USA > Pennsylvania > Bucks County > The history of Bucks County, Pennsylvania : from the discovery of the Delaware to the present time > Part 81
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Those who are old enough will remember the Merino sheep mania, or fever, which raged in the country, this county included, from
863
HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
1810 to 1813. Full-blood merinoes sold as high as from three to five hundred dollars each, and in a few instances they even brought one thousand dollars. Half-blood sheep sold at from twenty-five to fifty dollars. A man in this county, whose name it is not necessary to mention, sold his wheat crop, two hundred bushels, at three dol- lars, and gave the whole of it for one sheep. When the fever subsided these same sheep dropped down to five and ten dollars. Many persons were ruined, and the Ms. of an old resident of the county says that one man lost sixteen thousand dollars. When the next generation came upon the stage a quarter of a century after- ward, 1837-39, they were found just as ready and willing to be gulled as their ancestors, but this time it was the silk-producing mul- berry, and the excitement is known in history as the morus multi- caulis fever. It attacked both male and female, and spread gener- ally through the country.
It planted itself early in New Jersey, along the Delaware, and almost immediately leaped across the river, and took root in the lower end of this county. The newspapers teemed with the most marvelous accounts, and the inducements to fortune held out were hardly second to the South sea scheme and the Merino fever. One old lady sold her spectacles to buy mulberry trees to plant in her garden. An acre of trees near Camden, New Jersey, changed hands four times without being taken from the ground, going up from fifteen hundred to forty-five hundred dollars. The last pur- chaser was offered a thousand dollars advance, but refused it. One man near Burlington, is said to have sold $12,000 worth of trees from two acres of ground, and that Prince, of Long Island, sold $75,000 worth from his nursery. Multicaulis seed brought $16 per ounce, and sprouts of one summer's growth commanded from twelve and one-half to fifteen cents per foot, the limbs reserved and taken off and the buds sold at two cents each. In some instances, the trees brought almost fabulous prices. One sale in Germantown amounted to $81,218.75, and $8,000 profit are said to have been realized from a single acre. Trees four feet in height were sold at from forty to fifty cents each, and in some parts of the county as high as a dollar. Thousands of acres of trees were planted in all parts of the county, and in every village were numerous gardens and out-lots filled with the multicaulis.
During the height of the excitement, some people in this county made a great deal of money, while others lost. Sharpers and specu- lators took advantage of the excitement, and the frauds practiced
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
were tremendous. In some instances farms were mortgaged to raise money to go into the speculation, and we are told that one farmer in Falls, was offered a rent of nine hundred dollars for ten acres, to plant trees on one season, the tenant to clear the land in the spring. Considerable money was made and lost about Newtown, which with Doylestown, became multicaulis centres, and where buildings were erected to rear silk-worms. The one at Doylestown stood on the lot now owned by Isaiah Closson, on the New Hope turnpike, just east of the Catholic church, and forms part of the present dwelling. The bubble burst with a sudden explosion, and left those who had a stock of trees on hand high and dry. Had the speculation lasted a year or two longer the panic would have been wide-spread. In 1843 the trees had become a worthless encumbrance to the ground and were dug up and cut out.
Among the floods in the Delaware, those in 1841 and 1862 were probably the greatest since that of 1692 or 1731. That of 1841 was an ice flood, and occurred January 8th. Honses, barns, fences fur- niture, canal-boats, logs, etc., were borne down the swollen stream toward the ocean. Every bridge from Easton to Trenton, then five in number, were swept away. The guard lock of the feeder at Bool's island was torn away, and all the houses in the small hamlet of Johnstown were carried down the stream. The destruction along the Delaware and Lehigh were very great. George B. Fell, who was standing on Centre bridge at the time it was swept away, was carried down with it. He was on a loose plank as he passed New Hope, and had to lie down flat to prevent being swept off under the bridge. After running numerous risks from drowning and other- wise, he drifted ashore three miles above Trenton on some pieces of lumber that he had made into a raft. The freshet of 1862, almost equally severe, took place the 5th of June. An island in the Dela- ware was filled with drift-wood and other debris. A man bought what appeared to be a roof laying on the sand, but on attempting to remove it, it was found to belong to a dwelling that had lodged there entire. On a bed lay the body of a little child drowned by the freshet.
