Wikiplacemarks.com  
 



Find us on Google+

French Azilum

View on map:41.736000°N 76.318000°W

Description


French Azilum

French Azilum, located in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, was a planned settlement for refugees fleeing the French Revolution (1789- ). Several influential Philadelphians, including Stephen Girard, Robert Morris and John Nicholson, Pennsylvania's comptroller general, were sympathetic to the exiles, and also saw a chance to profit financially. In 1793 they aided in the purchase of 1,600 acres (6 km) of land in northeastern Pennsylvania, which was then wilderness. An area of 300 acres (1.2 km2) was laid out as a town plot including a 2-acre (8,100 m2) market square, a grid of broad streets and 413 lots, approximately one-half acre each. About 30 log houses were built. A small number of exiles arrived that fall. Some were royalists, loyal to King Louis XVI (guillotined in January 1793) and thus fleeing imprisonment and possible death during the French Revolution. Others came from the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) where slave uprisings had broken out in 1791, inspired by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) of the French Assembly. According to legend, Marie Antoinette (titular Queen of France until guillotined in October 1793) and her two surviving children were to settle here.

References

All text is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Average user rating: Not rated

Click on a star to rate
 

Do you have a form that you would like to turn into an application?

Please share your ideas with us.

Contact us...