CONCLUDING PAPER.
OLD SWEDES' CHURCH.
We have pointed out the metropolis of Delaware as being a distinctly Northern city, planted in the distinct South. Among other things, this complication has led to some singularities in its settlement. As a community regulated by the most liberal traditions of Penn, but placed under the legal conditions of a slave State, it has held a position perfectly anomalous. No other spot could be indicated where the contrasts of North and South came to so sharp an edge; and there are few where a skilled pen could set down so many curiosities of folk-lore and confusions of race. The Dutch, the Swedes and the English Quakers formed the substratum, upon which were poured the émigrés of the French Revolution and the fugitives from Santo Domingo. The latter sometimes brought slaves who had continued faithful, and who retained their serfdom under the laws of Delaware. The French bonnes stood on washing-benches in the Brandywine, and taught the amazed Quaker wives that laundry-work could be done in cold water. The names of grand old French families, prefaced by the proprietarial forms of le and du, became mixed by marriage with such Swedish names as Svensson and such Dutch names as Staelkappe. (The first Staelkappe was a ship's cook, nicknamed from his oily and glossy bonnet.) As for the refugees from Santo Domingo, they absolutely invaded Wilmington, so that the price of butter and eggs was just doubled in 1791, and house-rents rose in proportion. They found themselves with rapture where the hills were rosy with peach-blossoms, and where every summer was simply an extract from Paradise.
We cannot linger, as we fain would do, over the quaint and amusing Paris en Amerique which reigned here for a period following the events of '93. At Sixth and French streets lived a marchioness in a cot, which she adorned with the manners of Versailles, the temper of the Faubourg St. Germain and the pride of Lucifer. This Marquise de Sourci was maintained by her son, who made pretty boxes of gourds, and afterward boats, in one of which he was subsequently wrecked on the Delaware, before the young marquis was of age to claim his title. In a farm-house, whose rooms he lined with painted canvas, lived Colonel de Tousard. On Long Hook Farm resided, in honor and comfort, Major Pierre Jaquette, son of a Huguenot refugee who married a Swedish girl, and became a Methodist after one of Whitefield's orations: as for the son, he served in thirty-two pitched battles during our Revolution. Good Joseph Isambrie, the blacksmith, used to tell in provincial French the story of his service with Bonaparte in Egypt, while his wife blew the forge-bellows. Le Docteur Bayard, a rich physician, cured his compatriots for nothing, and Doctor Capelle, one of Louis XVI.'s army-surgeons, set their poor homesick old bones for them when necessary. Monsieur Bergerac, afterward professor in St. Mary's College, Baltimore, was a teacher: another preceptor, M. Michel Martel, an émigré of 1780, was proficient in fifteen languages, five of which he had imparted to the lovely and talented Theodosia Burr. Aaron Burr happened to visit Wilmington when the man who had trained his daughter's intellect was lying in the almshouse, wrecked and paralytic, with the memory of all his many tongues gone, except the French. Some benevolent Wilmingtonians approached Burr in his behalf, showing the colonel's own letter which had introduced him to the town.
GRACE CHURCH.
"I wrote that letter when I knew him," said the diplomatic Colonel Burr, "but I know him no more."
The day quickly came when Burr's speech of denial was reflected upon himself, and those who then honored him "knew him no more."
Another French teacher, by the by, was not of Gallic race, but that of Albion le perfide: this was none other than William Cobbett, with his reputation all before him, known only to the Wilmington millers for the French lessons he gave their daughters and the French grammar he had published. He lived on "Quaker Hill" from 1794 to 1796. He then went to Philadelphia, and began to publish Peter Porcupine's Gazette. "I mean to shoot my quills," said Cobbett, "wherever I can catch game." With the sinews of Wilmington money he soon made his way back to England, became a philosopher, and sat in the House of Commons. Another British exile was Archibald Hamilton Rowan, an Irish patriot, and one of the "United Irishmen" of 1797. Escaping from a Dublin jail in woman's clothes, he found his way to Wilmington after adventures like those of Boucicault's heroes; lived here several years in garrets and cottages, carrying fascination and laughter wherever he went among his staid neighbors; and after some years flew back to Ireland, glorious as a phoenix, resuming the habits proper to his income of thirty thousand pounds a year.
