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. II > Part 62
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Among the subjects of novelty and interest got up here, we were indebted to the enterprise of a Mr. Woolston, from near Wilmington, for a draw of a seine for catching sharks and porpoises. This cost us by subscription thirty dollars-say twenty dollars for twenty men, &c. The seine used is of great weight and strength, and made of best rope. The original materials cost $1500; and the whole belongs to a company, who, in the proper season, make it a busi- ness here to catch schools of porpoises, and render their livers and fat for lamp-oil, at one dollar per gallon. Early in the morning, the seine was drawn off about one-sixth of a mile from shore; and a boat at each end was anchored there to wait till porpoises should attempt to pass between them and the shore. Several schools came near; but none went inside. They remained off all day. In draw- ing it to land in the evening, it brought ashore six sharks and two large fishes of the skate kind, very like bats in their form and appearance. One or two of the sharks were eight feet long. They had great muscular vigour after their heads were off; and their heads for several hours after they were off-if stood up upon their base, and a stick thrust into their throat, would snap violently, and with much strength, their teeth into the wood. It is strange that these sharks occupy the same waters in which we bathe, and yet never molest
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us. Even when some go out swimming and floating beyond their depth.
Last night the gentlemen at Hughes' gave a ball in return for the one at our house the night before. (Ours cost the contributors $1 622 for each gentleman.) We were all indiscriminately invited -but few, however, went. The ladies made up a great many ornamental decorations with green branches and flowers from the gardens. Some were wild, and some were sunflowers. 'The chan- delier was made of oak hoops from casks, and covered with ever- greens plucked from some neighbouring bushes.
It is worthy of remark how very much of the timbers and wrecks of vessels we see employed in all the fences and sheds in the village. They may be known by their marks of rust from spikes, &c., in the wood. When one considers the heartaches and terrors of those who must have been their companions (if they lived) who came floating with them on the tempest surges, we must feel a measure of gloom and sympathy to look upon them, and to think that this or that plank was a poor sufferer's last refuge.
I have been much interested in hearing the relation of the inci- dents of the late war at this place. The British, by commanding the ocean, were frequently off these capes. The main fleet would lay off Cape Henlopen ; but their tenders, launches and smaller vessels, made such frequent threats of landing, and ravaging the country for supplies of cattle, &c, as to make a connected guard along the whole coast necessary. They would frequently capture small ves- sels, and immediately set them on fire. They sometimes landed with flags of truce to exchange or land prisoners. Once they attacked a large American privateer, and the fight was very interesting on both sides, and close to the shore. She got on the breakers and went to pieces. I felt, whilst I heard these recitals, as if I should have been much interested to have been present.
Whilst at church, I saw a gentleman with a shark-cane. It was formed from the spine bones of the shark. I observed, that per- sons took out all the spines of those we lately took. The cane had a steel elastic wire run through its whole length-was varnished and had a neat silver head. Its general appearance was that of the Indian reed-cane.
Monday night brought us the arrival of the steamboat with new company, and much bustle. We had just sat down to supper when we received ten new guests, chiefly Quaker ladies. To these were soon added a company of fifteen men and five women, from Cape Henlopen, to sup and spend the night. They had a fiddle, and some an excess of drink. After supper, they set to dancing, and to rude mirth, and kept it up till midnight. I went to bed, and slept through the midst of their shuffling and boozy mirth.
The entire exemption which one feels at a watering place, from all the usual family concerns of housekeeping or business, is a state which a care-crazed man of business should feel to arrive at any just
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conception of it. It would make us bad and useless members of the community to live thus freed (constantly) from the concerns and obligations of life ; but a man, who labours ordinarily much for him- self and others, should occasionally step into such a new state of existence. The transition is so extreme, that it is capable of pro- ducing mental and bodily emotions, calculated to loose him from many morbid and nervous afflictions of body. Let the closely con- fined city drudge, by all means, visit such a sans souci establishment, and abandon his mind and body to absolute freedom of both. It will make him a more ethereal being.
The season of bathing at Cape May begins about the 8th of July, and continues to the last week in August.
