One of a dozen delightful outings lying in the way of the sojourner in Philadelphia or its suburbs takes one to the ancient borough of Bristol. Set down on the western bank of the Delaware, midway between Trenton and Philadelphia, Bristol has seen more than two centuries sweep by since the beginning of its settlement, and all about the town there are traces remaining of the birth years of the republic, and even of colonial times, in narrow and irregular streets, and olden houses with chimneys at the gable ends, and in family heirlooms treasured in these antique dwellings by descendants of the first settlers. A large part of Bristol is built of brick, giving the town a substantial and comfortable appearance; Mill Street, the main thoroughfare, has many old business houses on it, and Radcliffe Street, stretching through its vista of shade-trees, for a long distance along the river's bank, is lined with fine mansions, most of them set in spacious grounds, and all commanding views of the Delaware, creeping seaward between grassy and wooded banks.

Peace and rest dwell the twelvemonth through in Bristol, and it is fitting that they do, for the town is the eastern gateway to the Penn's Wood of other days, and six miles to the north of it, up the Delaware, is Pennsbury Manor, the spot where stood the mansion erected and occupied by William Penn. The estate originally consisted of above six thousand acres, bounded by Welcome Creek and Governor's Creek. A tract of three hundred acres, including the site of the homestead, is now owned as a farm by William Penn Crozer. Many years ago a visitor to the place noted the fact that nine gnarled cherry-trees were then standing as the remains of Penn's cherry hedge along the lane. One poor stump is all that is now left, and this relic is fast crumbling into dust, but the well that belonged to the old mansion still gives its pure water to the thirsty or curious wayfarer.

The manor-house was of brick, and might possibly have been preserved till now had not a neglected water-tank on the roof helped by its leakage the process of decay. The only vestiges of the building remaining are the old bricks, which pave the cellar floor of the present farm-house. The ancient house was sixty feet long and forty feet deep, with offices and adjoining buildings. It was begun in 1682, immediately upon Penn's arrival, and was constructed in the best style of the day, costing some thousands of pounds and consuming four or five years in its erection. With its stately porch in front and rear, and wide hall running through it, and spacious apartments, it must have presented an appearance of elegance unusual to the New World. There was stabling for twelve horses, and it was not forgotten to provide a brew-house in which to brew ale for the household.

A beautiful garden was laid out between the house and the river, and a broad shady walk added to the grace of these elegant grounds. In the years 1700 and 1701 the founder lived here in the style usual to men of his rank in colonial times, entertaining frequent guests with liberal hospitality. The Indians here held conference with the distinguished Friend, and on one occasion he gave a feast under the poplars at the manor to his Indian visitors, at which time one hundred turkeys were served up, “besides venison and other meats.” In attending to his extensive plantations Penn was often away, so that he frequently passed in his barge from Philadelphia, then beginning its history, to this manor home on the Delaware, which was then wooded to its very edge with stately forest-trees. But he was not permitted long to enjoy his rural tastes. Interests imperilled by political changes called him to England, and though he hoped soon to return and spend the evening of his life in this chosen home, his wish was never gratified.

The country about and beyond Pennsbury Manor is classic ground. Not far away is the site of the house in which Moreau, Napoleon's old marshal and the victor of Hohenlinden, led the life of an American country gentleman until, in an evil hour, he listened to the proposals of the Emperors of Austria and Russia, and went back to Europe to have his legs shot off at Dresden; a short distance to the north Washington made his famous “crossing of the Delaware” on the Christmas Eve of 1776, a few miles to the south is Trappe, long the home of Muhlenberg, and an easy morning's journey through Bucks and Montgomery into Chester takes one to historic Valley Forge, where was passed the gloomiest and saddest period of the war for independence.

Trappe, which lies near the lower edge of Montgomery County, is a small place and modest, but it has played its part in history, for it was here, in 1733, that the first Lutheran place of worship in America was erected, and it was here that Muhlenberg began his great work of establishing the doctrine of his church in this country. He came from Germany to the settlement of Trappe in 1742, and found a structure of logs that the primitive Lutherans had built to worship in. In 1743 he built a stone church to take the place of the rude log sanctuary, and it stands to-day just as it was finished a century and a half ago. It has not been used for church service for many years, but is sacredly preserved for its historic associations.