WEST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.
A familiar figure on the wharves of Wilmington was the gigantic one of Captain Paul Cuffee, looking like a character in a masquerade. His athletic limbs forced into the narrow garments of the Quakers, and a brim of superior development shading his dark negro face, he talked sea-lingo among the trading captains, mixed with phrases from Robert Barclay and gutturals picked up on the coast of Sierra Leone. Captain Cuffee owned several vessels, manned by sailors as black as shoemaker's wax, and he conducted one of his ships habitually to the African ports. Coming back rich from Africa, this figure of darkness has often led its crew of shadows into port at the Brandywine mouth, passing modestly amongst the whalers and wheat-shallops, dim as the Flying Dutchman and mum as Friends' meeting. It is possible that from some visit of his arose the legend that Blackbeard, the terrible pirate, who always hid his booty on the margins of streams, had used the Brandywine for this purpose. At any rate, some clairvoyants, in their dreams, saw in 1812 the glittering pots of Blackbeard's gold lying beneath the rocks of Harvey's waste-land, next to Vincent Gilpin's mill. They paid forty thousand dollars for a small tract, and searched and found nothing; but Job Harvey hugged his purchase money.
ST. JOHN'S PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
Latrobe the architect lived here in the first quarter of the century, midway between Philadelphia (where he was building waterworks and banks) and Washington (where he was seating a young nation in legislative halls worthy of its greatness); using Wilmington meanwhile as a pleasant retirement, where he could wear his thinking-cap, educate his beautiful young daughter, and mix with the French and other cultured society of the place. Here, too, about fifty years ago, a pretty French girl used to play and eat peaches, maintained by funds mysteriously supplied from Louisiana, and ignorant of all connections except a peculating guardian. It was little Myra Clark (now Mrs. Gaines), who woke up one day to find herself the heroine of the greatest of modern lawsuits, and the credited possessor of a large part of New Orleans—the same who has recently gained a million, while she expects to gain a million more, and to be richer than Lady Burdett-Coutts.
Thus has the pretty city ever played its part as a storing-house where things and people and ideas might be set by to ripen. It is not wonderful that it now and then found itself, quite unintentionally, a museum, where the far-brought rarities were living souls. In a heavenly climate, just where the winged songsters of the South held tryst with those of the North, and where the plants of both latitudes embowered the gardens together, Nature arranged a new garden wherein were brought together almost all the races that had diverged from Babel.
The antiquities we have been examining, however, yield in age to the venerable walls which were built to shelter a worship no longer promulgated among us. The Swedes' churches of Philadelphia and Wilmington are among the oldest civilized fabrics to be found in this new country of ours. That of Wilmington was built in 1698, and that at Wicaco in Philadelphia in 1700. Rudman, a missionary from Sweden, preached the first sermon to the Wilmingtonians in May, 1699; and after him a succession of Swedish apostles arrived, trembling at their own courage, and feeling as our preachers would do if assigned to posts in Nova Zembla or Patagonia. The salary offered was a hundred rixdollars, with house and glebe, and the creed was the Lutheran doctrines according to "the Augsburg Confession of Faith, free from all human superstition and tradition." Dutch ministers alternated peaceably with the Swedish ones, who bore such Latinized names as Torkillus, Lokenius, Fabricius, Hesselius, Acrelius. The last wrote in his own language an excellent history of the Swedish settlements on the Delaware, only a part of which has been rendered into English by the New York Historical Society. William Penn proved his tolerance by giving the little church a folio Bible and a shelf of pious books, together with a bill of fifty pounds sterling. The building was planted half a mile away from the then city, in the village of Christinaham. Its site was on the banks of the Christine, and its congregation, in the comparative absence of roads, came in boats or sleighs, according to the season. The church was well built of hard gray stone, with fir pews and a cedar roof: iron letters fixed in the walls spelled out such holy mottoes as "Lux L. I. Tenebr. oriens ex Alto," and "Si de. pro Nobis Quis contra Nos," and commemorated side by side the names of William III., king of England, William Penn, proprietary, and Charles XI. of Sweden. Swedish services were continued up to about the epoch of the Revolution, when, the language being no longer intelligible in the colony, they were merged into English ones: the last Swedish commissary, Girelius, returned by order of the archbishop in 1786, and the intercourse between the American Swedish churches and the ecclesiastical see in the fatherland ceased for ever. The oldest headstone in the churchyard is that of William Vandevere, who died in 1719. Service was long celebrated by means of the chalice and plate sent over by the Swedish copper-miners to Biorch, the first missionary at Cranehook, and the Bible given by Queen Anne in 1712. The sexes sat separately. In our grandfathers' day the old sanctuary used to be dressed for Christmas by the sexton, Peter Davis: he was a Hessian deserter, with a powder-marked face and murderous habits toward the English language. Descending from their sledges and jumpers, the congregation would crowd toward the bed of coals raked out in the middle of the brick floor from the old cannon stove: to do this they must brush by the cedars which "Old Powderproof" had covered with flour, in imitation of snow; and then Dutch Peter, as they complimented him on his efforts, would whisper the astonishing invocation, "God be tankful for all dish plessins and tings!"
