USA > Pennsylvania > Philadelphia County > Philadelphia > Annals of Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania in the olden time; being a collection of the memoirs, anecdotes, and incidents of the earliest settlements of the inland part of Pennsylvania, Vol. I > Part 48
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Mr. Edward Duffield tells me that when he was a boy he saw the vosters of the whole county giving in their votes at Clarke's Inn. On that occasion he saw the whole crowd put in commotion by an accident which befel a horse there. He had been hitched to a fence, and in pulling backward fell into a concealed and covered well of water ; after being got up once he fell down a second time, and was again recovered-strange to tell-without injury! Such a covered and concealed well, of excellent water too, was lately discovered near there in the garden of Jacob Ridgway.
After the Revolution the inn was known as the "Half Moon," by Mr. Hassell ; and much its attractions were increased by the charms of his only daughter Norah, " passing fair," who drew after her the Oglebies of the day.
* Since penning the above publication, " La Fayette in America," Vol. 2, page 232 speaks with much commendation of such a box given to General La Fayette.
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Washington Square.
WASHINGTON SQUARE.
THIS beautiful square, now so much the resort of citizens and strangers, as a promenade, was, only twenty-five years ago, a " Potter's Field," in which were seen numerous graves, generally the recepta- cles of the poor, and formerly of the criminals from the prison. It was long enclosed in a post and rail fence, and always produced much grass. It was not originally high and level as now, but a de- scending ground, from the western side to a deep gulley which tra- versed it in a line from Doctor Wilson's large church to the mouth of the present tunnel on Sixth street below Walnut street. Another course of water came from the north-west, from beyond Arch street, falling into the same place. The houses on the street, along the south side of the square, were but a few years ago as miserable and deformed a set of negro huts and sheds as could be well imagined.
In the centre of the square was an enclosed ground, having a brick wall of about forty feet square, in which had been interred members of Joshua Carpenter's and the Story families, caused by the circum- stance of a female of the former family having been interred there for suicide-a circumstance which excluded her from burial in the common church grounds of the city. There was an apple tree in the centre, under which Mr. Carpenter was buried.
Those who remembered the place long before my recollections, knew it when the whole place was surrounded by a privet-hedge, where boys used to go and cut bow-sticks, for shooting of arrows. Timothy Matlack remembered it as early as the year 1745 to '50, and used then to go to a pond where is now the site of the Presby- terian church, to shoot wild ducks. A. J. Morris, at the same period, remembered when a water-course, starting from Arch street near Tenth street, traversed High street under a small bridge at Tenth street, and thence ran south-eastward through the Washington Square, thence by the line of the present tunnel under the prison, by Beek's Hollow, into Dock creek, by Girard's Bank. The late aged Hayfield Conyngham, Esq., when he was young, caught fish of six inches in length in the above mentioned water-course, within the present square. Another aged person told me of his often walk- ing up the brook, barefooted, in the water, and catching crayfish.
There was a deep gulley from the end of the tunnel, to which a floodgate was fixed by the commissioners, so as to retain the water in the hollow basin then in the field at that place, and when a large quantity was gathered after a great rain, it was all let off suddenly, so as to drive out and cleanse the tunnel. There used to be two or three small frame houses on the north-east corner, near the jail, after
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Washington Square.
wards used by the commissioners as stables for the horses of the din carts. Up Walnut street, nigh the corner of Eighth street, was a row of red painted frame houses ; in 1784-5 they were the nearest houses to Schuylkill.
It was the custom for the slave blacks, at the time of fairs and other great holidays, to go there to the number of one thousand, of both sexes, and hold their dances, dancing after the manner of their several nations in Africa, and speaking and singing in their native dialects, thus cheerily amusing themselves over the sleeping dust below! An aged lady, Mrs. H. S., has told me she has often seen the Guinea negroes, in the days of her youth, going to the graves of their friends early in the morning, and there leaving them victuals and rum!