The walls of this ancient church are moss-grown and worn by wind and storm, but they are firm, and able to defy decay and ruin for another century. Its odd and angular architecture is striking. There is no steeple, and from the peak the roof slopes gradually for a few feet, and then drops at a sharp angle to the eaves. The heavy arched vestibule door is fastened by a ponderous lock, the great key that unlocks it being yellow and eaten with rust.

The interior of the church is as it was the day services were first held in it by Muhlenberg, except that the high, straight-backed pews show the marks of occupancy by generations of worshippers. The curious oaken pulpit, hanging high against the wall at one end of the room, and reached by a long flight of steps, is the same from which Muhlenberg preached. Above the pulpit is the sounding-board that aided in making the preacher's words more distinct to his hearers. A gallery of hewn oak timbers, with quaint wrought-iron braces to support it, extends around three sides of the room. Paint never stained the interior of the old church, and it was never heated, even in the coldest weather. Over the door on the outside a Latin inscription could once be read, but the rude letters have been so obliterated by time that they can no longer be deciphered.

The burial-ground of this ancient edifice contains the graves of the pioneers of Lutheranism in this country, and here repose the remains of Father Muhlenberg himself. Beside his lie those of his distinguished son, Peter, who was preacher, soldier, and statesman. It was this son who, at the breaking out of the Revolutionary War, appeared in the pulpit dressed in the uniform of a colonel, and telling his people that there was a time to preach and a time to fight, and the time had come to fight, proceeded to enlist men for the patriot army on the spot.

From Trappe, which promises to long remain one of the most delightful of New World nooks, a tree-embowered road winds southward between low hills to the site of II. — 6 Washington's camp at Valley Forge. This covers some two thousand acres of rolling meadow-land, broken here and there with abrupt wooded hills. The old stone mansion occupied as head-quarters by Washington and his staff fronts the station of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. Southward, at a distance of a quarter of a mile, is the spot where Washington's original head-quarters stood, the building, now removed, which he occupied in December, 1777. A stone's throw from there is the bubbling spring known as “Washington's Spring,” on the right bank of Valley Creek.

On the farther side of that stream, a step below, is the site of the old Valley Forge, from which the locality takes its name, built in 1757. To the southeast a few hundred yards, extending in a zigzag line north and south for a quarter of a mile, are the remains of the old entrenchments thrown up by the patriot troops, and still easily distinguished by the irregular and scattered heaps of stones and the uneven elevation of the greensward. To the right of these remains are the foundation-stones and decayed timbers of Fort Washington, which served as the eastern bulwark of the camp. Southwest of this, a quarter of a mile farther, is the site of the head-quarters used by Knox and the officers of his command, and a short distance below, on the other side of Valley Creek, is the site of Lafayette's head-quarters, a two-and-a-half story house which still stands, little changed by the years.

It was after the disastrous battles of the Brandywine and Germantown that the Continental army went into camp at Valley Forge. The enlisted men and their field and line officers dwelt in cabins, each built to accommodate twelve men. Six months of terrible suffering were spent in these dreary huts. The patriot troopers, ragged and half starved, without shoes or blankets or proper clothing, slept at night during the whole dreadful winter of 1777–78 on the bare earth, and in the daytime, in providing firewood for their comfortless cabins, left foot-tracks of blood on the frozen ground, hallowing the very soil by the severity and heroism of their sufferings. Disease added its terrors to those of famine and cold, and smallpox wrought fearful havoc in the camp. Facilities of transportation were scarce, and such supplies as could be procured were carried upon the backs of the men and hauled in improvised hand-carts. By the middle of January, 1778, things were so desperate that General Varnum wrote to General Greene, “In all human probability the army must dissolve.”

