Ask around long enough and someone will tell you West Chester used to be called Turk's Head because of pirates. It's a fun guess. It's also wrong.
The real answer is quieter, and more interesting, than that. It has to do with a tavern, a sign, and the way colonial towns got their names before they got their charters.
A crossroads with a tavern, not a town
Before West Chester was West Chester, the settlement here wasn't really a settlement at all. It was a crossroads — a spot where a few roads met, useful enough that someone built an inn to serve travelers passing through.
That inn was known as the Turk's Head. And for a while, that's what people called the place itself. Not a formal name. Just the practical shorthand of the era: you'd tell someone to meet you at the Turk's Head, and they'd know exactly where that was, because the sign hanging outside told them.
When Chester County needed a more central seat of government — the original county seat, in the town of Chester, sat too far east for a growing county — this crossroads got the job. The borough took a new, more official name: West Chester. But the older name didn't disappear overnight. It lingered in speech, in memory, the way old names for places often do long after the signs change.
What a "Turk's Head" sign actually was
Here's the part that surprises people: naming a tavern the Turk's Head wasn't unusual, and it wasn't specific to this town. Inns and pubs across England and colonial America carried that same name for generations. The sign typically showed a turbaned figure — an image drawn from Europe's long, uneasy fascination with the Ottoman Empire, trade routes east, and the general exoticism that 18th-century sign painters leaned on to make a tavern memorable from the road.
It wasn't a local invention. It was a stock image, borrowed the way tavern names often were — the King's Arms, the Green Dragon, the Turk's Head. Distinctive enough to remember, generic enough to show up in dozens of towns that had nothing to do with each other.
West Chester's version of that sign is long gone. The building it hung on is gone too, at least in its original form. What survived was the name — attached, almost by accident, to a town that eventually outgrew it.
So why not pirates?
The pirate theory is understandable. "Turk's Head" sounds like it belongs on a flag, next to a skull and crossbones. But there's no documented connection between this borough's name and piracy of any kind — no ship, no flag, no buried treasure story with roots here.
The tavern-sign explanation isn't as dramatic. It's also the one that's actually true, and it says something real about how towns like this one got built: not through legend, but through ordinary commerce — an innkeeper putting up a sign, travelers using it as a landmark, and a name sticking long after the reason for it faded from memory.
Why it's worth knowing
Most people who live in or near West Chester never hear this story. The name Turk's Head shows up on a street, maybe a building, and gets treated as decoration rather than history.
But it's one of the few threads that connects the modern borough — the courthouse, the university, the restaurant rows on Gay and Market Streets — back to the version of this place that existed before any of that. Before it was a county seat. Before it was a college town. It was a tavern at a crossroads, known by its sign.
That's a better story than pirates. It's just quieter about it.
If that kind of local history is your thing, our West Chester collection is built on it — named for the same sign that started all this.
Frequently asked
Why is West Chester PA called Turk's Head?
Before it was officially named West Chester, the crossroads settlement was known by the name of a local tavern, the Turk's Head, whose sign gave travelers a landmark to navigate by.
Does the Turk's Head name have anything to do with pirates?
No. That's a popular guess, but there's no documented pirate connection. The name comes from an 18th-century tavern sign, a common style of pub name borrowed from England.
Is the original Turk's Head tavern still standing?
No, the original tavern and its sign are long gone. What remains is the name, which lives on in local streets, businesses, and references around the borough.
When did the town stop being called Turk's Head?
The borough took on the name West Chester when it became the county seat of Chester County, though the older name continued to be used informally for some time afterward.
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