CAR-BUILDING WORKS.
Modern improvement has a particular spite against the landmarks of antiquity. The railroad to Baltimore slices off a part of the Swedish graveyard—an institution much more ancient than the church which stands on it. And the rock by old Fort Christina, upon which Governor Stuyvesant—Irving's Stuyvesant—stood on his silver leg and took the surrender of the Swedish governor-general, is now quarried out and reconstructed into Delaware Breakwater.
RESIDENCE OF JOB JACKSON, ESQ.
Doubtless we dwell too fondly on the old memories, but it appears that the souvenirs of this region are somewhat remarkable for their contrast of nationalities. Perhaps the colonization of other spots would yield better romances than any we have to offer; yet we cannot help feeling that a better pen than ours would find brilliant matter for literary effects in the paradise revealed to good Elizabeth Shipley by her dream-guide.
Delawarean Wilmington is perhaps hardly known to the general public except through two of its products. Everybody buys Wilmington matches, and everybody knows that Du Pont's powder is made in the vicinity. Ignoring the foundries and shipyards, the popular imagination recognizes but these two commodities—the powder which could blow up the obstructions to all the American harbors, and the match which could touch off the train. A million dollars' worth of gunpowder and three hundred thousand dollars' worth of matches are the annual product.
CAR-WHEEL CASTING WORKS.
Eleuthère Irenée Du Pont, a French gentleman of honorable family, appeared in Wilmington in 1802. The town had at that time hardly three thousand inhabitants. He amazed all the quidnuncs by buying, for fifty thousand dollars, Rumford Dawes' old tract of rocks on the Brandywine, which everybody knew was perfectly useless. The stranger was pitied as he began to blast away the stone. Out of a single rock, separated into fragments, he built a cottage: it was a lonely spot, and the snakes from the fissures were in the habit of sharing the contents of his well-bucket. Such was the beginning of the Eleuthère Powder-works. M. Du Pont, who died some forty years ago, was much beloved for his benevolence and probity. In 1825, La Fayette, during his celebrated visit of reminiscence, was the guest of the brave old Frenchman for several days, during which he examined the battle-ground of Brandywine. He here received the ball with which he got his wound in that battle, from the hands of Bell McClosky, a kind of camp-follower and nurse, who had extracted the bullet with her scissors and preserved it. The general wrote in the album of Mademoiselle Du Pont the following graceful sentiment:
"After having seen, nearly half a century ago, the bank of the Brandywine a scene of bloody fighting, I am happy now to find it the seat of industry, beauty and mutual friendship.
"La Fayette.
"July 25, 1825."
While on a Revolutionary topic we may mention that among a great many relics of '76 preserved in the town is the sword of General Wayne—"Mad Anthony"—a straight, light blade in leather scabbard, possessed by Mr. W. H. Naff.
JESSUP & MOORE'S PAPER-MILLS.
