When in 1789 Gen. Aaron Z. Woolwine founded this place all the best
Palestinian names, such as Philadelphia, Lebanon and Bethlehem, were
already taken in Pennsylvania, so he called it New Damascus; and this
name when he thought of it was perfect. The Damascenes were famous
artificers in metal. He imagined even a geographical resemblance,--a
plain bounded on one side by a river and on the other three by
mountains representing the heights of Anti-Lebanon.
He resolved a city and that its character should be Presbyterian,
and entered in his diary a prophecy. With ore, coal and limestone
in Providential propinquity, with a river for its commerce to walk
upon and with that spirit of industry which he purposed to teach and
exemplify, aye, if necessary to require, New Damascus should wax in the
sight of the Lord, partake of happiness and develop a paying trade.
Besides capital and imagination he brought to this undertaking a
partner, three sons and a new wife.
For thirty years he fathered New Damascus. He saw it become the most
important point of trade between Philadelphia and Wilkes-Barre, with
five notable inns, two general supply stores, three tanneries, six
grist mills, two lumber mills and the finest Presbyterian conventicle
in that part of the state. The river was a disappointment. It was
high and swift in flood and very low in the dry season, all very well
for lumbering and seasonal traffic, but not a true servant of steady
commerce. To bring the canal to New Damascus he entered politics and
continuously thereafter represented his county in the legislature. He
did not live to see the rise of the iron industry. That was left to the
wonder of the next generation.
One of the disasters of his old age was with stone coal, the name by
which anthracite was first known. All the coal around New Damascus was
anthracite. For all that could be made of it commercially it might as
well have been slate or shale. Nobody knew how to burn it. The fuel
of industry was soft coal, which ignites easily; and wood was burned
in open grates, not in New Damascus only but everywhere at this time;
and as anthracite or hard coal would not burn in the same furnace
and grates that burned either soft coal or wood people were sure it
would not burn at all. General Woolwine knew better. Wherever he went
he carried with him samples of hard coal, even in his saddle bags,
begging people to try it, but the notion against it was too strong to
be overcome by propaganda. Only time and accident could do that. Once
he freighted a large quantity to Philadelphia, resolved to make it burn
in some of the large forges there. The result was a dismal failure.
Others before him on the same crazy errand had been arrested for
obtaining money under false pretences, selling black stone as coal, and
the prejudice was irreducible. He abandoned the stuff in Philadelphia;
it was broken up and spread in walks. Later,--too late to benefit
him,--the secret of burning anthracite in furnaces was discovered by
accident. A perverse foundryman, who believed less in hard coal than
in the probability that what everybody disbelieved was for that reason
true, spent a whole day trying to make a fire of it. Then he left it in
disgust and went home to supper. Returning some hours later he found
an amazing fire,--hotter than any soft coal fire he had ever seen.
The secret, beyond having a strong draught, was to let it alone. In a
little while everybody was saying that you could burn stone coal if
only you let it alone. That simple bit of knowledge, derived from trial
and error, was worth more to Pennsylvania than a thousand gold mines.
In the last few years of his life General Woolwine, by his efforts to
exploit stone coal and in various schemes of the imagination, lost a
considerable part of his fortune by not attending to it. He was not a
sound man of business in that sense. Ideas obsessed him. The idea that
stone coal would burn was an obsession on which he made large outlays
of time and money. He pursued the idea to failure. A more practical
man would have first invented a grate suited to the fuel. A more
conservative, selfish man would have sat on his anthracite beds until
someone else had invented a grate. Yet he was never discouraged. The
day before he died he wrote in his diary:
“As I lay down this life I am moved to reflect on its beauty and
fulness to me. I have used up my strength in works. Nothing have I
withheld from the Lord. I have walked in the faith. I have imagined
civilization in a wilderness. Then I have seen it with my eyes.”
That was all he said of New Damascus. Other memories crowded in.
“In 1774,” he wrote, “I married a pious, sensible woman, who bore me
two sons. In 1781 I married an eminent, worthy woman, who bore me a
third son. In 1788 I married a delightful, affectionate woman, whom
God was pleased to spare me to the end. She bore me my one daughter,
Rebecca.”
The two sons by the first wife were already dead. This he did not
mention in his testimony. The third son, born of the eminent and
worthy woman, was at this time thirty-seven and unmarried, unlikely to
perpetuate the line or to grace it if he did. All the Woolwine vitality
went into Rebecca, born of his union with the delightful affectionate
woman. Rebecca had married Phineas Breakspeare, the inn keeper, and was
for a long time estranged from her father on that account. He forgave
her on the head of a grandson, his namesake, Aaron Breakspeare.
The founder’s affairs were left in a somewhat involved condition.
Everyone was surprised that the estate was not greater. His partner had
large claims upon it and the accounts were in confusion.
The widow survived the General but one year. The third son died the
next year. The whole estate then passed to Rebecca, who had buried her
inn keeper; she held it in trust for the founder’s grandson, Aaron.
Here ends the Woolwine line. The name disappears suddenly from the
annals of the county.