The Philadelphia grant describes 200,000 acres (81,000 ha) of land along the south shore of the Northumberland Strait between Tatamagouche and Pictou, Nova Scotia.
Following expulsion of the Acadians, the British government distributed Acadian land to various landlords under the condition those landlords oversee repopulation of those lands with colonists loyal to King George III of the United Kingdom.
In October 1765, the Philadelphia grant was awarded to a group of businessmen from Philadelphia: John Bayard, George Bryan, Edmund Crawley, Robert Harris, Thomas Harris, Andrew Hodge, James Lyon, David Rhea, John Rhea, Jonathan Bayard Smith, Richard Stockton, William Symonds, Isaac Wykoff, and John Wykoff.
The Philadelphia Company was also obligated to populate the grant with at least one-thousand Protestant settlers by 1775.
The Philadelphia grant extended inland as far as Stewiacke, but was comparatively unappealing because there were no similar harbors along its shoreline in the era when ships were the primary means of communication and commerce with the outside world.