In the time of the war of independence the place was made awful by the numerous interments of the dying soldiers destroyed by the camp fever. Pits of twenty by thirty feet square were dug along the line of Walnut street by Seventh street, which were closed by coffins piled one upon another until filled up; and along the south- ern line long trenches, the whole width of the square, were dug at once, and filled up as the voracious grave required its victims. A letter of John Adams, of the 13th April, 1777, says, " I have spent an hour this morning in the congregation of the dead. I took a walk into the 'Potter's Field,' (a burying place between the new stone prison and the hospital,) and I never in my whole life was so affected with melancholy. The graves of the soldiers who have been buried in this ground from the hospital and bettering-house during the course of last summer, fall and winter, dead of the small por and camp diseases, are enough to make the heart of stone to melt away! The sexton told me that upwards of two thousand soldiers had been buried there, and by the appearance of the graves and trenches, it is most probable to me that he speaks within bounds. To what cause this plague is to be attributed, I don't know-disease has destroyed ten men for us where the sword of the enemy has killed one! We have at last determined on a plan for the sick, and have called into the service the best abilities in physic, &c., that the continent affords." Its final scene, as a Golgotha and ghostly receptacle, occurred in the fever of 1793, after which, the extension of improvements westward induced the City Council to close it against the use of future interments at and after the year 1795.
Some of my cotemporaries will remember the simple-hearted in- nocent Leah, a half-crazed spectre-looking elderly maiden lady, tall and thin, of the Society of Friends. Among her oddities, she some- times used to pass the night, wrapped in a blanket, " between the graves at this place, for the avowed purpose of frightening away the doctors !"
The place was originally patented in 1704-5, under the name of " the Potter's Field," as " a burial ground for strangers," &c. The minutes of Council, in September, 1705, show that the Mayor. Re
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Beek's Hollow.
corder, and persons of various religious denominations, were appoint- ed to wait on the commissioners of property for a public piece of ground for "a burial place for strangers dying in the city." With a run of ninety years it was no wonder it looked well filled!
That it was deemed a good pasture field, is evidenced by the fact of its being rented by the council for such a purpose. A minute of council of 14th April, 1766, is to this effect : "The lease of Potter's Field to Jacob Shoemaker having expired, it is agreed to lease it to Jasper Carpenter for seven years, (to the year 1773,) at ten pounds per annum."
It was begun as a public walk in the year 1815, under the plan of G. Bridport, and executed under the direction of George Vaux, Esq. It has from sixty to seventy varieties of trees, mostly of native growth. In a few years more they will have extended their shade in admirable beauty, and those who may exercise beneath their branches will no longer remember those " whelmed in pits and for- gotten! "
BEEK'S HOLLOW.
THIS was the familiar name of ground descending into a brook or run, which traversed Walnut street a little above Fourth street, in the line of the present tunnel, called after a resident owner near the place of the intersecting streets. Before the tunnel was constructed it was an open watercourse coming from the present Washington square, crossing under Fourth street above Walnut street by an arch, and out to Dock creek by the way of the present Girard's Bank.
Many men, are still living who remember it as an open, deep and sluggish stream, from Walnut street near the present Scotch Presby- terian church, in a line towards the corner of Library street and Fourth street-then a vacant commons there. In proof of the low ground once there it may be said, that when they were digging the cellar for the house No. 73, South Fourth street, western side, below Library street, at the depth of nine feet they came to an old post and rail fence !
I can myself remember, when, a little westward of the brook, on the north side of Walnut street, there stood back from the street a very pleasant two-story old cottage, the residence of the widow Rowen, having a grapevine clustering about the lattice of the piazza, and a neat garden in front. I believe Doctor Cox built his dwelling house on the same premises, nearly forty years ago. The south side of Walnut street was then generally vacant lots ; and where the present range of fine houses extends westward from the south-west
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Norris' House and Garden.
corner of Fourth and Walnut streets, was a long yard occupied many years by a coachmaker, whose frame shop stood upon the corner. The rear of Doctor Rush's former residence shows a gradual descent of sloping garden into Beek's Hollow ; and an old house or two in Prune street, north side, show themselves buried as much as three steps beneath the present surface-thus marking there the range of " the Hollow" once so familiar in the mouths of all persons passing up Walnut street.
NORRIS' HOUSE AND GARDEN.
