 2017.