The prospect for American independence was dark indeed, but in the character of Washington was something which enabled him, notwithstanding the discordant materials of which his army was composed, and in spite of the hardships and privations his men endured, to so attach both officers and soldiers to his person that no distress could weaken their affections nor impair the respect and veneration in which he was held by them. When that army, after its trying ordeal, left Valley Forge, it started upon a career of victory, and never again knew the sting and bitterness of defeat. The battle of the Brandywine was the high-water mark of British success, and after June 18, 1777, until the surrender at Yorktown the army of the invader constantly met with reverses.

The passage of six-score years has made few changes at Valley Forge. Trees have been cut down and the woods which sheltered Washington's soldiers have disappeared, but the generals' head-quarters, with one or two exceptions, are still standing, and the Potts mansion, which housed Washington and his staff and is now the property of the Sons of America, appears inside and out almost precisely as it was when occupied by the patriot captain.

A plain, somewhat contracted-looking house is this Valley Forge shrine, after the usual type of ancient Pennsylvania homesteads, with a queer roof over the door and narrow, small-paned windows that end in low, deep window-seats. Interest in the house centres in the back room used by Washington as a private office and furnished with articles gathered here and there of the date of Washington's residence, but the dwelling as a whole strikes the visitor as a bare-looking and somewhat dreary place, and when its few relics have been inspected one is not unwilling to leave it for the drive over quiet country roads to the church built in 1715 and known as “Old St. David's at Radnor.”

This little temple in the wilderness, of which Longfellow wrote in one of his last poems, —

“What an image of peace and rest

     Is this little church among its graves!

All is so quiet; the troubled breast,

The wounded spirit, the heart oppressed,

     Here may find the repose it craves.

“See how the ivy climbs and expands

     Over this humble hermitage,

And seems to caress with its little hands

The rough gray stones as a child that stands

     Caressing the wrinkled cheeks of age.

“You cross the threshold, and dim and small

     Is the space that serves for the Shepherd's fold;

The narrow aisle, the bare, white wall,

The pews and the pulpit, quaint and tall,

     Whisper and say: ‘Alas! we are old!’”

stands in a secluded spot, among sloping fields and wooded hills, and wears an air of antiquity so marked that one might almost imagine himself transported to another age

Old St. David's, Radnor, Pennsylvania

and country. The ivy-clad structure is of rough graystone, in the old Pennsylvania style. The walls are thick, the shingled roof low, the windows arched, and the shutters iron-barred. Within the church an oaken table serves for an altar, and the pews are square and provided with doors. A high gallery extends across the end, and this is reached by a flight of stone steps from the outside, — a peculiarity that forms one of its distinguishing features.

The little church stands in a forest of gravestones, and even its door-step covers the dust of one of the forefathers of Radnor, a certain William Moore, who, dying in 1781, was, it is said, buried beneath the step as a mark of dishonor, on account of his being a Tory. Another tale has it that this was a token of respect. He requested that his remains might be interred under the pulpit, and as the vestry were unwilling to place them within the church, it was decided that the suppliant's bones should be deposited in the next best location, — before the door. Be this as it may, Moore's memorial stone has been trodden upon for a hundred years, so that his epitaph has become a blur, — little of him to day can be read but his name.

The most interesting spot in this fruitful God's Acre is the grave of that fearless soldier of the Revolution, General Anthony Wayne, who here takes his rest with his wife and kindred beside him. A stately monument marks the spot where his bones were interred, in 1809, having been brought, a dozen years after his death, from their original resting-place at Erie to be deposited amid the familiar scenes of his youth and manhood. This second funeral was a great event in the neighborhood. “The remains of General Wayne,” says the historian of Old St. David's, “were removed from the fortress at Presqu' Isle to Radnor church-yard by his son, Colonel Isaac Wayne, and at the same time (July 4, 1809) the Pennsylvania State Society of the Cincinnati, with due ritual ceremonies, placed over the grave of the illustrious dead the present monument. The wonders of that day are still fresh in the minds of some of our church-members; the First City Troop, of Philadelphia, under command of Mayor Robert Wharton, rode out to Radnor, and performed the honors of war over the grave of the general, but so excessively hot was the day that one of the officers is said to have fainted while coming down the hill near which the present parsonage stands. The hearse proceeded from Mr. Wayne's house to the church, and an old soldier named Samuel Smiley is said to have marched before it all the way, refusing to ride, and mourning the loss of his old commander.”

