The development in manufactures after the war, railroad expansion and
the somewhat deceptive prosperity of the Centennial gave the city the
same sudden burst which Chicago had in 1893, and Philadelphia took on
the aspect in the next twenty years, 1876 to 1896, which the great city
will always hold. Cheap freights poured in new building-stones, and the
easily worked green serpentine was used in the University buildings and
the Academy of Natural Science on Logan Square. It was employed in the
Academy of Fine Arts, less agreeable than the earlier front of the same
institution, now a theatre on Chestnut. The architectural impulse first
felt at the Centennial broke up the traditions of a century, and building
of the last twenty-five years, often _bizarre_, always shows, even in the
humblest row, intent, design and recognition, however uncouth, of the
just claim of decoration.
The seeing eye and loving can still trace all these changes of a century.
The very kernel of the city, and its warehouses about Dock Square,
and the river front, the expansion before the Revolution, the pause
just after, the growth in the period after 1787, the addition early
in the century and the great growth before and after the war and for
twenty years past. Each has its character and quality, its message and
purport, and these as they extended have met a growth as distinct and
recognizable, north, west and south. The marks of these things and their
metes and bounds, the current and course of population, the monuments
of the past, the changing fashion of each decade and the desire of the
present, these are all written in this moving tide of houses which has
flooded all the wood-grown fields of two centuries ago. Generation by
generation has seen a wider comfort, a higher level of life, an improving
education and more abundant resource for the Many for whom this city
has always existed. Dull, sordid, narrow, much of this life has been.
From its dawn, it has had its seasons of stagnant corruption, and Penn
but wrote the despair of all who have served it since, yet no man has
labored and lived in it but has come to know its charm, to feel its life,
to trust to the sure tides of its being, welling always towards a more
complete comfort, and to love this vast amorphous city which broods over
its children with a perpetual home nurture.
[Illustration: SEAL OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA.]
[Illustration]
WILMINGTON
“Her mingled streams of Swedish, Dutch and English blood.”
BY E. N. VALLANDIGHAM
When the adventurous William Usselinx, native of Antwerp and merchant of
Stockholm, was growing old, he proposed to King Gustavus Adolphus that
Sweden organize a trading company to operate in Asia, Africa, America,
and Terra Magellanica. The King lent ear to Usselinx, and Usselinx
was able to picture to the Swedish people the beauty and fertility
of the region bordering on the Delaware, “a fine land, in which all
the necessaries and comforts of life are to be enjoyed in overflowing
abundance.” The proposed plans sped well for a time; the King pledged
a great sum from the royal treasury in aid of the new company, and the
Swedish people, nobles and commons, subscribed to the stock. But the
King was shortly to be busied in the wars of Germany, and when he died at
his great victory of Lützen, the plans of Usselinx were yet unexecuted.
One biographer of Gustavus, indeed, says that the little fleet intended
for America was seized by the Spaniards, but it is by no means certain
that such a fleet ever set sail.
Queen Christina, the daughter of Gustavus, permitted her able chancellor,
Oxenstiern, to revive the charter of Usselinx, and Oxenstiern employed
to take out a Swedish colony to the Delaware probably the fittest man
in all the world for that task, Peter Minuet, sometime Governor of New
Netherlands, driven from his post by the jealous factors that they
might put in his place the more pliant Walter Van Twiller, surnamed the
Doubter. The exact date of Minuet’s expedition is unknown, but Kieft,
who succeeded Van Twiller in the Governorship of New Netherlands, made
protest in May, 1638, against the presence upon the Delaware of Peter
Minuet, “who stylest thyself commander in the service of her Majesty the
Queen of Sweden.” Kieft warned Peter “that the whole South River [the
Delaware] of the New Netherlands, both the upper and the lower, has been
our property for many years, occupied by our forts, and sealed by our
blood.”
When Kieft’s protest reached the newly arrived Swedes, they were already
in snug quarters on the edge of the River Minquas, as the Indians called
it, or Christina, as the newcomers named it (set down on modern maps as
Christiana, but in the mouths of those that navigate its waters, called
Christeen); for they had sailed up the Delaware in the _Bird Grip_, or
_Griffin_, and the _Key of Calmar_, and entering the Minquas, had come to
anchor in deep water close against a natural wharf of rock, well within
the present limits of Wilmington. Thus was made the true beginning of
the city, though no part of the region it now occupies bore the name of
Wilmington until a full century later.