NORRIS' house, a respectable-looking family mansion, occupied till lately the site on which is now placed the Bank of the United States. When first built, it was deemed out of town. Such as it was before the war of Independence, when adorned with a large and highly cultivated garden, has been well told in a picturesque manner by its former inmate, Mrs. L -.* Its rural beauties, so near the city, were once very remarkable; and for that reason made it the frequent resort of respectable strangers and genteel citizens. In that house, when Isaac Norris was Speaker, and was confined at home, infirm, the Assembly of Pennsylvania, for the sake of his presence, sometimes held their deliberations. In the time of the war, the pa- triots took off its leaden reservoir and spouts to make bullets for the army. It was occupied by several British officers when the British army possessed the city. In those gardens Admiral Howe and several British officers were daily visiters. A few years ago an aged female Friend from Baltimore, who lived there by selling cakes, &c., was present at a Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia, and then told her friends that her grandfather had once been given the ground whereon the Bank stands, with as much as half the square, for his services as chain-bearer in the original survey of the city. Now, when old and needy, she sees the Bank erected thereon, at a cost for the site of 100,000 dollars !
The range of large brick houses on the south side of Chestnut street, extending from the Bank of the United States up to Fifth street, were built there about 35 years ago, upon what had been pre- viously Norris' garden. The whole front was formerly a garden fence, shaded by a long line of remarkably big catalpa trees, and, down Fifth street, by trees of the yellow willow class, being the first ever planted in Philadelphia-and the whole the product of a wicker-basket found sprouting in Dock creek, taken out and planted in Mr. Norris' garden at the request of Dr. Franklin.
* In a family manuscript for her son.
AMUMFORD SE.
ROBERT MORRIS' MANSION, CHESTNUT STREET .- Page 409.
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Robert Morris' Mansion.
On the Fifth street side of the garden, extending down to Library street, there stood a rural-looking cotttage, near the site of the present library. It was the gardener's residence, standing back from the street 'midst deep embowering shade, every way picturesque to the eye, and having near it an open well of water of peculiar excellence, famed far and wide as "deep and cold," and for which families often sent at several squares' distance. It was impossible to see the tout ensemble as it then was, without associating the poetic description of " the drawwell and mossy bucket at the door!" The well still re- mains, as a pump, on the north side of Library street, about 60 or 70 feet eastward of Fifth street, but its former virtues are nearly gone.
The eastern side of the garden was separated from Fourth street by the Cross-Keys Inn and some two or three appurtenant houses, once the estate of Peter Campbell, in whose hands they were con- fiscated, and then purchased by the late Andrew Caldwell, Esq. By mistake of the original surveys they had been built out four feet upon the Chestnut street pavement, so that when the street became public, they closed the front doors and entered the house on the western side by a gateway, and a long piazza. The whole produced an agreeable oddity, which always made the block of buildings re- markable.
ROBERT MORRIS' MANSION.
THIS great edifice, the grandest ever attempted in Philadelphia for the family purposes of private life, was erected at the request and "for the use of the great financier, Robert Morris, Esq. The whole proved to be a ruinous and abortive scheme, not so much from his want of judgment to measure his ends by his means, as by the de- ceptive estimates of his architect, Major L'Enfent, a name celebrated in our annals for the frequent disproportion between his hopes and his accomplishments. A gentleman was present at R. Morris' table when L'Enfent was there, and first broached the scheme of building him a grand house for 60,000 dollars. Mr. Morris said he could sell out his lots and houses on High street for 80,000 dollars, and so the thing was begun.
Mr. Morris purchased the whole square, extending from Chestnut to Walnut street, and from Seventh to Eighth street, for £10,000, a great sum for what had been, till then, the capital, at which the Norris' family had used it as their pasture ground ! Its original ele- vation was twelve to fifteen feet above the present level of the adja- cent streets. With such an extent of high ground in ornamental VOL I .- 3 B 35
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Robert Morris' Mansion.
cultivation, and a palace in effect fronting upon Chestnut street, 80 far as human grandeur was available, it must have had a signal effect.
Immense funds were expended ere it reached the surface of the ground, it being generally two, and sometimes three stories under ground, and the arches, vaults and labyrinths were numerous. It was finally got up to its intended elevation of two-stories, presenting four sides of entire marble surface, and much of the ornaments worked in expensive relief. Such as it then was may be seen in an accurate delineation of it as made in 1798, and preserved in my MS. Annals, page 243, in the City Library. It was then perceived too late-
-that finished as it was, It still lack'd a grace, the loveliest it could show- A mine to satisfy the enormous cost!"