The problem of the navigation of the Delaware, above the falls at Trenton, is still unsolved, and a great river that flows through the heart of a rich and populous country is almost worthless and unused. While yet the Indian canoe glided on the bosom of our beautiful river, the Durham boat came into use to carry the iron made at
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
Durham furnace, to market. For many years these boats and others called arks, carried all the commerce of the upper Delaware and Lehigh to tidewater, and their usefulness was only supplanted by steam. They floated down the stream with the current, the Durham boats being propelled up stream by "setting" with long poles shod with iron. The arks were broken up at Philadelphia and the lumber sold. William Turnbull built the first ark at Mauch Chunk in 1806, and she made her first trip to Philadelphia that year, loaded with three hundred bushels of hard coal. The dis- covery by Judge Fell, in 1808, of how to burn hard coal in a grate, increased its shipment to tidewater. Charles Miner and Jacob Cist, the pioneer operators in anthracite coal in Pennsylvania, leased the mine where coal was first discovered in 1791. Jacob Warner, 1 then in their employ, started from Mauch Chunk August 9th, 1814, for Philadelphia with an ark loaded with two or three hundred tons of coal. After many vicissitudes in going down the Lehigh, among which was staving a hole in the bottom, into which the men stuffed their clothing to keep the boat from sinking, she reached the Delaware and floated safely down to tidewater. After steam- boats were on the river large fleets of Durham boats and arks were towed down to Philadelphia, from the head of tide, and Durham boats made occasional trips on the Delaware down to 1850. The last trip was made by Isaac Vanorman in March, 1860. As early as 1758 boats went down the river from Delaware Water Gap to Phi- ladelphia carrying twenty-two tons, but the dangers and labors of the navigation were very great ?
Rafts commenced running down the river at an early day. The first that navigated it was run by a man named Skinner, from Cochecton, in 1746.3 He was assisted by one Parks, and on reaching Philadelphia they were given the "freedom of the city," and Skinner was created "Lord-high-admiral of the Delaware," which title lie bore to his death. Previous to the Revolution seven hun- dred and fifty pounds were expended in trying to make the falls at Trenton navigable for boats and rafts, which they succeeded in doing. Of this sum four hundred and seventy-eight pounds were
1 Died in 1873, at the age of ninety-one.
2 So says a letter of Colonel James Burd. We have been told that the compart- ments of the arks that brought the first coal down to market were hauled back on wagons by the farmers.
3 So says a newspaper account.
55
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
subscribed by the citizens of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and the corporation of Philadelphia, because of the importance of the work to the city, voted a gratuity of three hundred pounds for the purpose. In the fall of 1824 an invention of a Colonel Clark was tried on the Delaware to improve its navigation from Philadelphia to Easton, with considerable success. It was intended for a tow-boat and was propelled by the action of the water on a number of buckets attached to a wheel on each side of a barge. It drew a Durham boat and a large ark containing sixteen persons up the rapids at Trenton at the rate of one and one-third miles an hour, but it was supposed that it could make three miles an hour with the machinery properly adjusted. It could not have proved a success, for we do not hear of it afterward.
The navigation of the Delaware underwent but little change as to the conveyance of passengers and goods until the introduction of steamboats, in 1812. In that year a large boat called the Phoenix was put on the river to carry passengers from Philadelphia to Bor- dentown. She was followed by the Philadelphia, facetiously called "Old Sal," which ran up to Bristol; by the Pennsylvania, which ran to Bordentown; the Trenton and other boats, until the build- ing of the railroads on either banks monopolized the carrying of passengers. When the Delaware Division Pennsylvania canal + was constructed and put in operation, 1828-32, it almost entirely super- seded the carrying of heavy freight on the river. In 1852 an attempt was made to navigate the upper Delaware by steam, when a boat, called the Major William Barnet, Captain Young, one hun- dred and fifty feet long, made several trips between Lambertville and Easton, arriving at the latter place March 12th. 5 After run- ning part of the summer the enterprise was abandoned. The opening of the Belvidere-Delaware railroad, in 1854, and the com- pletion of the North Pennsylvania road, in 1856, were still further hindrances to future commerce on the Delaware above Trenton.