The newcomers built close to their original place of anchorage a little
fort, and behind it a little village. Hudde, the Dutch commander at
Fort Nassau, thirty miles up the Delaware, describing the Swedish
fortification seven years later, says that it was “nearly encircled
by a marsh, except on the northwest side, where it can be approached
by land.” The fort was then and for years afterward, the only place
of worship in the immediate region, and here from the founding of the
colony the Rev. Reorus Torkillius, a Swedish clergyman of Latinized name,
conducted the Lutheran service in the Swedish language. Thus church and
state were planted together. Pastor Campanius, who came five years after
Torkillius, found that beside Fort Christina had sprung up the village of
Christina Harbor, or Christinaham, and Engineer Lindstrom, who came when
the settlement was not yet twenty years old, has left us a map of this
earliest Wilmington.
[Illustration: PLAN OF CHRISTINA FORT, 1655.]
Before the Dutch had time to call the Swedish intruders to a reckoning
Minuet died, and John Prinz was sent out as Governor. There had been the
short intervening reign of Peter Hollendare. Prinz came under a cloud,
having lost his rank as First Lieutenant by his over-hasty surrender
of Chemnitz. Probably this fact may account for his restless energy as
Governor of New Sweden. He sought to regain in the new world repute lost
in the old. Prinz came with two ships, an armed transport, munitions of
war, troops, and many immigrants, and with instructions to maintain and
promote piety and education, to develop the resources of the colony,
agricultural and mineral, to make friends with the Indians, and to live
at peace with all neighboring Europeans. But he was to resent by force
of arms, if need be, the pretensions of the Dutch to any territorial or
other rights upon the west side of the Delaware.
Prinz built at Tinicum, or Tenacong as the Indians called it, near the
present city of Chester, Pennsylvania, a fort to threaten the Dutch
Fort Nassau, above; and likewise at the mouth of Salem Creek, on the
Jersey shore, where the English had a small settlement, he built Fort
Elfsborg, or Elsinborough. Both were promptly armed and garrisoned. He
built still another fort, this time on the Schuylkill, within gunshot
of its mouth, and in 1646 he ordered a Dutch trading-vessel from that
river. Furthermore, he caused to be torn down with despiteful words the
arms of the Dutch, set up in sign of possession upon the present site
of Philadelphia, and when reminded of the Dutch West India Company’s
prior claim, he profanely answered that although Satan was the earliest
possessor of hell, doubtless he sometimes welcomed new comers.
But a day of reckoning was speedily to come, for Peter Stuyvesant,
Governor of the New Netherlands, moved by the amazing activity of Prinz,
bought from the Indians all the west side of the Delaware from Minquas
Creek to Bompties (or Bombay) Hook, and in 1651, as some say,—before the
building of Elfsborg as others say,—built Fort Casimir at Sand Huken, now
Newcastle, on the Delaware, five miles below Fort Christina, and within
sight of Elfsborg. Whichever fort was built first, it is pretty certain
that the Swedes soon deserted Elfsborg, after naming it in disgust
Myggenborg, which means Fort Mosquito. The excuse for the desertion was
the insupportable insect pests of the region; so early did the New Jersey
mosquito earn the reputation that clings to him even to this day. As for
Prinz, alarmed at the activity of the Dutch, he vainly petitioned the
home government for aid, and at length went off to Europe, leaving as
deputy his son-in-law, John Pappegoja.
And now the comedy of outflanking was to be followed by the comedy of
bloodless capture and recapture, for Prinz had not been long gone when
there arrived in the Delaware from Sweden, in the man-of-war _Eagle_,
John Claudius Rising, as commissary and counsellor to the Governor, and
Peter Lindstrom, military engineer, together with arms and soldiers. The
Dutch at Fort Casimir were living in unsuspicious peace when the _Eagle_
suddenly appeared before the fort and demanded that the place surrender,
as occupying Swedish ground. Rising enforced his demand by landing thirty
soldiers, and the Dutch yielded upon favorable terms which secured to
them all their property, public and private, and granted as well the
honors of war. As the capture was made on Trinity Sunday, the name of the
place was changed by the Swedes to Trefalldigheet, or Fort Trinity. This
incident, which befell in the year 1655, is notable as the first passage
at arms, if such it may be called, between rival European claimants to
the western shore of the Delaware.
