Editor’s note: In honor of America’s 250th birthday, the Earth Observatory is revisiting stories about the landscapes that helped shape American history. The images and text on this page were originally published on July 4, 2017. Explore the full collection here.

Located between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, Philadelphia was founded in 1682 by William Penn as the seat of a Quaker colony. Later, its location upstream from Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean made it an industrial, commercial, and cultural center of the American colonies.

When the original inhabitants of the area, the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) Indians, lived here, much of the land was covered in forests. Swedish and Dutch settlers had already traveled to the area when Penn finally arrived and signed a treaty with the Lenape to establish a town. He named his colony, now the state of Pennsylvania, Sylvania, for its jungle and wooded appearance. Present-day Philadelphia had “a high dry land by the water, with a coast adorned with a beautiful view of the pine trees that grew on it,” according to one historical account.

More than 300 years after Penn’s arrival, this landscape remains green, despite its urban development. The natural color image above shows Philadelphia and its surrounding area as it looked on June 1, 2013, when the Landsat 8 satellite’s Operational Land Imager (OLI) passed overhead.

Nearly one hundred years after the founding of Philadelphia, the Founding Fathers of the United States met in this prosperous city at roughly the geographic center of the 13 colonies. It was here that they debated, drafted, and signed the documents that would become the blueprints of the American government. In 1776, they signed the Declaration of Independence at Carpenter’s Hall, not far from the red brick building that then housed Pennsylvania’s colonial government; In 1787 they signed the Constitution in the same place. (Carpenter’s is now known as Independence Hall.) Between 1781 and 1788, it was also the seat of the United States government.

Today, Philadelphia is the fifth largest city in the United States, with more than 6 million people living in its metropolitan area. The city experienced its heyday as a manufacturing center in the 19th century. Currently, its most important sectors include education and health services.

Traces of the city’s history remain embedded in its landscape. A belt of large, tall buildings makes up the center of the city, the area around Independence Hall. To the south lies a dense network of smaller houses: South Philadelphia, home to the city’s Italian Market. At one time, this was a satellite town of the city; The two merged in 1854, when the area’s population increased. Today it remains a diverse area, home to a large African-American community, as well as remnants of once-significant Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrant populations.

NASA Earth Observatory images taken by Jesse Allen, using Landsat data from the US Geological Survey. Story by Pola Lem.