The citizens of this pleasant town have ever been orderly and pious, just as they have ever been loyal. Their religious institutions have grown and flourished. Godfearing and unspeculative, they have attached themselves to such creeds as appealed most powerfully to the heart with the least possible admixture of form. "The words Fear God" says Joubert, "have made many men pious: proofs of the existence of God have made many men atheists." Since the day when Whitefield poured out his eloquence among the Brandywine valleys and touched the hearts of the French exiles, Methodism, with its almost entire absence of dogma, has had great success in the community. This success is now indicated by a rich congregation, and a church-building that would be called noble in any city. Grace Church, on Ninth and West streets, is a large Gothic temple, seating nearly eight hundred persons—warmed, frescoed and heavily carpeted inside, and walled externally with brownstone mixed with the delicate pea-green serpentine of Chadd's Ford. The architect was a native Wilmingtonian—Thomas Dixon—now of Baltimore. The windows, including a very brilliant oriel, are finely stained: the font is a delicate piece of carving, the organ is grand, and the accommodations for Sunday-schools and lectures are of singular perfection. Few shrines in this country show better the modern movement of Methodism toward luxury and elegance, as compared with the repellant humiliations of Wesley's day.
It is to be hoped that this advance in attractiveness does not indicate any lapse in the more solid qualities of spiritual earnestness. "Whenever this altar," well said Bishop Simpson in dedicating the building on the centenary anniversary of the rise of Methodism—"whenever this altar shall be too fine for the poorest penitent sinner to kneel here, the Spirit of God will depart, and that of Ichabod will come in."
We have indicated the Swedish Lutheran missionaries exhorting under the roof of their antique church in a language which their congregations were beginning to forget, and afterward in a broken English hardly more intelligible. Their place is largely taken now by predicators of the faith of John Knox, with a plentiful following of pious believers. Among the family of Presbyterian kirks in Wilmington the youngest is a large brick edifice built in 1871, for sixty-one thousand dollars, on Eighth and Washington streets, able to seat nearly a thousand persons, most comfortably and invitingly furnished, and supplied with lecture-, infant- and Sunday-school-rooms, together with a huge kitchen, suggesting the agapæ or love-feasts of the primitive Christians. Meantime, Anglicanism does not lack supporters. The descendants of Monsieur Du Pont, cultured and influential, have done much to advance the creed, and about fifteen years ago Mr. Alexis I. Du Pont, pulling down a low tavern in the suburbs, prepared to erect a church upon the site, to be built mainly through his own liberality. Unhappily, Mr. Du Pont died from the effects of an explosion at the powder-works ten weeks after the laying of the corner-stone; but the building was soon completed through the pious munificence of his widow, and the Bible of St. John's Protestant Episcopal Church now rests on its lectern upon the site of the old liquor-bar, and the gambling-den of former days is replaced by its pews. The rector is Mr. T. Gardiner Littell, a man of eminent goodness and intelligence. St. John's has a beautiful open roof, stained windows and a fine organ: it can offer seats to seven hundred worshipers.
"AT THE SIGN OF SHAKESPEARE."
These few specimen churches—and especially the last, which blots out a grogshop—are good instances, with the large congregations they accommodate, of the way in which a sane, flourishing manufacturing community provides for the spiritual needs of its members. The tone and moral well-being which Boz found, or thought he found, among the operatives at Lowell are largely realized here. But our picture of Wilmington as a hive of industry is not yet complete, and before we enter upon the highly-interesting problem of its dealings with its working family, we should enter a few more of its sample manufactories.
OFFICE OF THE DAILY COMMERCIAL.
