Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
borough of Pennsylvania, United States
Swarthmore ( SWORTH-mor, locally SWAHTH-mor) is a borough in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, United States. Swarthmore was originally named Westdale in honor of painter Benjamin West, who was one of the early residents of the town. The name was changed to Swarthmore after the establishment of Swarthmore College. As of the 2020 census, Swarthmore had a population of 6,543.
History
Originally, the area belonged to the Lenape people. It was settled in the late 1600s by Quakers after William Penn granted them the land. By the early 1800s, it was still mainly farmland, and was known as Westdale in honor of local artist Benjamin West. It was part of Springfield Township, but the area began to become a distinct town after Swarthmore College was founded in 1864. The advent of passenger rail service from Philadelphia in the 1880s greatly enhanced the desirability of the borough as a commuter suburb, and the borough was incorporated in 1893.
About one third of the borough's land area consists of the Swarthmore College campus.
“Swarthmore, Pennsylvania” enters the record as borough of Pennsylvania, United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Swarthmore, Pennsylvania and borough can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1182014. VIAF identifies the subject as 155408390. The Library of Congress control number is n50061026. Authority coordinates are 39.902, -75.347. 5 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2020, 1864 and 1893.
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This entry incorporates text from “Swarthmore, Pennsylvania” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.