Part 15

Notwithstanding the erection of the new church, the community seems to have grown away from the scene of the original landing, until in 1731 Thomas Willing, son-in-law of Andrew Justison, of Swedish blood, laid out upon the Christiana front, half a mile from the Rocks, a new town modelled upon the rectangular plan of Philadelphia. The first house in Willingstown, built at the corner of Front and Market streets, bore in its brick gable a stone with the inscription, “J. W. S., 1732.” Three years later the place was only a small hamlet, but in that year Willingstown had a new birth, for then William Shipley, a wealthy, well educated and energetic English Friend of Ridley in Pennsylvania, came to the place and made himself, so to speak, its second founder. He came through the influence of his second wife, Elizabeth Lewis, a preacher of his own sect, who saw in a vision a goodly land lying at the foot of a hill and traversed by two rivers, one wild and dashing, the other sluggish and serpentine, and visiting by accident the region of the Swedish settlement on the Christiana, recognized the landscape of her vision.

William Shipley built his house—an admirable example of eighteenth-century brickwork—at the corner of Fourth and Shipley streets, where it recently gave place to a modern business building. He built, also, a market-house for the town at the corner of Fourth and Market streets, and in doing so, paved the way for a quarrel with the partisans of the Second Street market-house, a body of citizens including many Swedes.

So potent was the magic of William Shipley’s presence that in four years the town had reached six hundred inhabitants. Next year it received a borough charter from Penn, and its name was changed to Wilmington, in honor of Lord Wilmington, says Ebeling, the German historian. It was a tight little borough, the Wilmington of that day and of fifteen or twenty years later. The burgesses, who at first met about in taverns, at length were comfortably housed in a neat little Town Hall built upon arches over one end of the Second Street market. There were fairs during most of the eighteenth century; fairs to which hundreds came in holiday attire and dancing shoes to make merry to the sound of bagpipe, flute, fiddle and trombone. It is significant of grave Quaker austerity, perhaps, that the fairs were suppressed by act of Legislature in 1785, as nurseries of vice, a scandal to religion, and an offence to well ordered persons. There may have been some excuse for this severity, for indeed with the coming of the English had come something of the brutality of eighteenth-century English manners. Bullies fought naked to the waist in the market-place, and hired ruffians nearly cut down the posts that supported William Shipley’s market-house. The most picturesque modern survival of Wilmington in the eighteenth century is the King Street open-air market, and with it remains the statute against forestalling, made to meet the case of some early monopolist.

[Illustration: SHIPLEY BUILDING.]

Wilmington’s Quaker peace was little disturbed by echoes of European wars in the eighteenth century, though in 1741 the Christiana was fortified against possible Spanish pirates; but when the war of the Revolution came, Wilmington was loyal and ready. Old folk still preserve the tradition of Washington’s presence in the city just before the battle of the Brandywine, of his gay French officers in the sober house of a Quaker citizen, of President John McKinly’s capture at midnight by a detachment of British sent in after the battle, of the British wounded crowding the houses of citizens and probably saving the town from bombardment by British ships of war in the Delaware. Tradition recalls, too, the visit of Washington in his hour of victory, when he journeyed homeward to Mount Vernon, of his other visit on his journey northward to be inaugurated as President at New York, and of still another visit in 1791, when he made his famous progress through the country. On that last visit, riding in his chariot of state through little Brandywine village, opposite Wilmington, on the left bank of the Brandywine, he stopped at the house of miller Joseph Tatnall, to learn that he was at the mill, and then, with those great strides of his, walked through the village street to the edge of the stream, entered the mill, and talked with the courageous patriot Quaker of his services to the army during the war.

[Illustration: OLD FRIENDS’ MEETING-HOUSE.]

By this time the borough had travelled far from the crudity of Swedish days and had even departed somewhat from the severity of Quaker tradition. There were French emigrants from the black terror in Santo Domingo, and from the red terror in France. There were soon to be other French immigrants,—Du Ponts, bringing a mingled flavor of aristocracy, learning and benevolence, destined to found great factories and to give patriot soldiers and sailors to the land of their adoption, and yet to retain even to the fifth generation the Gallic face, and air, and manner.