Take car-building, for an example, in which the reputation of this town is known to the initiated of all the States and many foreign countries. Travelers are at this moment spinning in Wilmington-made railway-carriages over the extremest parts of North and South America, admiring, through Wilmington-made windows, every possible variety of winter and tropical scenery, on which they comment in English, German, French, Spanish and all civilized languages. Such a migratory product as a rail-car is an active messenger of fame for the place of its fabrication. We examine, as a fair type, the Jackson and Sharp Company's works, claimed to be the largest in the New World, and only exceeded by a few British and Continental establishments. The buildings have frontage upon the Brandywine and Christine streams, as well as on the principal railroad. Here are a congeries of two-story buildings, which are together fifteen hundred feet in length by a width of seventy feet. Five miles of heating-pipes warm the rooms for a thousand workmen. There is something logical and consecutive in the arrangement here, which makes it the best spot on the face of the earth for an enthusiast who should wish to demonstrate, what all loyal Americans believe in, the vast superiority of our form of railway-carriage. The cars proceed, in perfectly regular order, from raw material to completion with the progressive march of a quadratic equation in algebra. They seem to be arranged to demonstrate a theory. First the visitor sees lumber in stock, a million feet of it; then, across one end of a long room, the mere sketch or transparent diagram of a car; then, a car broadly filled in; and so on, up to the last glorious result, upholstered with velvet and smelling of varnish. The cars are on rails, upon which they move, side on, as if by a principle of growth, the undeveloped ones perpetually pushing up their more forward predecessors, until the last perfect carriage is ejected from the fifteen-hundredth foot of the building's length. Each one, gathering material and ornament as it rolls steadily along in its crablike side-fashion, becomes at last a vehicle of perfect luxury; and then, with one final plunge into the open air, it leaves its diversely-destined neighbors, and changes for ever its sidelong motion for the forward roll which will carry it through a long existence. A very large proportion of this company's work is on "palace" cars of the Pullman type, those extravagances of luxury of which Europe is just now applying to Wilmington to learn the lesson. Narrow-gauge cars for the West, in supplying which they are the pioneers, gaudy cars for South America, and sturdy, solid ones for Canada, are all gently riding forward, side to side, in this inexorable chain of destiny, and diverging at the front door on their widely-different errands. Besides the manufacture of cars, the company builds every sort of coasters and steamers. The class of workmen it employs is often of a particularly high grade. German painters quote Kotzebue and sing the songs of Uhland as they weave their graceful harmonies of line and color over the panels; and the sculptors who carve antique heads over the doorways of palace cars make the place merry with studio jokes from the Berlin Academy. It is evident that a community of artists like this, furnishing the æsthetic department to an immense manufactory, will also elevate the tone of the industrial society outside, if they can but be kept free from vice and supplied with means of culture; more of which anon. Meantime, as a kind of standard of what the manufacturers themselves arrive at in prosecuting the amenities of life, we will quote the fine residence of Mr. Job Jackson, a magnate of the company.
The wheel on which the car is mounted is of course another specialty, turned off in another manufactory. We leave the rooms where the work goes on with easy smoothness like a demonstration in a lecture-hall, and come to raging, roaring, deafening furnaces and hammers. The hollow-chested artists give way to cyclops. Here we are in the Lobdell Car-wheel Company's premises. Negligently leaning up against each other, like wafers in the tray of an ink-stand, are wheels that will presently whiz over the landscapes of Russia, of Mexico, of England; wheels that will behave rashly and heat their axles; wheels that will lie turned up in the air at the bottoms of viaducts; and wheels that in various ways will see astonishing adventures, because in railway-transit there are telescopings and wheels within wheels. The English and the foreign trade of the Lobdell Company is due to its manufacture of wheels in the material or process lately known as chilled iron. This manufacture has not yet penetrated the British intellect. Take the foreman of an English car-manufactory, tell him that you will supply him a wheel about as durable as a wheel with a steel tire at less than half the cost, and he will laugh at you for an impudent idiot. But they use our wheels. The "chilling" of iron, when poured into a mould partly iron-faced, is very singular: as the melted metal hardens against the metallic boundary, its granulation changes to a certain depth, and the outside becomes excessively strong: species of crystals seem to form, presenting their ends to the surface, and meeting the wear and tear there to be experienced. The use of this fact secures, in many manufactures, a hardness approaching that of steel, without increase of cost. This company employs the process both for car-wheels and for the large cylinders (or "rolls") used in paper-mills. It is not to be supposed that the work is all rude and rough, like ordinary iron casting. The polishing of the large cylinders almost suggests diamond-cutting, it is so fine. So true is the finish that a pair of these broad rolls, perhaps five feet across, may be approached so near each other that the light showing between them is decomposed: a blade of blue or violet light, inexpressibly thin and of the width of the cylinders, passes through the entire distance. As for the "chilling" of iron, it was applied first to wheels in Baltimore, in 1833, by Mr. Ross Winans; and then, during the same year, Mr. Bonney and his nephew, George G. Lobdell, established the business we see, which has gradually grown to its present capacity of three hundred wheels per day.