+ It is sixty miles long, forty feet wide, five feet deep, and has twenty-three locks ninety feet long by eleven feet wide, and from six to ten feet high. It cost one mil- lion three hundred and seventy-four thousand seven hundred and forty-four dollars. There have been material alterations in it.
5 On her first arrival at Easton there was a general turn out to welcome the stran- ger. Speeches were made and a collation served at the American hotel to the captain and crew, where the citizens escorted them. Subsequently the Reindeer, a small steamboat from the Schuylkill, ascended the Delaware some distance above Easton, but she returned to Philadelphia after a few trips.
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
But the time will come when the navigation of the Delaware will be so improved that goods and passengers can be carried with safety and dispatch far toward its source. It is quite surprising that such a fine stream is entirely abandoned for purposes of commerce.
When our English ancestors settled upon its banks the Delaware swarmed with shad and other fish, which were caught without dif- ficulty, 6 but of late years they have become scarce. There has been a material falling off in the last sixty years. William Kinsey says that when a boy he frequently went fishing with others, with a drift-net, and canght as high as ninety in a night, while some caught as many as one hundred and sixty, and he has seen shad caught that weighed eight and three-quarters pounds. The late Anthony Bur- ton said that shad were frequently caught at his fisheries near Tullytown that weighed eight pounds, and that one weighing nine pounds was caught and presented to L. T. Pratt, of the Delaware house, who had a drawing of it made, which now hangs in the bar-roomn. The heaviest shad known to be caught in the Delaware was taken at Moon's ferry, near Tullytown, which weighed fourteen pounds. In 1819 one was caught below Trenton that weighed fourteen and one- quarter pounds, was two feet eight inches long, and sold for seventy-five cents. As high as four thousand shad have been caught in a day at Burton's ferry, and forty thousand in a season, while sixty thousand have been caught at Hay's fishery, opposite. The fishing season begins in March and ends the 10th of June. Of late years the run of shad has fallen off to such an extent that few fisheries catch over five hundred in a day, and many not more than one hundred. Drift-nets seldom catch thirty in a night, and they are small, and not five caught in a season average over six pounds in weight. In the spring of 1873 a son of A. W. Stackhouse put the row of a shad into a creek running through the Burton farm. In a few weeks Mr. Burton went to see what had become of it, when he found the water alive with young shad. They remained in the creek until a heavy rain raised the water, when they were swept by the current down into the Bristol mill-pond. The run of herring, likewise, has fallen off so that the shore-nets do not catch five hundred a day. Thousands have been known to be caught in one day at a single fishery. Of late years efforts have been made to stock the Delaware with shad.
The first election in Bucks county was held at the falls the 20th
6 In 1688 Phineas Pemberton saw a whale in the Delaware as high up as the falls ..
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
of twelfth- month, 1682, which, according to the present reckoning, would be February 20th, 1683. In the writ of election " freehold- ers " only were summoned to vote. The elections were probably holden at the falls until 1705, when the place was changed to the court-house at Bristol, by act of assembly, which required they should be held there annually without further notice, except in case of special elections, when the sheriff was to issue his proclamation. The frame of government adopted in 1696, fixed the pay of members of the assembly at four shillings per day when in attendance, and two pence per mile going and returning.7 The new charter of 1701, provided for a double number of persons to be elected for sheriff and coroners, from whom the governor must select and commission one. The elections were held at Bristol until the county-seat was removed to Newtown, 1725, when they were changed to the latter place and continued there for many years. The first division of the county into election districts was by the court in 1742, but no places were fixed for the polls. The districts were eight, namely : First, Bristol, Falls, Middletown ; second, Northampton, Southampton, Warminster ; third, Newtown, Wrightstown, Makefield ; fourth, Solebury, Buckingham, Plumstead, and lands adjacent, and Bed- minster ; fifth, Warwick, Warrington, Hilltown ; sixth, Richland, Rockhill, Lower Milford, and lands adjacent ; seventh, Upper Mil- ford, Macungie, lands adjacent, and Saucon ; eighth, Durham, Al- lentown, Smithfield, and lands adjacent. The county was divided into two election districts by the act of June 14th, 1777. The first district comprised the townships of Milford, Richland, Springfield, Durham, Haycock, Nockamixon, Tinicum, Bedminster, Rockhill, Hilltown, and Plumstead, and the place of elections fixed at the public house of Abraham Keichline, in Bedminster. The remain- ing townships with the borough of Bristol, composed the second district, and held the election at Newtown. New Britain was added to the upper district in 1785. With but two polling-places the vote was necessarily small in proportion to the population, on account of the distance to travel, the bad roads, and the want of bridges.