Cape May must, at some future day, be the great resort of the southern gentry. All those who live in Maryland and Virginia, nearest to the city of Baltimore, will ride there, quit their carriages, or send them home, and take the steamboat to Frenchtown and New Castle where they can, the same day, join the steamboat from Philadelphia. In this way Marylanders and Virginians will get to Cape May on the same day from Baltimore. All the gentry of Delaware and Philadelphia will find it to their advantage to go to Cape May of course. The beach is so decidedly preferable to Long branch that it must be preferred, whenever the boarding houses at Cape May shall have made enough to enable them to make such improvements as are needful there.
I predict, too, that the time will ere long come, when pilot boats will be engaged for 15 to $20 to take parties of fifteen to twenty people as often as once a week to the houses of entertainment at Tucker's and Manahawkin beach, sixty miles. All those who want to see and feel the exercise of a sea voyage and sea-sickness, and to get out of sight of land, will become parties to such excursions. I was the first who proposed this; and if a pilot boat had come to land while I talked of it, I had a dozen persons ready to embark, and to come home to Philadelphia by the Tuckerton stage.
A Trip to Long beach Seashore, 1823.
The country from Evesham down to Tuckerton has all the ap- pearance of its original wildness-few houses or settlements appear. Pine and oak woods on both sides of the road perpetually ; and for at least 30 miles of the road, the bushes on either side fill up the whole road, which is scarcely the single path which one wagon fills. We met nothing almost on the road to turn us out. I could thus have a very good conception of how the country looked in the hands of the aborigines, some few of whom still linger about.
Was much interested to see the formidable ruins of Atsion iron works, (27} miles). They looked as picturesque as the ruins of abbeys, &c., in pictures. There were dams, forges, furnaces, store- houses, a dozen houses and lots for the men, and the whole com
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prising a town; a place once overwhelming the ear with the din of unceasing ponderous hammers, or alarming the sight with fire and smoke, and smutty and sweating Vulcans. Now, all is hushed ; no wheels turn, no fires blaze, the houses are unroofed, and the frames &c., have fallen down, and not a foot of the busy workmen is seen.
Little Egg harbour, (now a poor country and population,) was once a place (in my grandfather's time, when he went there to trade &c.) of great commerce and prosperity. The little river there used to be filled with masted vessels. It was a place rich in money. As farm- ing was little attended to, taverns and boarding houses were filled with comers and goers. Hundreds of men were engaged in the swamps cutting cedar, and saw-mills were numerous and always in business, cutting cedar and pine boards. The Forks of Egg har- bour was the place of chief prosperity ; many shipyards were there ; vessels were built and loaded out to the West Indies; New York and Philadelphia, and the southern and eastern cities, received their chief supplies of shingles, boards, and iron, from this place. The trade too, in iron-castings, while the fuel there was abundant, was very great. The numerous workmen, all without dependence on cultivation of the soil, required constant supplies of beef, pork, flour, groceries, &c. from abroad. Even the women wore more of im- ported apparel than in any other country places. Merchants from New York and Philadelphia went there occasionally in such num- bers that the inns and boarding houses could not contain them, and they had to be distributed among private houses. On such occ» sions they would club and have a general dance, and other like en tertainments.
Sometimes rich cargoes came ashore on the beach, and were brought up the river for public sale, and brought there many traders to buy.
The vessels from New York and New England on trading voyages were numerous before the Revolution. The inlet was formerly the best on the coast ; and many vessels destined for Philadelphia in the winter, because of the ice in the Delaware, made into Egg harbour river, and there sold out their cargoes to traders from New York and Philadelphia.
In these times Great Egg harbour had little or no distinction. Its inlet and advantages were not good. It since enjoys more than Lit- tle Egg harbour. Now both those places do their chief business in taking cord wood, especially pine, to the cities ; but formerly they did none of that, when fuel was cheaper and easier procured.
In the time of the revolutionary war, Little Egg harbour river was a good refuge for our privateers, or their prizes. Many sales were made there of prize goods. The British, aware of it, endea- voured to avenge themselves. They entered it in light vessels and destroyed Chestnut neck, a town of about 20 houses. which have not been since rebuilt.