Mr. Morris, as he became more and more sensible of his ruin in the above building, was often seen contemplating it, and has been heard to vent imprecations on himself and his lavish architect. He had besides provided, by importation and otherwise, the most costly furniture ; all of which, in time, together with the marble mansion itself, had to be abandoned to his creditors.
" Drained to the last poor item of his wealth, He sighs, departs, and leaves the accomplished plan Just where it meets his hopes !"
He saw it raised enough to make a picture and to preserve the ideal presence of his scheme; but that was all-for the magnitude of the establishment could answer no individual wealth in this country ; and the fact was speedily realized, that what cost so much to rear could find no purchaser at any reduced price. The creditors were therefore compelled, by slow and patient labour, to pull down, piece-meal, what had been so expensively set up. Some of the underground labyrinths were so deep and massive as to have been left as they were, and at some future age may be discovered to the great perplexity of the quid nuncs. The materials thus taken down were sold out in lots; and the square being divided into building lots, and sold, gave occasion to employ much of the former material therein. Mr. William Sansom soon procured the erection of his "Row" on Walnut street, and many of the houses on "Sansom street," thereby producing a uniformity in building ranges of similar houses, often since imitated, but never before attempted in our city.
It always struck me as something remarkable in the personal his- tory of Mr. Morris, that while he operated for the government as financier, his wisdom and management was pre-eminent, as if "sky- guided and heaven-directed," leading to a national end, by an over- ruling providence ; but, when acting for himself, as if teaching us to see that fact by contrast, all his personal affairs went wrong and to ruin !
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LOXLEY'S HOUSE, SOUTH SECOND STREET .- Page 411
Munn ford
WASHINGTON'S HOUSE, HIGH STREET .- Page 411.
BATHSHEBA'S BATH AND BOWER .- Page 411.
Loxley's House, and Bathsheba's Bath and Bower. 411
LOXLEY'S HOUSE, AND BATHSHEBA'S BATH AND BOWER.
THE frame house of singular construction, No. 177 south Second street, at the junction of Little Dock and Second streets, was memo- rable in its early day for affording from its gallery a preaching place for the celebrated Whitfield-his audience occupying the street (then out of town) and the opposite hill, at the margin of Bathsheba's bath and bower. All these facts must sound strange to modern ears, who so long have regarded that neighbourhood as a well compacted city. It may therefore serve as well to amuse the reader, as to sustain the assertions above, to adduce some of the authorities on which those traditions are founded.
I had long heard traditional facts concerning the rural beauty and charming scenes of Bathsheba's bath and bower, as told among the earliest recollections of the aged. They had heard their parents talk of going out over the Second street bridge into the country about the Society hill, and there making their tea-regale at the above-named spring. Some had seen it, and forgotten its location after it was changed by streets and houses; but a few, of more tenacious memo- ries or observing minds, had preserved the site in the mind's eye- among these was the late aged and respectable Samuel Coates, Esq. He told me that, when a lad, he had seen Whitfield preach- ing from the gallery, and that his audience, like a rising amphi- theatre, surrounded the site of the bath and bower, on the western side of Second street. That the spring, once surrounded by shrub- bery, sprang out of the hill on the site of the lot on which Captain Cadwallader (afterwards a General) constructed his large double house-the same site on which the late S. Girard, Esq., has since erected four brick houses. Mrs. J. and Mrs. R., daughters of Mr. Benjamin Loxley, the owner of that house, told me that they had heard him say he had heard Whitfield preach from that balcony, and also that there was originally a celebrated spring on the opposite side of the street. The springy nature of the ground was sufficiently indicated, to the surprise of the citizens and the builders, when Mr. Girard attempted to build the above-mentioned houses further out than Cadwallader's house ; they could find no substantial foundation, and were obliged to drive piles on which to build. Mrs. Logan, too, had a distinct recollection of an old lady who used to describe to her the delightful scenery once around the spring, and that it lay somewhere towards the Society Hill.
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Loxley's House, and Bathsheba's Bath and Bower.