FOUNTAIN.
The use of such cylinders as we have just seen under the difficult process of polishing is only understood when we explore some large paper-mill, where they take the place of the old-fashioned frame of wire gauze which produced the hand-made paper. We may select the splendid works of Messrs. Jessup & Moore on the Brandywine. Our welcome is sure to be a cordial one, for among the largest customers of the firm are the publishers of Lippincott's Magazine. The process of paper-making by the Fourdrinier machine was so fully explained in our Number for last November that it is useless now to repeat the details. But it would never do to leave the Brandywine without a glance at least at one of its principal manufactures. The mill of Jessup & Moore uses the strength of the torrent as an auxiliary to its steam-power of seven hundred and fifty horses. The machinery is made by Pusey, Jones & Co., whose iron ships and machine-shops we have already examined: the rolls of admirable accuracy are from the shops of J. Morton Poole & Co. The paper-making process—the vast revolving boiler of twelve feet by twenty-six; the countless sacks of filthy rags, that have clothed peasants of the Black Forest, beggars on the steps of St. Peter's and Egyptian fellahs; their reduction to purity, and hardening from pulp to snowy continuities of endless, marginless paper,—all this is of rare interest in the watching, but has been told until the public is satiated. We leave the banks of the Brandywine and the wharves of Christine, and try to lose ourselves in the thickly-built heart of the city.
"IN MEMORY OF THE SOLDIERS AND SAILORS OF DELAWARE WHO FELL IN THE STRUGGLE FOR THE UNION."
Even here the implacable business spirit exhibits itself at every turn. In place of the placid millers and quaint refugees of the last century at their doors, we see the shops, the storehouses of manufacturers' supplies, the hotel and the theatre; and, pervading all, the vast throng of artisans, providing such problems of local government and education as the last century never dreamed of.
HIGH-SCHOOL.
In almost all the industries of the city you are struck by the ancestral aspect of the trades, the continuance of a business from father to son, or the gradual change of firms by the absorption of partners. Boughman, Thomas & Co., established in a handsome, modern-looking bookstore, represent a business as old as 1793, uninterrupted since the time when the founder, James Wilson, hung the sign of Shakespeare at his door. The young girl of the period, who goes to their place from one of the model seminaries of which Wilmington is so full to buy a little paper for confidential notes or perhaps a delicate valentine, sees the old brown advertisement framed against the wall, and behind it, in sign-painting of her great-grandfather's time, the head of him who wrote Romeo and Juliet.
While in this literary vein we would say a word of the newspapers. These, the true finger-posts of thought in a community, are apt in manufacturing cities to be conservative and timid, as trade is timid. The very special attitude of Wilmington, however—a Yankee town in perpetual protest with a Bourbon State—has inspired its press with peculiar political energy. No more vehement Republican organ can be found in the land, for instance, than the Wilmington Commercial: it is not in its columns that you will see ingenious defences of the whipping-post at Newcastle or of the crushing taxes levied at Dover, whereby a lazy State feeds greedily upon a hard-working metropolis. The Commercial (Jenkins & Atkinson) is a staunch Administration sheet, sound on the subject of industrial protection, and highly appreciated by the manufacturers. Founded in 1866, it was, we believe, the sole daily until eighteen months ago, when some of the sober-sided weeklies began to understand that they must bestir themselves and put forth a diurnal appearance. The Gazette (C. P. Johnson), a paper nearly one hundred years old, now appears daily, and expresses the opinions of the State Assembly, where the Senate has but a single Republican member, and the House of Representatives stands fourteen Democrats to seven Republicans. Here the conservative thought of Kent and Sussex counties is kneaded up into the requisite coherency and eloquence. Every Evening (Croasdale & Cameron), a smart paper without political bias, flies around the city as the shadows begin to lengthen, selling at one cent a sheet, and liked by everybody.
HOUSE OF COLONEL HENRY McCOMB.