Wealth and elegance were come to the little community on the Minquas. Had not Robert Montgomery made the tour of Europe, and did he not for four months during the plague of yellow fever at Philadelphia entertain Governor McKean of Pennsylvania? Did not another wealthy citizen entertain one hundred refugees of the same period? And there was Gunning Bedford, Jr., _aide-de-camp_ and friend to Washington, inheritor of his crimson satin Masonic sash, his appointee as first Federal Judge for the District of Delaware. He and his wife, a Read of distinguished colonial stock, entertained friend and stranger with splendid hospitality in the very house in Market Street that had been the headquarters of Washington’s French officers. The Bedfords were Presbyterians. Gunning Bedford, Jr., worshipped in the quaint little First Presbyterian Church in Market Street near Tenth, now reverently preserved and occupied by the Delaware Historical Society. Hard by in the churchyard you may see Judge Bedford’s tomb, a low but graceful domed shaft facing the public street, so that all may read the lesson of civic virtue, and bearing an inscription that closes thus:

“His form was goodly, his temper amiable, His manners winning, and his discharge Of private duties exemplary.

“Reader, may his example stimulate you to improve the talents—be they five, or two, or one—with which God has entrusted you.”

Wilmington built her new Town Hall just a century ago last year, and Friend Joseph Tatnall gave the clock that shone in its tower and told the hours. The clock went out of use more than thirty years ago, but the building remains, not altogether spoiled by modern additions, sacred because of its associations, and testifying to the solidity with which the city fathers built in the last century.

[Illustration: HOUSE OF THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.]

When the City Hall was built Penn’s charter, unamended, still served the community, and continued to serve until 1809, when it was amended and the borough limits were enlarged. The town was yet merely a borough when the War of 1812 came on, and Senator James A. Bayard, the first of four Bayards to represent Delaware in the United States Senate, helped with his own hands to build a fort almost upon the site of Fort Christina. A city charter came in 1832. The mayor was elected for three years by the city council, and the first mayor chosen was Richard H. Bayard.

Wilmington as the intellectual centre of the State was naturally also the home of radical thought. Quaker sentiment had sunk deep into the community. An anti-slavery society was organized early. A great meeting at the Town Hall in 1820 adopted resolutions against the extension of slavery into the territories. Sam Townsend, a picturesque and characteristic figure in the mid-century politics of the State, was amazed and horrified to find that his brother, home after a week’s visit to Wilmington, had returned with a tincture of abolitionism. Sam and his neighbors labored with the erring one, but could not meet his arguments against holding one’s fellow-men in bondage until Sam bethought him to deny the humanity of the negro, and thus snatched the brother as a brand from the burning.

[Illustration: CITY HALL.]

Wilmington was a station on the “underground railroad,” and Thomas Garrett, a Quaker of Pennsylvanian birth, was the station-master—a man of prudence but of dauntless courage, who, left penniless at sixty by reason of a fine imposed upon him for violation of the Fugitive Slave Law, declared upon the court-house steps in his peculiar lisp: “I did it; I’m glad I did it; and I’d do it again.” The Civil War came too soon for him, he said, for he had hoped to help away three thousand slaves, and had stopped at two thousand seven hundred.

[Illustration: NEWCASTLE COUNTY COURT HOUSE.]

