WILMINGTON AND ITS INDUSTRIES.
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."