To be candid, however, we do not suspect that this unique old city thinks through its newspapers. The circumstances here are so peculiar, the neighborhood so close, activity so concentrated, and the circumjacent neighborhood so little congenial, that an order of things has been established unusual in modern times. Mind acts on mind by personal contact; the strong men meet and support each other; the Board of Trade assembles daily in beautiful rooms, and discusses every interest as quickly as it arises. It is like the order of things of old, ere the press and telegraph undertook to express our views before we had formed them ourselves. We are reminded of the guilds of labor in ancient Flanders or the fondachi of Venice. The State of Delaware, meanwhile, comes up and looks in at the windows, only half satisfied with the rapid fortunes making by the civic trades. What the Delaware yeomen know is, that they have broad acres of sunny land, on which they are perpetually wanting advances of money. They therefore instruct their legislators to fix a legal rate of interest, and to fix it low. The abuse which naturally follows on this blind policy is, that the wealth created by the splendid industries of Wilmington is constantly leaving the State to seek investment where usury is not kept down by old-fashioned legislation. Richard Burton, the Anatomist of Melancholy, saw a somewhat similar state of things among the unproductive and ale-tippling scholars with whom he lived at Oxford, but he was keen enough to feel an envy of the livelier marts of commerce. "How many goodly cities could I reckon up," says Burton, "that thrive wholly by trade, where thousands of inhabitants live singular well by their fingers' ends! As Florence in Italy by making cloth of gold; great Milan by silk and all curious works; Arras in Artois by those fair hangings; many cities in Spain, many in France, Germany, have none other maintenance, especially those within the land.... In most of our cities" (continues the mortified Englishman), "some few excepted, we live wholly by tippling-inns and ale-houses."
CLAYTON HOUSE.
The average Delawarean of 1873 is the average Oxford gossip of 1620, with the scholarship left out. But he has the unfortunate advantage for mischief that he is in a position to enact laws over the producers of "all curious works." These anomalies, however, must soon pass away with the march of the age, leaving Wilmington less individual perhaps, but more free.
OPERA-HOUSE AND MASONIC HALL.
How deftly, by the by, Burton picks up the distinction between an inland city, living by handicraft, and a port city, handling weighty materials and feeding freely on commerce! His livers by their finger-ends are especially "those within the land." Just so the great capital of France, arbitrarily concentred amongst her provinces, and deprived of a port, can only thrive by her exceptional genius in fine and easily-moved articles de Paris. The site now under our consideration, however, means to have no such one-sided success. If her horoscope be not cast amiss, this American Glasgow will both make whatever human ingenuity can make, and she will also distribute. One of the first things she intends to do is to tap the stream of food, fuel and lumber destined for the South, and now laid up in the winter in Philadelphia by the closing of the Delaware, and send it to the Southern consumer by her cheap water-transport. Connected with this enterprise will be the multiplication of her steam colliers, ultimately scattering the crop of breadstuffs to the South Atlantic and Gulf States (if not the Eastern), and coming home with ballast of the varied iron ores those States abound in. When Delaware Bay begins to be whitened with the sails of returning coal-vessels, or lashed with the wheels of steam carriers, bringing in the oxides and magnetite ores of North Carolina and the hematite and other varieties of the extreme South, to mix with the rail-brought ores of interior localities, then Wilmington proposes to be the chosen centre of industry in cast iron. This production, it is now well understood, is no longer carried on most advantageously in the neighborhood of any one great natural deposit of ore. The important thing is to be at a meeting of all varieties of the metal: chemistry then selects the proportions for mixture, and the best stock is produced with scarcely any greater expense than the lowest grade. The situation at the head of Delaware Bay is one where every choice of the ores can be easily swept together by rail or water. It also controls fuel, by both means of carriage, from either of the great anthracite regions—a matter of special importance in this time of "strikes," as the operatives of both districts rarely throw up work at the same time. Wilmington thus proposes to obtain its iron at three dollars per ton less than Pittsburg.
PARLOR-MATCH FACTORY.
To properly digest these advantages, the city needs a large furnace, centrally located, to work for all the foundries and forges of the place. This construction is now being earnestly advocated, and will doubtless soon take form.
Thus we see the northernmost of the slave-State cities leaping up to catch first the advantages of perfect commercial union under the new regime. Affiliated with the South, inspired by the North, we should watch her as a standard and a type.