The conflict found Wilmington a little city of rough-cobbled streets, the metropolis of a small surrounding territory, visited daily by country folk, who drove twelve or fifteen miles,—came “to town,” as the phrase went,—and having made their purchases, drove home, whipping in dread past “Folly Woods,” since the days of Sandy Flash a place of evil reputation. The firing upon Fort Sumter stirred the community to its depths, and the city lost no time in sending to the front more than her quota of volunteers. Flags fluttered out all over the city. Barbers made haste to add to their poles a third stripe, a blue one, in token of loyalty. Amid all the enthusiasm it was a time of acrid bitterness, for Delaware was a border State with citizens holding openly or secretly opinions of many shades other than that recognized as true blue. There were reported sullen threats of incendiarism on the part of the disaffected; there were many arrests of the disloyal, and stubborn but entirely conscientious men, who would not take the oath of allegiance and were imprisoned or publicly shamed. It was no time for a nice weighing of motives, and the fires of the war-time hatreds were nearly a generation in cooling. The city came out of the war chastened by sorrow and pained by bitter contention, but ready for a newer and broader life. She has since grown to 70,000 people. Her boundaries have been extended to the Delaware; her factories have vastly increased in volume and variety. Miles of territory have been covered with new homes. Water-works, sewers and parks have been created. New Castle, the old Dutch capital of New Amstel, has yielded up the court-house to Wilmington, but has held on to the whipping-post, as perhaps not quite in keeping with the modern mood of the city. But in spite of growth and change the old Quaker spirit, the ineradicable instinct of sobriety and decency, remains along with the Swedish and Dutch names two and a half centuries ago. When the hush of evening falls upon the city and the crowds have melted from the sidewalks, then in the dusk of the deserted streets one may easily imagine the distinguished William Shipley and the gracious Elizabeth, the grin of broad-faced Dutchmen fresh from the harrowing of Swen Schute, the spectral figures of tow-haired Swedish farmers, or the grave, black-clad form of Pastor Torkillius with solemn eyes bent upon wondering peasant lads and lasses.

[Illustration: SEAL OF THE CITY OF WILMINGTON.]

[Illustration]

BUFFALO

“THE QUEEN CITY OF THE LAKES”

BY ROWLAND B. MAHANY

Few cities of the United States have a history more picturesque than Buffalo, or more typical of the forces that have made the Republic great. At the time of the adoption of the Federal constitution, in 1787, not a single white settler dwelt on the site of what is now the Queen of the Lakes; and it was not until after the second presidency of Washington, that Joseph Ellicott, the founder of Buffalo, laid out the plan of the town, which he called New Amsterdam. Ellicott was a man of great ability, force and foresight, and with prophetic vision he saw the future importance of the city, which is now the fourth commercial entrepôt of the world. He had been the assistant of his brother, Andrew Ellicott, the first Surveyor General of the United States; and the two brothers, together with General Washington,—himself an engineer by profession,—had collaborated with Captain Pierre Charles L’Enfant the plan of the National Capital. With the beautiful design of Washington City fresh in his mind, Joseph Ellicott gave to the village of New Amsterdam a similar system of radiating broad avenues, embracing in the territory they enclosed rectangular systems of streets. The avenues were 99 feet in width and the streets 66 feet. The surveys were begun in 1798 and completed in 1805. Indirectly, therefore, Buffalo is indebted to President Washington for some of its topographical features.

[Illustration: JOSEPH ELLICOTT.

FOUNDER OF BUFFALO.]

The early history of the village is not unlike that of most of our inland cities which have grown from conditions common to the Canadian and to the western frontier; and differs, perhaps, chiefly in this regard, that owing to the natural advantages of the town’s situation and its proximity to the great cataract of Niagara Falls, its annals are rich with instances of exploration, of war and of romance; for adventure and enterprise met here at the beginning of the century.

The period when the Mohawks, the Eries, the Hurons, the Tuscaroras, the Neuters (so called because they were a peaceful tribe) and the Senecas were the sole possessors of this region was succeeded by the epoch of the French traders, whose business was in turn absorbed by their Dutch competitors. These gave way to the alert descendants of New England, who yielded back again the supremacy to a group of Dutch capitalists, composing the Holland Land Company, whose first agent was Joseph Ellicott.

The primitive scenery of Buffalo must have been almost incomparable in its beauty. The wooded hills, the fertile plains, the superb river and the mighty lake enchanted alike the savage and the civilized beholder. Even now, when commerce has invaded the loveliness of the prospect by investing one of the greatest harbors in the world with a fortress of elevators and crowding it with a forest of masts, artists and tourists unite in saying that the Buffalo sunsets are not rivalled anywhere save by those on the Bay of Naples.