[Illustration: RESIDENCE OF THE LATE THOMAS F. BAYARD.]
But Rising’s prompt policy of aggression was a mistake, for it left
the Dutch no alternative but counter-aggression; and accordingly Peter
Stuyvesant, with seven ships and six hundred or seven hundred men,
appeared before the deserted Elfsborg late in August, 1655, captured a
few straggling Swedes ashore, endured the mosquitoes for one night only,
and next day, having landed a force north of Fort Trinity to cut it off
from Fort Christina, demanded that the garrison surrender. Swen Schute,
the Swedish commander, despite a name that ought to have been formidable
in war, was as obligingly prompt in compliance as the Dutch commander had
been a few months earlier. There was, as before, a friendly arrangement
as to the guaranty of property, public and private, but Swen Schute never
dared return to Sweden lest he be brought to book for his alacrity in
surrendering.
Now came the taking of Fort Christina, immortalized by Washington
Irving’s genius of burlesque. Rising, aware of his weakness, professed
to believe that the Dutch had no further hostile intent, but when
they invested Fort Christina on three sides, planted cannon, and
called for the surrender of the place in forty-eight hours, he first
temporized, then put on a bold face, and finally, without striking a
blow, surrendered. So ended Swedish rule in Delaware, and so began the
short-lived Dutch supremacy.
The Dutch guaranteed to the vanquished religious liberty and all other
reasonable privileges, so that few Swedes took the chance afforded
of selling their property and removing out of the jurisdiction. The
Swedes, indeed, were soon reconciled to Dutch rule, and in fact the
colony remained, in all save politics, as truly Swedish as it had been
before. The Dutch children learned the Swedish tongue, and as the Swedes
far outnumbered the Dutch, the latter were soon lost in the mass of
the former. When a nephew of Prinz visited the country, late in the
seventeenth century, he found that the people “used the old Swedish way
in all things.” Pastor Rudman wrote home to Sweden that the mother tongue
was still spoken in all its purity by the colonists at Christinaham, and
as a matter of fact it did not entirely cease to be used in the services
of the Swedish church until more than a century and a quarter had elapsed.
[Illustration: OLD SWEDES CHURCH.]
Luckily for the Swedes they were too busy to trouble themselves about a
change of masters, and when the agents of James, Duke of York, having
possessed themselves of New Amsterdam in 1664, after Charles I. had
magnificently given to James all the country between the Connecticut and
the east bank of the Delaware, also seized New Sweden as a dependency of
New Netherlands, the good folk at Christinaham accepted the new situation
and went about their business. The attempted rebellion of Königsmark,
“the Long Finn,” who called himself a son of General Count William Von
Königsmark, and the historical interlude of the Dutch occupation in 1673
and 1674, when the forts changed hands, in the usual bloodless fashion,
twice in a few months, did not profoundly shake the community on the
Minquas. The second surrender left the English in secure possession.
In the midst of this apparent indifference to governmental changes, one
thing did move the Swedes, and was doubtless in part responsible for the
welcome they gave the return of the Dutch: this was a tariff imposed by
the English rulers upon all inward-bound merchandise passing the capes of
the Delaware. At this juncture there came to the rescue the best friend
the Swedes had yet found in the new world, a man so wise and just in
his dealing with civilized man and savage on this side the Atlantic, so
generous, tolerant, large-minded and large-hearted in all that concerned
the great powers entrusted to him, that one can hardly understand how
even so audacious an iconoclast as Macaulay had the hardihood to assail
his memory. This man was William Penn, who, having recently become
trustee for Quaker estates in West Jersey, made prompt protest against
the tariff and had it revoked—an early triumph for the principle of no
taxation without representation.
