Morton Homestead is a historic homestead that is part of Morton Homestead State Park at 100 Lincoln Avenue in Prospect Park, Delaware County.
The homestead was founded in 1654 by Morton Mortenson, a Finnish immigrant, when the area was part of the New Sweden colony. Mortenson’s great-grandson, John Morton, signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Parts of the current house date back to the 1698 with a large addition constructed in the 18th century.
Years before William Penn and his Quaker followers set foot on America's shores, Swedish settlers had established a settlement along the Delaware River and Bay..The two-and-a-half acre Morton Homestead in Prospect Park came to prominence as a public, tangible site around which to begin a discussion of the little-known colony called New Sweden.
The building at Morton Homestead today is a three-part cabin identified as south, center, and north units. The Morton cabin is one of the oldest dwellings in Pennsylvania and one of the few surviving examples of seventeenth-century Swedish log structures in the Delaware Valley.
According to a 1938 study of the site, the old cabin was cited as the birthplace of John Morton (1725-1777), signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Morton Homestead State Park is open to the public as is the John Heinz Wildlife Preserve and the area surrounding.
The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.