Part 14

The development of civic institutions in the first quarter of the century was accompanied by the founding, each to-day housed in conspicuous recent edifices of the past decade, of State-aided institutions for the Deaf and Dumb, 1820, for the Blind, 1833, and the House of Refuge, 1828. This philanthropic impulse came, as such generally does, as part of a rapid material development which, in a score of years ending with the commercial crash of 1837-39, had laid the foundations of the manufacturing activity and the internal commerce of Philadelphia. It was in this period that the Music Fund Hall (1824), Eighth above South, was built. The Exchange, 1832, the most pretentious building of its day, was erected near the close of the period, and the pillared row, following a London model, was built on Spruce between Ninth and Tenth, the largest and most costly private dwellings of its day. The next Colonnade row, nearly twenty years later, occupied the site, and gave the name to the Colonnade Hotel, Fifteenth and Chestnut. St. Mark’s and St. Luke’s stood for opposite extremes of the church edifices of the forties. The taste of the Federalists and Whigs of the day filled the city with the pseudo-classic, from which Europe was just departing—the United States bank, now the Custom-house, the Mint, the building in which Girard had his bank, back of the Exchange, and lastly Girard College, not easily forgot, however unfit for its purpose, if once seen from St. George’s hill on its airy height. The ship-building firm of Cramps was established 1830, and Baldwin’s Locomotive Works 1837, both products of the same period of activity. Ten years later began the Pennsylvania railroad comparable to a kingdom in revenue power and the ability of chiefs like Frank Thomson. The city flowed across Broad Street, and solid blocks pushed their way in brick and white marble, turning later to New York’s brown-stone, up each flank of the city on Pine and on Arch, spreading out in an area beyond Broad Street, which the crash of credit, and the failure of the State for a season to pay the interest on its bonds, left tenantless, often roofless, covered with mortgages and the prediction, heard first under Governor Keith, 1725, repeated within this decade, that the city would never need the houses which a boom had erected.

The city of the period before the war had now been built and the suburbs had grown close to the consolidation of 1854. Railroad access had created, across the Schuylkill, the village of Mantua, which was to become West Philadelphia as it extended southward and was reached by new bridges and street-car lines. To the north, just beyond the old British redoubts, factory owners, managers and foremen, mechanics and operatives, with the retailers they required, had built their homes on the higher ground, north of the great industries growing on the low and lightly taxed land, easily accessible by railroads from the coal-fields, beyond the old city limits at Vine, and extending to Callowhill and beyond. This created the city of Spring Garden. The river settlements, the Northern Liberties, Kensington, Richmond, grew under the triple influence of manufacturers and cheap coal, out of the villages whose farm-houses, taverns and mechanics’ dwellings of the early years of the century still dot the raw newer dwellings of the past forty years. Like settlements had grown in Southwark and Manayunk. The gaps and sutures still remain to mark the old divisions. The squalid stretches of South Street from river to river, for nearly a century the resort of cheap stores which sought city trade, and avoided city taxes. The like ragged selvedge along Vine, influenced, too, along much of the line by low, open ground. The gap fringing both banks of the Schuylkill, marking days when the railroad and the Market Street bridge made the more distant uprise of Fortieth Street more accessible than the lower region nearer. The bare and vacant patches about Germantown Junction, over which the old village has never quite grown down to meet the approaching city, where for various reasons of grade, access was not easy, and where institutions like Girard College and the Penitentiary, with a cemetery or two, like rocks in a moving stream, have stopped and divided the glacier-like spread of the city. These things have made Philadelphia, like London, a city of accretions from divers centres, and not, like Paris or New York, a steady, symmetrical and continuous growth from one organic centre.

The war found a city which, united, had more than the area of London (Philadelphia, 82,807 acres; London, 74,692), and at almost every stage of the growth of the two a quarter of the population of the vaster metropolis. Since room is the chief factor in civic comfort, there has never been a year in which the average man has not been just about four times as comfortable in Philadelphia as in London, and he has always had higher wages by a quarter to a half, paid less for food and lodgings, and paid more for clothing, light and coal. He has lived here, a family to a house, where a quarter of London has been a family to two rooms. Most of all, for twenty years past has this growth of the small houses of labor gone on, their number swelling faster than the tale of families seeking them. These conditions, secured by a wise civic policy early in the century, had reached the full development, which they have since maintained, at the opening of the war. Inexpressibly dull was the extension the city now made, the dreary reaches of homes, which oppress the stranger west of Eleventh Street, and appear in unvarying blocks on the North and South Streets, the building operations of the ’40s and ’50s, in whose even rows were the last, worst expression of the dull, utilitarian spirit of the pre-war, pre-centennial period. Napoleon LeBrun built the Cathedral and the Academy of Music, a brick shell holding a shapely and grandiose interior, and Walton and McArthur added to the pseudo-classic. When the Jayne Block went up on Chestnut, east of Third, it was believed to be the largest single business building yet erected on the continent. The Girard, 1852, was one of its largest hotels, and echoed the Italian palace front which Barry had taught London in his Reform Club.

[Illustration: THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

STATE HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA.]

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.]