When, soon after, he became proprietor of the “Three Counties on the
Delaware,” the Swedes of Christinaham and the region round about knew him
and were glad. Penn had an equally good opinion of the Swedes, for he
says:
“As they are a proper people, and strong of body, so they have
fine children, and almost every house full. It is rare to find
one of them without three or four boys and as many girls, some
six, seven and eight sons. And I must do them that right to say
I see few young men more sober and laborious.”
A Swedish writer of about the same period notes that the Swedish farmers
are as well clad as the residents of cities. Penn describes the houses
in his new possessions as of a single story and divided into three
apartments. A house and a barn suitable to a colonist might be built for
seventy-five dollars.
[Illustration: REV. ERIC BJORK.]
[Illustration: BISHOP LEE.]
Penn noted, however, that the Swedes were not so well educated as
they should have been, and a few years later they were in such need
of religious instruction, although they had but recently lost their
pastor, that, partly through the representations of the proprietor and
partly through the importunities of the Swedes themselves, the King of
Sweden was induced to send out to Delaware the Rev. Eric Bjork. This
good and energetic man, finding inconveniently situated the Swedish
Lutheran church erected in 1667 at Crane Hook, or Tran Hook, near the
mouth of the Christiana, conceived and executed the plan of building a
new church near the scene of the original Swedish landing at the Rocks.
The new edifice was the Old Swedes of to-day, which celebrated the two
hundredth anniversary of its dedication on the 28th of last May. This
venerable church, now Holy Trinity of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of
Delaware, is revered and cherished as the one visible link which joins
the city of Wilmington to her earliest past. In the churchyard lie the
dead of many generations, and of almost all denominations. Here, side by
side with the Swedish colonists of the early eighteenth century, lies the
late Bishop Alfred Lee of the Episcopal Church, who in life, as learned
as he was modest, was one of the American Committee for the Revision of
the King James Bible. Here, too, was recently laid to rest, amid many of
his kinsfolk, the late Ambassador Thomas F. Bayard, worn with long and
honorable public service.
Thanks to the late Dr. Horace Burr we have an English translation of the
earliest records of Old Swedes. In these records is contained a curious
account of the difficulties attendant upon the building of the new
church. There were quarrels over the glebe, the usual troubles with the
contractor, and the inevitable changes of plan after the work was under
way. Hired sawyers were paid so much per foot, and “drink.” In order to
save wages the men of the parish came as they found leisure and hewed the
timbers. Masons and other skilled mechanics came from Philadelphia, then
“a clever little town,” and with them came Dick, a negro mortar-mixer.
[Illustration: THOMAS F. BAYARD.]
Notwithstanding the erection of the new church, the community seems to
have grown away from the scene of the original landing, until in 1731
Thomas Willing, son-in-law of Andrew Justison, of Swedish blood, laid
out upon the Christiana front, half a mile from the Rocks, a new town
modelled upon the rectangular plan of Philadelphia. The first house in
Willingstown, built at the corner of Front and Market streets, bore
in its brick gable a stone with the inscription, “J. W. S., 1732.”
Three years later the place was only a small hamlet, but in that year
Willingstown had a new birth, for then William Shipley, a wealthy, well
educated and energetic English Friend of Ridley in Pennsylvania, came
to the place and made himself, so to speak, its second founder. He came
through the influence of his second wife, Elizabeth Lewis, a preacher
of his own sect, who saw in a vision a goodly land lying at the foot
of a hill and traversed by two rivers, one wild and dashing, the other
sluggish and serpentine, and visiting by accident the region of the
Swedish settlement on the Christiana, recognized the landscape of her
vision.
William Shipley built his house—an admirable example of
eighteenth-century brickwork—at the corner of Fourth and Shipley streets,
where it recently gave place to a modern business building. He built,
also, a market-house for the town at the corner of Fourth and Market
streets, and in doing so, paved the way for a quarrel with the partisans
of the Second Street market-house, a body of citizens including many
Swedes.