In 1806, the first schoolhouse was built on the corner of Swan and Pearl streets,—the humble pioneer of an educational system that now embraces sixty modern grammar schools, three collegiate High Schools, and innumerable independent and private institutions of learning. Notable among these latter is the Le Couteulx Asylum for the instruction of the deaf and dumb. This beneficent institution owes its origin to the liberality of the Le Couteulx family. Louis Stephen Le Couteulx de Caumont, a Norman-French gentleman of station and culture, was the founder of the family in Buffalo. He came to New Amsterdam in 1804.

On February 10, 1810, the “Town of Buffaloe” was created by an act of the legislature. This was the name originally given to the settlement by the Senecas, and there is little doubt that it was derived from the visits of the bison to the neighboring salt-licks. However that may be, the village of New Amsterdam was merged in 1810 into the town of Buffalo.

[Illustration: LAFAYETTE SQUARE.]

With the disappearance of the Dutch appellation of the town, vanished also the Dutch nomenclature of the streets. Van Staphorst and Willink Avenues were connected and called Main Street; Stadinzky Avenue, a name suggestive of the Polish element that later was to swell in such numbers the population of the city, became Church Street; Niagara Street succeeded Schimmelpennick Avenue; and Vollenhoven Avenue was changed into Erie Street.

The origin of some of Buffalo’s thoroughfares is interesting and amusing. Utica Street was formerly a lane on the old Hodge farm, and led from the Cold Spring region to the Elmwood Avenue district. The people using it, however, were very careless about closing the gates, and this so irritated Mr. Hodge that he locked the gates and closed the lane. An indignation meeting was called in the little schoolhouse at Cold Spring. The schoolmaster was the chief speaker, and unless tradition does violence to his grammar, the principal part of his speech consisted of the declaration that “them Hodges is maintainin’ a ‘pent-up Uticky.’” When Mr. Hodge heard of the meeting, he relented and offered to give the people the lane on condition that the town government would lay out a street. The offer was accepted and the new thoroughfare was called Utica Street in commemoration of the schoolmaster’s speech.

The inevitable newspaper appeared on the 3d of October, 1811, when the Buffalo _Gazette_ issued its first number. The _Gazette_ was the forerunner of journals which to-day recognize as their only competitors the Metropolitan press.

On the 26th of June, 1812, the tidings of war with Great Britain reached Buffalo, and on August 13th the first gun of the struggle is said to have been fired by the battery at Black Rock, then a rival, now a suburb, of Buffalo. The excitement was intense; for all recognized that the growing town, because of its frontier situation, was sure to be one of the theatres of hostilities. Nor was this a mistaken idea, as subsequent events proved. Immediately after the declaration of war, the British soldiers from the Canadian garrison at Fort Erie, directly across the river from Buffalo, made an incursion, and captured the schooner _Connecticut_, at anchor in the Buffalo Creek. This humiliation, however, was more than wiped out by the daring exploit of Lieutenant Jesse D. Elliott, U. S. N., who, on October 9, 1812, crossed the river, and boldly attacked two vessels lying under the guns of Fort Erie. One of these, the _Detroit_, of six guns, had been captured by the British at the surrender of that town; the other was the _Caledonia_, of two guns. With a loss of two killed and five wounded, Elliott’s force captured both vessels and took prisoners, officers and men, to the number of seventy-one. Forty-seven American prisoners taken by the British at the River Raisin, were released by Elliott. The _Detroit_ was carried down the stream when the cables were cut, and ran aground on Squaw Island. The British opened a lively cannonading from the Canadian shore and attempted to recapture the vessel, but were driven off by the Americans, who, unable to float it, burned it to the water’s edge. For his brilliant coup, Lieutenant Elliott was voted a sword of honor by Congress.

[Illustration: A GLIMPSE OF BUFFALO HARBOR.]