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Count Pulaski, with his legion was down there, and had an ac- tion with the British in the Revolution.
There used to be a considerable exportation of sassafras from Egg harbour. Some vessels went direct to Holland with it " north about," to avoid, I believe, some British orders of trade therein. "The Dutch made it into a beverage which they sold under the name of sloop. This commerce existed before the war of the Revolution.
When I ride over these lands and see so much soil whitened and glistened in the sun, especially in the woods where vegetation cannot conceal, I am forcibly persuaded that all these Jersey lands were once traversed by the finny monsters of the great Atlantic deep ; and where the formal pine trees tower, there the billows rolled !
We arrived safely at Tuckerton at 7 o'clock in the evening. It proved to be a much neater and more civilized place than I ex- pected. Several houses were painted, and were of boards, save Tucker's store, which was of brick. I should suppose it contains fifty buildings ; twenty houses are on the main street. It has a Methodists' and Friends' meeting house ; a mill dam and grist and saw-mill, and near it a wind-mill to make salt. This last arricle is made with much success and profit. The work cost $4,000. The people here have several fields planted with the castor-oil plant, and have two or three mills to grind it. They find it very profitable. Their chief export has been pine wood.
Friday morning, at 7 o'clock, I left Tuckerton with Capt. Horner, to go to Horner's house on the Long beach. Had head wind, and arrived at about 10 o'clock : fare 25 cents ! The price of going in this vessel to sea or elsewhere is 25 cents, when company is made. As I came out of the creek my eyes were arrested with a considerable mound, on which three or four large cedars were growing. It was a hill of oyster and clam shells, left there by the aboriginal Indians long since. They dried their clams. What numbers they must have consumed to have made such a hill !
Horner's house, at which I have sat down for the present, is a new house, built and set up by a company of gentlemen in Philadelphia for the purpose of sea-bathing. It is all made for good cheer and free and easy comforts, without any attempt at elegance. None of the floors are planed, and the side walls are rough boards, and the ceilings are white-washed. Its appointment of liquors and table is very good. It is set down on an extremely desolate beach, full of broken and small sand-hills, without a solitary tree. Its very deso lation increased my sense of comforts! I the more enjoyed the solid diet of the table; its zest was heightened by contrast! Its desola- tion too, was so isolated as to cut me off from all the world, and seemed to make me begin there an entire new existence! Thus I found charms where others might have been disgusted. But it is a manifest disadvantage that the bathers have to walk half a mile to the shore across the sand, and the ladies to ride in a cart. This com- pany intend to increase its benefits and comforts. As it has fine VOL. II -3 T 46*
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shooting and fishing, and a grand surf, it will always best suit gentle men who love rough and vigorous fare. The beach is twenty miles long, and to the northward has several houses, and so much of cedar wood as to shelter red foxes. The tables are a cover which is set on trussels and moved out of the room. The room is about twenty-six by fifteen feet. The proprietors intend to build a large house next summer. [This is since done, and every thing is in more refinement.] This establishment is quite new. They have dug and found a fine well of fresh water at ten feet depth near the house. It had never entered the mind of former people that good water could be found. In great sea storms, the sea has covered this whole beach, and the water came quite up to the ground floor of the house. The inlets and the beach have much altered in fifty years. It was once covered with cedar trees. Now all are gone. The inlets in the war of the Revolution admitted two frigates to come in, and now there is only water for small vessels. +
This is a great place for the killing of ducks and geese in the win- ter. They have nothing else to do, and use decoys and ambush, and very often lay out to shoot as the flocks fly over them. The house at Tucker's beach is a cluster of three houses built at different times. The original house of the celebrated Mother Tucker is a one-story house, with a hipped roof, and front piazza. When you enter this piazza you are struck with the display of names cut in the boards of the house by the summer visiters ; and probably one hundred clams are nailed up, of large size, having names inscribed on them. The house stands about the length of five hundred feet from the seashore. The salt meadow comes close up to the house, and the house is ele- vated on a heap of sand and shells. The room in which I lay on my cot and write this is open directly to the ocean. I see the ves- sels buffeting the waves, and the roar of the bellowing surf seems to lie just below me.