So potent was the magic of William Shipley’s presence that in four years
the town had reached six hundred inhabitants. Next year it received a
borough charter from Penn, and its name was changed to Wilmington, in
honor of Lord Wilmington, says Ebeling, the German historian. It was
a tight little borough, the Wilmington of that day and of fifteen or
twenty years later. The burgesses, who at first met about in taverns,
at length were comfortably housed in a neat little Town Hall built upon
arches over one end of the Second Street market. There were fairs
during most of the eighteenth century; fairs to which hundreds came in
holiday attire and dancing shoes to make merry to the sound of bagpipe,
flute, fiddle and trombone. It is significant of grave Quaker austerity,
perhaps, that the fairs were suppressed by act of Legislature in 1785, as
nurseries of vice, a scandal to religion, and an offence to well ordered
persons. There may have been some excuse for this severity, for indeed
with the coming of the English had come something of the brutality of
eighteenth-century English manners. Bullies fought naked to the waist
in the market-place, and hired ruffians nearly cut down the posts that
supported William Shipley’s market-house. The most picturesque modern
survival of Wilmington in the eighteenth century is the King Street
open-air market, and with it remains the statute against forestalling,
made to meet the case of some early monopolist.
[Illustration: SHIPLEY BUILDING.]
Wilmington’s Quaker peace was little disturbed by echoes of European wars
in the eighteenth century, though in 1741 the Christiana was fortified
against possible Spanish pirates; but when the war of the Revolution
came, Wilmington was loyal and ready. Old folk still preserve the
tradition of Washington’s presence in the city just before the battle of
the Brandywine, of his gay French officers in the sober house of a Quaker
citizen, of President John McKinly’s capture at midnight by a detachment
of British sent in after the battle, of the British wounded crowding the
houses of citizens and probably saving the town from bombardment by
British ships of war in the Delaware. Tradition recalls, too, the visit
of Washington in his hour of victory, when he journeyed homeward to Mount
Vernon, of his other visit on his journey northward to be inaugurated
as President at New York, and of still another visit in 1791, when he
made his famous progress through the country. On that last visit, riding
in his chariot of state through little Brandywine village, opposite
Wilmington, on the left bank of the Brandywine, he stopped at the house
of miller Joseph Tatnall, to learn that he was at the mill, and then,
with those great strides of his, walked through the village street to
the edge of the stream, entered the mill, and talked with the courageous
patriot Quaker of his services to the army during the war.
[Illustration: OLD FRIENDS’ MEETING-HOUSE.]
By this time the borough had travelled far from the crudity of Swedish
days and had even departed somewhat from the severity of Quaker
tradition. There were French emigrants from the black terror in Santo
Domingo, and from the red terror in France. There were soon to be other
French immigrants,—Du Ponts, bringing a mingled flavor of aristocracy,
learning and benevolence, destined to found great factories and to give
patriot soldiers and sailors to the land of their adoption, and yet to
retain even to the fifth generation the Gallic face, and air, and manner.
Wealth and elegance were come to the little community on the Minquas.
Had not Robert Montgomery made the tour of Europe, and did he not for
four months during the plague of yellow fever at Philadelphia entertain
Governor McKean of Pennsylvania? Did not another wealthy citizen
entertain one hundred refugees of the same period? And there was Gunning
Bedford, Jr., _aide-de-camp_ and friend to Washington, inheritor of
his crimson satin Masonic sash, his appointee as first Federal Judge
for the District of Delaware. He and his wife, a Read of distinguished
colonial stock, entertained friend and stranger with splendid hospitality
in the very house in Market Street that had been the headquarters of
Washington’s French officers. The Bedfords were Presbyterians. Gunning
Bedford, Jr., worshipped in the quaint little First Presbyterian Church
in Market Street near Tenth, now reverently preserved and occupied by
the Delaware Historical Society. Hard by in the churchyard you may see
Judge Bedford’s tomb, a low but graceful domed shaft facing the public
street, so that all may read the lesson of civic virtue, and bearing an
inscription that closes thus:
“His form was goodly, his temper amiable,
His manners winning, and his discharge
Of private duties exemplary.
“Reader, may his example stimulate you to improve the
talents—be they five, or two, or one—with which God has
entrusted you.”
Wilmington built her new Town Hall just a century ago last year, and
Friend Joseph Tatnall gave the clock that shone in its tower and told
the hours. The clock went out of use more than thirty years ago, but the
building remains, not altogether spoiled by modern additions, sacred
because of its associations, and testifying to the solidity with which
the city fathers built in the last century.
[Illustration: HOUSE OF THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.]