Mr. Alexander Fullerton, when aged 76 years, told me he was familiar with this neighbourhood when a boy, and was certain the spring here was called " Bathsheba's Spring and Bower." He knew also that the pump near there, and still at the south-east corner of Second and Spruce streets, was long resorted to as a superior water, and was said to draw its excellence from the same source.
When I first published my Annals, I had to make much inquiry and search, before I could fully determine the location of this spring. I since find, by the Rev. Mr. Clay's Annals of the Swedes, that the whole place was named after and fitted up by, the aunt of his grand- mother, Ann Clay. Her name was Bathsheba Bowers. The MS ife of Ann Clay reads thus: " Under Society Hill she (Bathsheba Bowers, her maiden aunt,) built a small house, close by the best spring of water that was in our city. The house she furnished with books, a table and a cup, in which she, or any that visited her, drank of the spring. Some people gave it the name of Bathsheba's Bower, and the spring has ever since borne the name of Bathsheba's Spring."
The street in front of Loxley's house was originally much lower than it now appears to the eye, being now raised by a subterrane tunnel. It was traversed by a low wooden bridge half the width of the street, and the other half was left open for watering cattle.
The yards now in the rear of Girard's houses are much above the level of Second street, and prove the fact of a former hill there; on which Captain Cadwallader used to exercise and drill his celebrated " silk stocking company."
Mr. Loxley, himself, was a military chieftain of an earlier day- made the talk and dependence of the town in the days of the Pax- tang boys. His intended defence of the city against those outlaws has been facetiously told by Graydon in his Memoirs. He had been made a lieutenant of artillery in 1756, on the occasion of Brad- dock's defeat. His father, before him, owned these premises; and the family mansion near there, now shut in and concealed from Spruce street, was once at the base of a rural and beautiful hill, dis- playing there a charming hanging garden, and the choicest fruits and grapes. The Loxley house is deserving of some further dis- tinction, as the residence, in the time of the Revolution, of Lydia Darrach, who so generously and patriotically undertook to walk beyond the lines to give our army timely information of the medi- tated attack. Under her roof the Adjutant General of the British army had his office ; and upon a particular occasion she there over- heard the plan of attack, and started off, beforehand, to reveal it to her countrymen.
DUCHÉ'S HOUSE, SOUTH THIRD STREET .- Page 413.
BRITISH BARRACKS, NORTHERN LIBERTIES .- Page 415.
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Duché's House, &c.
DUCHÉ'S HOUSE, &C.
THIS was one of the most venerable looking, antiquated houses of our city, built in 1758, for Parson Duché, the pastor of St. Peter's church, as a gift from his father, and taken down a few years ago, to give room to erect several brick houses on its site. It was said to have been built after the pattern of one of the wings of Lambeth Palace. When first erected there it was deemed quite out of town, and for some time rested in lonely grandeur. In after years it be- came the residence of Governor M'Kean, and when we saw it as a boy, we derived from its contemplation conceptions of the state and dignity of a governor which no subsequent structures could gene- rate. It seemed the appropriate residence of some notable public man.
Parson Duché was as notable in his time as his mansion, and both for a time ran their fame together. He was withal a man of some eccentricity, and of a very busy mind, partaking with lively feelings in all the secular incidents of the day. When Junius' Letters first came out, in 1771, he used to descant upon them in the Gazettes of the time under the signature of Tamoc Caspina, a title formed by an acrostic on his office, &c., as "the assistant minister of Christ church and St. Peter's in North America." At another time he en- deavoured to influence General Washington, with whom he was said to be popular as a preacher, to forsake the American cause; and for this measure he was obliged to make his escape for England, where he lived and preached some time, but finally came back to Philadel. phia and died. His ancestor was Anthony Duché, a respectable Pro testant refugee, who came out with William Penn.
The church of St. Peter, to which he was attached, on the south- west corner of Third and Pine streets, (the diagonal corner from his own house,) was founded in the year 1758, as a chapel of ease to the parent Christ church. It was built by contract for the sum of £3310, and the bell in its cupola, (the best at present in the city for its tones) was the same, as told to me by Bishop White, which had occupied the tree-crotch at Christ church. The extensive ground was the gift of the proprietaries ; level as the whole area was, it was always called "the church on the hill," in primitive days, in re- ference to its being in the region of "Society Hill," and not, in fa- miliar parlance, within the city walks.
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