These beaches are much more dreary in the aspect than Cape May. Nothing seems to grow upon them but wild and scattered tufts of grass. But one feels comfort in the increase of appetite, and the consciousness of high cheer and good provisions.
How often have the landmarks of this shore been sought out by the approaching mariners of distant voyages, seeking, with anxious and distrustful eye, the first glimpse of the doubtful coast. Many this day, in the distant verge of the sinking horizon, would give great gifts to be once more on terra firma. Women passengers, sick of their confinements, listen with eager attention to the conjec- tures about land, which by their soundings is known to be near at hand; and the terrors of possible stranding and shipwreck are pic- tured to their labouring imaginations. It might do one good to see such objects land, and to regale them with the delicacies of the sea- son, untasted by them for months.
Sundry of us made a sailboat excursion up the sound to the other boarding house on the same beach, twelve miles off, to the
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large house, called the Mansion of Health, (of which see a picture.) We found it well kept and supported by a goodly number of inmates.
The house, a hundred and twenty feet long, stands about one tenth of a mile from the surf. The original house once there was at one half the distance, and had numerous cedar and oak trees nigh it. The great "September gale," of 1821, swept over the whole island at this place, and tore up or blew over those trees, so that none now remain nigh, although the stumps of many are still seen. The whole island is twenty miles long, being from Tucker's to Barnegat inlets. At its northern end are still many trees and high hills, wherein foxes burrow.
As a riding vehicle to the surf and along the beach the ladies use an ox-wagon, wherein they amuse themselves greatly in a rustic novel way.
I was surprised to learn here from old Stephen Inman, one of the twelve family residents of the place, that he and his family have never ceased to be whale catchers along this coast. They devote themselves to it in February and March. They generally catch two or three of a season, so as to average forty to fifty barrels of oil apiece. I saw their look-out mast, their chaldron and furnace for rendering the oil, their whale-boats, &c. He has taken some whales of ninety bar- rels of oil. The whale bones of large size lay about bleaching in the sun. About his place are many oak and holly trees. Gunners go there much, in the season, for wild geese and ducks. Inman has killed twenty-four geese in a day. Sheep, mules, and horses are pastured and browsed on the northern end of the island, by himself and others. His house having formerly been the winter quarters of the gunners, is fully cut with the names of his visiters, made on the outside boards, under the piazza.
The coasting trade along these shores must be great. Sometimes we could count twenty sail, all going onward, eastward and south- ward. Their white sails looked like villas set along a highway.
Sometimes I think and wonder at what could have been all the features of this place before civilization and European eyes scanned it. I peopled it in imagination with Indians, seeking here and find- ing a summer home for their unrestrained supply of fish, shell-fish, birds' eggs, &c. In these sounds they had often " wigwassed" for sheep heads, of whom we learnt the art of bobbing, as even now prac- tised successfully, with flaming torch at night.
The beach at this place is certainly the best along our coast, and to be so shut up on an island, makes every thing of sea character still more like sea-shore. The very desolation of the sands around us makes the table refreshments still more estimable by a feeling sense of contrast.
As we sail back to our boarding house, we notice many fish in the waters we traverse, such as we might have speared, if we had been so disposed, and had had the needful instruments.
Monday, August 17 .- This begins a new epoch. Awake at five
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o'clock, and found the wind fair at S. W. I determine therefore to try for Long branch by sea. I am taken off in the bay to Capt. Ro gers' sloop Jane, loaded for New York, and near to the New Inlet We arrived at New York the next day with a delightful sail
" Reminiscences of Philadelphia."