One great advantage the British possessed early in the war was their superiority on the Lakes. The _Queen Charlotte_, of twenty-two guns, the _Hunter_, of twelve guns, and a small armed schooner patrolled the Erie coast-line in the neighborhood of Buffalo, and kept the inhabitants of the region in a constant state of fear and excitement. To remedy this disadvantage, the Government, in the spring of 1813, sent Captain Oliver Hazard Perry to fit out a war fleet at Erie, Pennsylvania. He arrived in Buffalo in March, and thence proceeded to his destination. The Government had purchased a number of merchant craft, and these he immediately began converting into men-of-war. Some new vessels also were built. Five gunboats were fitted out at Buffalo on Scajaquada Creek. On September 10, 1813, Perry, with an inferior force, both in the number of men and guns, gave battle to the British and captured or destroyed their entire fleet. This victory was not only the most notable of the war, but is one of the most conspicuous in our naval history. In the midst of the battle Perry’s ship was sunk, and he left it in an open boat, and, under the fire of the enemy, went to another vessel of his fleet, whence he directed the operations that rendered the battle of Lake Erie an illustrious triumph for American arms.

In a few months, however, the exultation of Buffalo’s citizens was turned into mourning through the burning of the town by the British. On the 29th of December, General Riall, with twelve hundred men, regulars, militia and Indians, landed below Scajaquada Creek, and owing to the confusion which prevailed in the councils of the local military commanders, captured the town with little difficulty. The inhabitants had fled, and every dwelling, with one or two exceptions, was given over to the flames. Mrs. St. John and two of her daughters remained to protect their house, and owing to the chivalry of Colonel Elliott, the commander of the Indians, neither the ladies nor their household possessions were molested. Mrs. Joshua Lovejoy, who also remained in her home, where the Tifft House now stands, was imprudent enough to have an altercation with the Indians, and was slain by one of them. Her house was burned, and her dead body with it.

On the withdrawal of the British, the citizens returned from their flight, bringing back with them such household goods as they had gathered together on their hasty departure, and forthwith the rebuilding of Buffalo commenced. The American loss in the engagement preceding the capture of the town was heavy. Between forty and fifty of our troops were killed, as many more wounded, and about ninety prisoners were carried off by the victors. From all these reverses the people of the little town measurably recovered in the succeeding five or six months. On April 10, 1814, Brigadier-General Winfield Scott came to Buffalo, and shortly after, Major-General Brown arrived. The preparations for an advance on the Canadian position were pushed forward as rapidly as possible, and on July 3d the movement began. Three brigades,—two of regulars, one of volunteers,—accompanied by a few Indians, crossed the river, and captured Fort Erie. Thence proceeding down the Canadian bank, they engaged the enemy at Chippewa on July 5th, and won a decisive victory.

The Americans wore temporary uniforms of gray, and it was in honor of the conspicuous gallantry displayed by our troops in this conflict that gray was adopted as the uniform for the West Point cadets.

[Illustration: ST. PAUL’S CHURCH.]

The volunteer brigade was commanded by General Peter B. Porter, for many years a member of Congress from Erie County, and afterwards Secretary of War for a brief period under John Quincy Adams. General Porter distinguished himself also in the battle of Lundy’s Lane, and throughout the war gained such reputation for valor, skill and eloquence, that to him has been assigned the credit of being the pioneer in organizing the volunteer system of the American Army.

During all this war the famous Seneca chief, Red Jacket, took an active

## part in behalf of the Americans, and though he had little love for the

white men on either side of the controversy, still his influence was cast in favor of those who were the neighbors and friends of his people. Innumerable anecdotes are told of the wisdom, oratory and dignity of the great sachem, and a later generation has raised in Forest Lawn Cemetery an imposing statue to his memory.

After the battle of Chippewa, General Riall, the British commander, retreated to Queenstown, and thence to Fort George, the Americans in pursuit. The British, however, were reinforced and General Brown decided to return to Fort Erie. Riall, in turn, pursued. On July 25th the contending forces met near Lundy’s Lane, and one of the most fiercely fought battles of the war followed. The conflict began a little before nightfall, and raged until nearly ten o’clock, when the Americans held undisputed possession of the field. General Riall and one hundred and sixty-eight prisoners were captured. Both General Brown and General Scott were wounded, as was also Captain Worth, afterwards famous in the Mexican War.