Meantime, her labor problem, as a city crammed with proletarians, she meets with consummate tranquillity. The paternal relations between the good old Brandywine millers and their journeymen are continued through the immense operations of the present day. A singular harmony has thus far subsisted between employers and employed: the prosperity and calm which travelers used to praise among the operatives of New England mills are perhaps now best seen here. To this result both Nature and man contribute. The country round about is so bounteous, is such a garden, that the pay of the workman represents a far higher grade of social life than anywhere else in manufacturing regions. Rents so far are low, but a beneficent system is in active operation amongst the working-classes which helps a man to own his own house, and avoid the teasing periodical drain of rent.
This is the associative system, here in faultless operation, by which the fragments of a large piece of ground are paid for by degrees and cleared of all incumbrance in eight or nine years by the profit on the contributed moneys. This plan is assisted by the best men in the town, who participate in the associations, receive themselves a reasonable profit, and supply the credit and advantages necessary for the safety of wholesale enterprises. They have thus far worked with their workmen for the latter's profit, with perfect honor and without a stain of scandal. The great advantage, after all, is to themselves; for a workman owning his own home, accumulating comforts and a family, is indissolubly tied to the city and its peaceful order.
Various plans for the improvement of the workmen are afoot, including a "Holly-Tree Inn" for the supply of harmless refreshment and evening relaxation, the ground for which is bought and a stock-company forming. A public park, for which a beautiful stretch of the Brandywine, on Adams street and north of Levering Avenue, is recommended, is already engaging the attention of the citizens as a necessary provision. A "fountain society" is in active operation, offering cool, wholesome drink to the thirsty workman and the tired beast: the principal of its fountain-structures forms a memorial monument to a young gentleman who had distinguished himself by his liberality in preparing scientific lectures for the free entertainment of the working public. Shut up in the public hall among the materials of his lecture, he was found dead from the result of some solitary experiment—slain by his own kindness. A rich monument to the soldiers and sailors slain in the civil war was unveiled in 1871: it is formed of a pillar from the old United States Bank, surmounted by an eagle cast from captured cannon.
But the best thing a manufacturing town can do for her workman is to educate his children. During the old aristocratic days of Wilmington she was satisfied with the reputation of her private tutors and of her young ladies' seminaries, where "sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair" cultivated cheeks like the surrounding peaches, while they learned Shakespeare, musical glasses and the use of the globes. It was not until 1852 that the Delaware Legislature chartered a board of education for the town. In these twenty years fifteen schools have been put up, with five thousand attenders. Schoolhouse No. 1, shown in the illustration, accommodates four hundred and thirty-six pupils, and furnishes an education, in the words of the late Bishop Potter, "good enough for the richest and cheap enough for the poorest."
The choice streets of the city are filling up with tasteful residences. As a specimen we present the house of Colonel McComb, an old favorite of Wilmington, where his familiar appellation of "Harry McComb" is as often uttered day by day as it was at Washington during the exposure by its owner of Congressional honesty and piety—or magpiety.
A hotel of the first class has been erected, and baptized with the commemorative name of the Clayton House. It has one hundred and five chambers and every improvement. A very characteristic fact, showing the spirit of integrity and goodness which here travels hand in hand with modern enterprise, is that the owners sacrificed full three-quarters of the rent they could have obtained, in order to keep it pledged as a temperance house. Another elegant building has been put up by the Masonic fraternity for their own purposes and those of the Board of Trade, etc., including a handsome opera-house on the ground floor. The auditorium is praised for its acoustic properties by Parepa-Rosa, Wallack, Davenport and other performers, seats about fifteen hundred, and is furnished with the inevitable drop-curtain by Russell Smith. Faced with iron painted white, and very rich in mouldings and ornaments, the building presents as cheery a front to enter as any similar place of attraction known to the American tourist. The Masonic rooms above, and those of the Board of Trade, Historical Society, etc., are provided with every beauty and comfort.
Here are the indications of a prospering, laboring, thinking, virtuous city of the New World. We have tried to sketch it both as a city with a past and a city with a future. Could we have selected one for illustration that would be a better or sharper concentration of all that is good in American life?