We here give an article from the pen of "Lang Syne," (often quoted in this work,) as a specimen of his manner and tact in giving subjects of by-gone days. It may serve to show to others, what they may imitate in the way of tales of olden time, from the use of the materials, so abundantly preserved in the foregoing pages. For the character of the writer, Mr. M'Koy, (now no more,) see page 182 of vol. i. of these Annals. On the present subject he says, to wit :
The contemplation, occasionally, by your reminiscent, of the as- tonishing increase in population, wealth and splendour, now exhi- biting every where throughout our beloved. city ; its lengthened pave- ments and splendid buildings, very frequently cause a reversion of the mind, back upon the period when, on Monday mornings in particular, he crept lazily to school, stopping here and gazing there, upon the " moving panorama" around him. The images of cha- racters then existing in the city, and the situation of things, are as palpable as was the "air drawn dagger" of Macbeth, but without the horror. They float upon the memory rather as " Thistle down moving," or the motes (sometimes mingled and convolved) discern- ible only in the sunbeam. Ere they vanish for ever, as the curling mist, or the flitting ghost at cock-crow, it is intended in this commu- nication to collect a variety of them hastily together, in one groupe, so that those who have a relish for the modern antique, in by-gone days, may see them
" Come like shadows, so depart."
An elderly domestic in the Pancoast family, who always named himself Me Mo Michael Hans Muckle Weder, although moving in an humble sphere, his person and character were familiar to every inhabitant. When sent on an errand he could scarcely proceed a square in an hour, being continually surrounded by all sorts of peo- ple, some viewing him, and listening to him, and some asking him over again, the same question which had been asked a thousand times. Whether the question (repeated) came from the child or the man, he was sure to answer them, every one, with an unbroken smile, extending from cheek to cheek, (sans teeth,) with unwearied patience, idiotic simplicity, and an affectionate tone of voice. 'l'o astonish them, he sometimes changed his usual amiable appearance and expression of countenance, to a hideous frown and an awful squint; his two eyes gazing at each other, and his long tongue hiss.
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ing like the serpent from between his boneless gums, causing the juvenile spectator to shrink away from the horrid sight, which was but for a moment-then resuming his usual benevolent smiling look, he would say, " that's the way to frighten the Indians, so it is." He claimed as sweethearts, all the fashionable unmarried young belles in the city. He had " fifty hundred, twenty hundred and sixteen" of them ; and when any one of them married, he was sure to go the next day after the wedding, to claim his forfeit, always cheerfully given to him, which was a half crown, and a glass of punch from the lady's own hand, which, said he, was all the same, as though I married her myself.
A partially deranged, elderly, spectre-looking maiden lady, tall and thin, of the Friends' persuasion, named Leah, was somewhat re- markable from the circumstance, that she used sometimes to pass the night, wrapped in a blanket, between the graves of the Potter's field, (now Washington square,) for the benevolent purpose of frighten- ing away "the doctors."
Collector Sharp Delany, in the front part of his family residence, transacted the whole custom house business of the port of Phila- delphia, at the south-east corner of Walnut and Second streets, at present occupied by the Delaware Insurance Company.
George Baynton, a native of the city, was, without controversy, acknowledged to be the most admirable among the fashionable young gentlemen of his day-being of proper age and height, and of most astonishing beauty. "The beautiful Fatima," as described by Lady Wortley Montague, in her letters from Adrianople, and George Baynton, should have been brother and sister. Boys and men would turn and gaze after his splendid personal appearance- " many a bright eye fell beneath his glance," and followed his reced- ing footseps with admiration. Fame had assigned to him all the bounties of nature, beyond the reach of art,-and every youthful manly grace, accompanied by the fascination of the serpent, towards the devoted fluttering bird. He deceased in the fever of 1793.
The uptown and the downtown boys, at this time, used to have, according to the streets, their regular night-battles, with sticks and stones, making the panes of glass to jingle on the pavement occa- sionally-but the appearance of Old Carlisle and the famous West, the constable, would scatter them into all the hiding places, peeping out from hole and corner, when the coast was clear.
The sign of the Three Jolly Irishmen, a tavern kept at the north- east corner of Race and Water streets, and whose locality ('twas said) was familiar in places across the ocean, used to be notorious throughout the city, as a primary resort of the " new comers," and at times, one continued scene and sound of daily riot, and night brawl, making it dangerous to meddle with them, even by course of law. A little old German watchman, who stood in his box hard by, his shoulders bending under the pressure of years, and his chin and nose almost in contact-on being foolishly applied to one night,
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