Let it be remembered that at this time Philadelphia, and even the world, were as yet to a great degree in the Middle Ages as compared to the present day. We had few steamboats, and no railroads, or telephones, or percussion-caps, or a tremendous press, or Darwinism, or friction matches. Even the introduction of ice-cream, and stone coal as fuel, and grates was within the memory of our elders. Apropos of matches, the use of tinderbox and brimstone matches was universal; bold young men had tinder pistols; but the wood fire was generally kept under ashes all night, and I can well remember how our negro servants, when it had gone out, were used early on winter mornings to borrow a shovelful of coals from the cook of our next-door neighbour, and how it was handed over the garden fence, the recipient standing on our pump handle and the donor on hers.
I forget in what year the railroad (with locomotives) was first built from Philadelphia to Columbia, a distance of sixty miles. I believe it was the first real road of the kind in America. On the day when the first train ran, the City Council and certain honoured guests made the journey, and among them was my father, who took me with him. There were only a few miles of the road then completed. It was a stupendous marvel to me, and all this being drawn by steam,
and by a great terrible iron monster of a machine. And there was still in all souls a certain unearthly awe of the recently invented and as yet rather rare steamboats. I can (strangely enough) still recall this feeling by a mental effort—this meeting the Horror for the first time! My father remembered, and had been in the first steamboat which was a success on the Delaware. I saw its wreck in after years at Hoboken. The earlier boat made by John Fitch is still preserved in Bordentown.
I can remember that when gas was introduced to light the city, it was done under a fearful opposition. All the principal people signed a petition against it. I saw the paper. It would burst and kill myriads; it was poisonous; and, finally, it would ruin the oil trade. However, we got it at last. Somebody had invented hand gas-lamps; they were sold in the Arcade; and as one of these had burst, it was naturally supposed that the gasworks would do the same.
The characteristics of old Philadelphia were in those days so marked, and are, withal, so sweet to the memory, that I cannot help lingering on them. As Washington Irving says of the Golden Age of Wouter van Twiller, “Happy days when the harvest moon was twice as large as now, when the shad were all salmon, and peace was in the land.” Trees grew abundantly in rows in almost every street—one before every house. I had two before mine till 1892, when the Street Commissioners heartlessly ordained that one must be cut down and removed, and charged me ten dollars for doing it. It is needless to say that since Street Commissioners have found this so profitable, trees have disappeared with sad rapidity. Then at twilight the pea-ak of the night-hawk could be heard all over Arasapha, which is the Indian name for the place where our city stands; there were in Coaquannoc, or the Schuylkill, abundant gold fish and perch, of which I angled divers. Yes, there was, and still is, a Fisher Club, which claims to be the oldest gentleman’s club in Anglo-Saxony, and which has for two centuries brewed for itself a
“fish-house punch” as delicious as that of London civic banquets. There be no fish in the fair river now; they have all vanished before the combined forces of petroleum and the offal of factories and mines, but the Fish-House Club still has its merry banquets in its ancient home; for, as the French say, “Chacun péche à sa manière.” In graveyards lone or over gardens green glittered of summer nights millions of fireflies; there was the scent of magnolias, roses, pinks, and honeysuckles by every house; for Philadelphians have always had a passion for flowers, and there never was a Quaker, much less a Quakeress, who has not studied botany, and wandered in Bartram’s Garden and culled blue gentians in the early fall, or lilies wild in Wissahickon’s shade. There still remains a very beautiful relic of this olden time in the old Swedes Church, which every stranger should visit. It is a quaint structure of more than two hundred years, and in its large churchyard (which is not, like Karamsin’s graves, “deserted and drear,” but charming and garden-like) one can imagine himself in rural England.
In the spring of the year there was joyous activity on the Delaware, even in town; for, as the song hath it—
“De fishin’ time hab come at last,
De winter all am gone and past;”
and there was the casting of immense seines and the catching of myriads of shad, the typical fish or emblem of the Quaker Philadelphian, because in the profile outline of the shad people professed to discern the form according to which the Quaker coat was cut. With the shad were many herring, and now and then a desperate giant of a sturgeon, who in his struggles would give those concerned enough to do. Then the yells of the black fishermen, the flapping of the horny knife-backed prey—often by the flashing of a night-fire—formed a picture worthy of Rembrandt. Apropos of these sturgeon, the fresh caviare or roe (which has been pronounced at St. Petersburg to surpass the Russian) was always thrown
away, as was often the case with sweetbreads, which were rarely eaten. But if the caviare or roe was really in those days “caviare to the general” multitude, the nose of the fish was not, it being greatly coveted by us small boys wherewith to make a ball for “shinny,” which for some occult reason was preferred to any other. Old people of my acquaintance could remember when seals had been killed at Cape May below the city, and how on one or two occasions a bewildered whale of no small dimensions had found its way to Burlington, some miles above.