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Read Ebook: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 11 No. 25 April 1873 by Various
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Ebook has 747 lines and 74111 words, and 15 pages
WILMINGTON AND ITS INDUSTRIES.
THE ROUMI IN KABYLIA.
SECOND PAPER.
A CHINESE STORY, by C.P. CRANCH.
BERRYTOWN, by REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.
THE GLACIERS OF PARADISE, by HJALMAR HJARTH BOYESEN.
THACKERAY'S "GRAY FRIARS," by AN OLD "GOWN-BOY."
A PRINCESS OF THULE, by WILLIAM BLACK.
MEDICAL EXPERT EVIDENCE, by H.C. WOOD, JR., M.D.
THE SWEET WATERS, by EDWIN DE LEON.
MADEMOISELLE STYLITES, by MARGARET VANDEGRIFT.
THE MYSTERY OF MASSABIELLE, by WILLIAM D. WOOD.
BENEDICTION, by HOWARD GLYNDON.
A NIGHT IN BEDFORD, VIRGINIA, by RICHARD B. ELDER.
OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
THE WELLESLEY-POLES.
THE FATE OF DANGAN CASTLE.
INTERVIEWING CAPTAIN KIDD.
A DINNER EXCUSE.
NOTES.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
SHIP IN DRY-DOCK: HARLAN & HOLLINGSWORTH COMPANY.
WILMINGTON D?P?T OF THE PHILADELPHIA, WILMINGTON AND BALTIMORE RAILROAD.
THE BRANDYWINE, AND LEA'S MILLS.
IRON SHIP-BUILDING AND MACHINE-WORKS--P. 378.
CHRISTINE CREEK WITH THE DIAMOND STATE WORKS.
PLATE-IRON ROLLING-MILLS--P. 379.
MOROCCO-MAKING FACTORY.--P. 381.
COACH-BUILDING ESTABLISHMENT.--P. 381
STEAM MANUFACTORY OF SUPERPHOSPHATES.
FAUKLAND, THE SITE OF OLIVER EVANS'S MILL.
BRANDYWINE SPRINGS, ON REDCLAY CREEK.
HOUSE OF MR. J.T. HEALD.
D?P?T OF THE WILMINGTON AND WESTERN RAILROAD.
CHRISTINE RIVER, WITH WILMINGTON AND WESTERN RAILROAD BRIDGE.
CUTTING THROUGH CUBA HILL RIDGE.
VIEW OF THE WILMINGTON WHARVES.
FROM CONSTANTINA TO SETIF.
MOUNTAIN ARABS.
AN ARAB DOUAR.
THE WASHERWOMEN.
THE STONE TURBAN.
BOU-KTEUN.
TOBRIZ, AN ENEMY OF THE GUILLOTINE.
THE IRON GATES.
WILMINGTON AND ITS INDUSTRIES.
Sleepy travelers on the great route to Washington, having passed Philadelphia and expecting Baltimore, are attracted, if it is a way-train, by a phenomenon. The engine is observed to slacken, and a little elderly man with a lantern, looking in the twilight like an Arabian Night's phantom with one red eye in the middle of its body, places himself just in advance of the locomotive. He trots nimbly along, defending himself from incessant death by the sureness of his legs, and after a long race guides up to the station the clattering train, which is all the time threatening to catch him by the heel. "Wilmington!" shouts the brakesman. Every train into Wilmington is thus attended, as the palfrey of an Eastern pasha by the running footman. The man's life is passed in a perpetual race with destruction, and having beaten innumerable locomotives, he still survives, contentedly wagging his crimson eye, and hardly conscious that his existence is a perpetual escape.
Something quaint, peremptory, old-world and feudal strikes the traveler as adhering in this custom, by which Wilmington constantly pays for the general safety of her promenaders with the offering of a citizen's life and limbs. This impression is right. The city is the best-defined spot on the American map where the South begins and the North ends. Wilmington is, for its own part, a perfect crystal of Yankee grit, run out and fixed in a country which in the highest degree represents the soft, contented, lazy, incoherent Bourbon temper. We select it for our subject because it is so complete a terminal image. There is no other instance in the country of such sharp, close contrast. A man might step out to the city limit, and stand with one leg in full Yankeeland, thrilling with enterprise and emulation, and the other planted, as it were, in the "Patriarchal Times." Elsewhere along the effaced line of Mason and Dixon the sections die away into each other: here they stand face to face, and stare.
Shall we take a glance at a historic mill? The best location for such a structure where water-power just met tide-water, and shallops drawing eight feet could load up at the shore, was selected in 1762 for mill-buildings which still stand, and which were for many years the most famous in the country, regulating the price of grain for the United States. The business soon overflowed, and necessitated the building, in 1770, of the structures represented in the engraving on page 371, the whole group, on the two sides of the stream, being under one ownership, and known as "Lea's Brandywine Mills." Hither would come the long lines of Conestoga wagons, from distant counties, such as Dauphin and Berks, with fat horses, and wagoners persuading them by means of biblical oaths jabbered in Pennsylvania Dutch. From these mills Washington removed the runners , lest they should be seized and used by the British, hauling them up into Chester county. When independence was secured the State of Delaware hastened to pass laws putting foreign trade on a more liberal footing than the neighbor commonwealths, thus securing for her mills the enviable commerce with the West Indies. Much shipping was thus attracted to Wilmington, and the trade with Cuba in corn-meal was particularly large. It was found, however, that the flour of maize invariably rotted in a tropical voyage, and thereupon the commodity known as kiln-dried corn was invented at the Brandywine Mills: two hundred bushels would be dried per day on brick floors, and be thought a large amount, though the "pan-kiln" now in use dries two thousand in the same time. The dried meal was delivered at Havana perfectly fresh, and pay received, in those good old days of barter, in Jamaica rum, sugar and coffees. In the old times flour was heaped in the barrels and patted down with wooden shovels: then, when full, a cloth was laid over the top, and the fattest journeyman on the premises clambered up to a seat on the heap, to "cheese it down" and imprint his callipyge upon it. Flour thus made and branded was always safe to bring a high price, but never so high as in the short epoch of the Continental currency, when the old entries of the Brandywine Mill books show wheat bought at twenty-four pounds a bushel, a pair of the miller's leather small-clothes at eighty pounds, and some three or four hundred barrels of his flour charged at a gross sum of twenty-one thousand pounds.
Such is a specimen of one of the stout old industries of a hundred years ago, still surviving and hale as ever, though out of its former proportion amongst the immense enterprises of modern days. This article, however, must pass out of the atmosphere of ancient tradition as quickly as possible, being intended to show the handsome city of Wilmington with its sleeves rolled up as it were, and in the thick of the hardest work belonging to the nineteenth century. When steam was introduced to revolutionize labor, and railroads came to supplement water-transport, they found the manufacturers of this prosperous town ready to avail themselves of every improvement, and pass at once from the chrysalis state into the soaring development of modern enterprise.
That is a feature the citizens point out with a good deal of honest pride--the prosperity of the old families, enabling them at once to invest in the most enormous of modern mechanical applications. The wealthy companies now found here did not go to work by calling for capital from the large cities: they went to the old stocking, and found it there. The manufacturers show you, reared in a back office or sticking on a wall, the ancient family sign, which Washington and La Fayette regarded at the time of their disasters along the Brandywine. It is one continuity of thrift.
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