In 1794, for greater convenience to voters the county was divided into five election districts, namely ; The first district comprised the townships of Newtown, Middletown, Wrightstown, Northampton, Southampton, Upper Makefield, Lower Makefield, Warminster and
7 In 1718 the pay was six shillings a day, and the speaker received ten. In 1710 the county judges received twenty shillings per day.
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
Solebury, the elections to be held at the court-house in Newtown ; the second, Springfield, Haycock, Rockhill, Richland, and Milford, and the elections to be held at the house of Jacob Fries, in Milford ; the third, Tinicum, Nockamixon, and Durham, and the elections to be held at the house of Jacob Young, in Nockamixon ; the fourth, New Britain, Plumstead, Buckingham, Warwick, Warrington, Bed- minster, and Hilltown, the elections to be held at the house of William Chapman, in Buckingham ; and the fifth district comprised Bensalem, Falls, Bristol and the borough of Bristol, the elections to be held at the old court-house in said borough. In 1804 a sixth district was formed, comprising the townships of Rockhill, Bedmin- ster, and Hilltown, the elections to be held at the house of Henry Trumbower, in Rockhill. By 1818 all the townships in the county had become separate election districts, with the exception of Bristol township and borough, whose elections were held in the old court- house at Bristol ; Falls township and Morrisville, at Fallsington ; Warrington, Warwick and Warminster, at Joseph Carr's, Cross Roads, now Hartsville ; and Richland and Milford, at the Red lion, in Quakertown. For many years each township and borough lias been a separate election district, except Rockhill and Nockamnixon, which are divided into two each. In 1805 the polls were kept open from ten A. M. to two P. M. During the Proprietary government the sal- aries of county officers were small-sheriff, £100, coronor, £10, prothonotary, £10.
In 1727 Bucks county was represented in the assembly by the most distinguished man and greatest lawyer in the province, Andrew Hamilton, who was returned for twelve consecutive years. He was probably the most extraordinary man, intellectually, that lived in Pennsylvania during her early colonial history. He was born in Scotland in 1676, but nothing is known of his family or youth. It is not known at what time he came to America, but we find him settled in Maryland, with a good practice at the bar, in 1712. He was probably involved in some political difficulty at home, for he took the name of Trent when he first came here. He settled in Philadelphia soon after 1712, where he gained the first position at the bar, and held several important offices. Besides being in the council and assembly he was ten years speaker of the house, and the fifth attorney-general of the province, being appointed in 1717. He made the designs for the state-house, Philadelphia, and had charge of its building and disbursement of the money. He died at
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
Bush hill, his summer residence, in 1751. His wife was Mrs. Ann Brown, of Maryland, and one of his daughters married William Allen, a large landed proprietor in this county, and Allen's daughter married John Penn, the last Proprietary governor of Pennsylvania. In an obituary notice of Andrew Hamilton, attributed to Doctor Franklin, it is stated that "he feared God, loved mercy, and did justice." He was one of the earliest and boldest assertors of the liberty of speech and freedom of the press. His argument in the case of the printer, John Peter Zenger, before the supreme court of New York, in 1736, procured for him a prominent place in the history of Liberty. Gouverneur Morris called it the " day-star of the Revolution," because it awakened the public mind throughout the colonies to a conception of the most sacred rights of citizens as subjects of a free country.
