When Penn was obliged to return to England in 1701, the management of his personal and real estate in the Colony was left to James Greydon. Greydon, therefore, had to receive the Indian deputations, as well as to superintend all the fur traffic with the tribes for the benefit of the proprietor’s estate. He could hardly escape becoming a large landlord by the opportunities thrust into his way in the routine of his duties.
However, the mere acquirement of riches was not gratifying to James Greydon. He not only wished to establish his family comfortably in the enjoyments of a large estate, but he cherished even more highly those graces of mind and body, which accompany the love of books and learning.
Consequently, a few years after his establishment in the Colony and his marriage to a daughter of a wealthy merchant, he consolidated his earnings into several large tracts of land between Philadelphia and the settlement of Friends called Germantown. He named the estate “Dorminghurst.”
The mansion was finished in 1728. At the start, the family occupied the beautiful spot for a summer resort. Many times its master rode from Philadelphia on his finely-bred horse to superintend the clearing of fields, the planting of fruit trees and the setting out of rare shrubs for landscape effects. His pride was aroused in laying out and adorning with hemlocks an avenue which was to be the grand approach to his mansion. While out in the wilderness west of the Susquehanna surveying his possessions, the beauty of the native hemlocks amazed him so forcibly that he gathered, with his own hands, one hundred young trees, and upon his return to Dorminghurst in the autumn had them re-planted for the glory of his own handiwork. Hawthorns, walnuts, hazels and fruit trees sent out by William Penn from England found appropriate spots each year for the embellishment of James Greydon’s home.
Nature had provided Dorminghurst with many attractive features. The primeval forest of oaks, elms and maples needed only the exercise of taste and the use of artistic judgment to convert the undulating natural landscapes into lasting impressions of the beautiful. To cull out the obtruding exuberance of the primitive woodland was a triumph of art. To create a vista of the rivulet, Wingohocking, crooking up a little valley, and to present expanding miles of swelling meadows over which grazed sleek cattle, sometimes resting under a lone magnolia or a group of beeches, were passions in the heart of a devotee of Virgil’s Georgics. The sloping of the ground in all directions from the site of the mansion-house allowed the broad avenue between the hemlocks to curve around each side of the buildings. One way a serpentine road descended through a dense wild-wood grove, and then meandered through the gully, giving perspectives or vistas through the shadowy treetops; the other way skirted enclosures for fruits and esculents on one side, and on the other passed broad lawns rising and falling in harmony ’midst the clumps of spruces, pines and firs.
The development of a family seat in the early Colonial times aroused all the latent energies and pride of its founder. All the true domestic instincts found gratification in first choosing a picturesque location and then unfolding plans for landscape gardening. Problems arose. The manufacture of the brick, and the hewing of the timbers, from off the proprietor’s own soil, the construction of a mill on the stream to grind his own grain, and the building of his smoke-house, brew-house, a place for his loom, his dairy, and his ashery, rounded out the domestic economy of a Colonial gentleman.
The realizations of every domestic felicity were found in these establishments. The capital sprung from the soil, and the labor bestowed brought forth bountiful fruits of the earth, which are sweet to all true men. These treasuries of a home and the securities for a future were sounder and more human than an up-to-date gentleman’s commercial assets which are artificial and sometimes of fictitious origin. No market quotations ruined the Colonial home.
After the needs of the home were supplied from the soil, from the spinning-wheel and loom and the dairy and the poultry-yard, the surplus could be traded for the small needs of money. The Colonist was supported by nature’s products direct from the soil; the man of the present is the offspring of artificial institutions of money and of corporations—the slave of vested rights, whose origins have mostly been the unearned increment.
But, aside from the domestic felicity of the Colonial families, the social phases of their lives were no less distinguished than their hospitable homes. After the mansion was built and the servants or slaves well ordered; after the smoke-house was full of meat; after the mill was full of grain; the home-made ale or cider in the cellar; the spinners and weavers busy at the warp and woof; the travelling shoemaker busy at the year’s foot-wear (made from the home-tanned leather), what could deter the natural social proclivities of these people? The cares of an artificial man were unknown. The dames had quilting and spinning-bees, while the men had hunting contests, which were decided by the best filled bags. Entertainment and hospitality shown to house-parties would last for days. The housewives vied with each other to see their husbands and families clothed in the finest textures of their own manufacture. Each household tried to produce the finest ale of its own brewing, and to establish reputations for its cakes, mince pies and doughnuts. The gossip of the neighborhood was exchanged by the housewives; the men traded horses and sheep and swine; they all danced, dined, played games and made merry; so, then, what more could they ask for pleasure?
Dorminghurst grew out of the forest under the influence of a master mind. The mansion was one of those plain, square, two-storied brick structures,—dormer windows for the attic rooms, and a detached kitchen in the rear (connected with the large dining-hall by a covered passageway). The office was built in line of the eastern elevation of the dwelling, and connected with the house by a covered way. The store-house, smoke-house, brew-house and bakery, besides the servants’ quarters and the stables, were all built of brick and formed a quadrangle enclosure and a court in the center. The doors of all buildings were massive oak and secured by the heaviest fastenings of iron. All windows on the ground floor had heavy shutters, and an underground, secret passageway led from the house to a door under the stables. The structures were enclosed thus to guard against Indian attacks.