For the first half century of the county the vote was light, prob- ably from two canses, want of interest in politics and the property qualification for voters. We give the vote for a few years in the second quarter of the last century, which exhibits considerable fluctu- ation : 1725, 512 ; 1727, 339 ; 1728, 530; 1730, 445; 1734, 794 ; 1738, 821; 1739, 571. There was evidently a change in public . sentiment at the election in 1739, for the candidates, who had been returned to the assembly for several years, almost without question, were now left at home. Down to about 1756 the Friends were the ruling power in the assembly, and they shaped the destiny of the province, but a change was now at hand. The excitement caused by the defeat of Braddock in 1755 enabled the war party to carry twenty-four out of twenty-six members of assembly. Because the assembly refused to take any steps to protect the frontiers of the province from the Indians, the British Parliament had a bill prepared making every member take a test oath. 7 This would have excluded all Friends, but it was withdrawn on condition that they would decline being chosen to the assembly. From that time forward they persuaded their members not to stand as candidates, and but few, of any religious standing, were afterward found in the assembly of the province. In 1759 Mahlon Kirkbride and three other members
i An effort was made in 1703 to have all judicial officers in the province take an oath, when several members of the council wrote to Penn that if this were "enforced in Bucks it would be almost impossible to find a sufficient number of fit persons to make a quorum of justices that will take an administration oath." At this time the population of Bucks county was almost exclusively Friends. The taxables in 1751 were three thousand two hundred and sixty-two.
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
from this county vacated their seats, as it was not desirable there should be any Friends there during the war. Before 1750 the Irish of this county commenced to exercise considerable political influence by joining the Friends and supporting their ticket at the polls. Northampton county was cut off from Bucks, no doubt for political purposes. The Proprietaries had become alarmed at the growing numbers and increasing political influence of the Germans, and it was thought that by cutting off Northampton from Bucks and Berks from Philadelphia, the members of assembly they could control would be reduced. The Friends, with whom the Germans had formed an alliance, were now generally opposed to the interest of the Proprietaries. At a later date the influence of the Irish caused them as much alarm as the Germans.
In taking political leave of the Friends we cannot forget the debt the state owes them. They were its founders and its parent at a time the young province needed a father's tender care, and they have left their impress upon all our institutions. They laid the founda- tion of civil and religious liberty broader and deeper than any other sect on these shores, and from that time to this they have been the pioneers in all great social and moral reforms. They led the col- umn in education, temperance, and the abolition of negro slavery, without having the eye fixed on the reward of office at the other end of the line. Their conduct in the Revolution has been severely and unjustly criticised. Viewing it in the light of history, their oppo- sition, as a religious society, was in keeping with their previous con- duct and consistent with their faith and belief. The doctrine of opposition to war and strife was the corner-stone of their edifice, and to surrender that would have been giving up everything. To the Friends Pennsylvania is indebted for the conservatism that distin- guishes her people, and from them the state gets her broad charity that is as open as the day.
At the beginning of the present century Bucks county formed a congressional district with Montgomery, Northampton, Wayne and Luzerne, and elected three members, who were, in 1804, John Pugli, Frederick Conrad, and Frederick Brown. That year the vote for congress in this county was but 4,563, which fell down to 3,255 for coroner, in 1806. The taxables in 1814 were 7,066, and the vote 4,379, its smallness because of the number of men in camp, where a separate election was held. Ten years later the vote was 4,913, and since then there has been a gradual
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
increase down to 1872, when the vote for coroner was 14,924. In 1800 the opposing political parties were known as Constitutional Republicans and Democratic Republicans, the former led by Samuel D. Ingham, William Milnor, John Hulme, Nathaniel Shewell, and others, and the latter by William Watts, Samuel Smith, George Harrison, George Piper, Robert T. Neely, etc. It is not within our province to give the mutations of party names from that time to the present, as we are not writing the history of party politics. We are glad to record, in conclusion, that our county politics is not marked by the same bitterness that prevailed in years gone by, and it is a rare thing that personal attacks are made on candidates.
Tax laws were in force along the Delaware before the English had settled there. The earliest step to tax the settlers was in 1659, when the Dutch authorities proposed to lay one on the Swedes and Fins in the jurisdiction of the West India colony. At the Novem- ber term, 1677, the Upland court laid a poll-tax of twenty-six guild- ers upon each taxable inhabitant between sixteen and sixty years of age, to pay its accumulated expenses. It was to be collected by the sheriff before the 25th of the following March, and owing to the scarcity of money, he was authorized to receive it in kind, the price of wheat being fixed at five, rye and barley at four, and Indian corn at three guilders per schepel.8 Of the whole number of taxables under the jurisdiction of Upland, sixty-three were in the Tacony district, which included Bucks county up to the falls. About the same time Governor Andros declared real and personal estate liable for debt, the first time the English law on the subject was enforced on the Delaware. In 1678 a tax of five guilders was laid on each taxable inhabitant.
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