There is another noble reminder of Wayne in the land which holds his dust. Just over the hills from Old St. David's is the house in which he was born, and where he spent most of his life when not engaged in military campaigns, — a grand old homestead, still owned and occupied by his descendants. The house is filled with relics of Wayne, and the parlor is furnished exactly as it was in the general's time. It has an antique fireplace, with brass andirons and fender, and on the mantel are two pairs of china vases with handles that have survived without a crack, and a pair of silver candlesticks and snuffers. A beautiful old mirror fills the space between the windows, the stiff draperies of the period that cross it from the window almost concealing its beauty. These draperies are looped with gilt pins, and harmonize thoroughly with the ancient-looking sofa and chairs and the stiff neutral-hued carpet. The chairs, of course, are high-backed and broad-seated, after the fashion of a century ago, and the room as a whole is an admirable relic of that olden time.

A leisurely half-hour's stroll from the Wayne homestead is Paoli, scene of the massacre of a hundred and fifty American soldiers on the night of September 20, 1777,  — nine days after the battle of the Brandywine. The Americans, pursued by the British, had fallen back to Warwick Furnace, in Chester County, and General Wayne, whose command numbered some fifteen hundred men, had been ordered by Washington to cut off the enemy's baggage-train and halt his advance towards Schuylkill valley, thus affording the Continentals time to cross the river and march down the other side.

Wayne moved quickly, and the afternoon of September 20 found him encamped near the spot now marked by the Paoli monument, some four miles in the rear of the British army. It was his purpose to attack the enemy's rear whenever they should resume their march towards the Schuylkill, but he did not take into account the treachery of his old friends and neighbors. Late that night, under cover of darkness and guided by Tory residents of the countryside, the British general, Grey, massed his troops as near the camp of Wayne as possible without betraying a knowledge of his approach through the woods, and made a deadly charge upon the American corps.

Although cleverly executed, the surprise was not complete. The assailants were received with several close and destructive volleys which must have done great execution; but the Americans were greatly outnumbered, and, in the end, were obliged to retreat in haste and disorder. Many victims were massacred after resistance on their part had ceased; the cry for quarter was un-heeded, and the British bayonet did its work with unpitying ferocity. Of the American dead, fifty-three were laid in one grave. A pile of stones marked their burial-spot until 1817, when a monument was placed above it by the people of Chester. The present monument, a handsome granite shaft, with inscriptions on the four sides, was unveiled on the centennial of the massacre in 1877.

Paoli, which borrows its name from the Corsican general Pasquale di Paoli, leader of the revolt against the Genoese, is an old, old place in the midst of charming scenery; and, indeed, full of legend and story, as are nearly all the beautiful nooks and hamlets of Southeastern Pennsylvania. There is Swarthmore, with its memories of Benjamin West; and there are the Quaker villages of Kennett Square, Oxford, and Calvert; Robert Fulton's birthplace among the Conowingo Hills, and sleepy Manheim, on the hitherside of Lancaster, with its stories of Baron Stiegel and its yearly “Feast of the Roses,” — all within compass of a day's journey by rail or wheel from Philadelphia.

Swarthmore, the Springfield of other days, was founded by Thomas Pierson, the friend and comrade of William Penn. Thomas Pierson's daughter married John West, and one of the children of this union was Benjamin West, the painter. West left America when he was twenty-two years old never to return, but the house in which he was born, a stone structure with dormer-windows set squarely in the sloping roof, still stands inside the college grounds at Swarthmore very like it was in the painter's youth. Here, with no guide save native love for the beautiful, West began to draw and paint, and the first expression of his talent was in the picture of a sleeping child, drawn in this old house. It is commonly told that it was his sleeping sister who inspired him; but Benjamin was the youngest of his father's children. The mother of the baby was Benjamin's sister. She had come with the infant to spend a few days with her parents. When the child was asleep, Mrs. West invited the mother to gather flowers in the garden, giving the little boy a fan with which to flap away the flies while he watched the baby in their absence.

The child smiled in its sleep. Seizing pen and paper, and having fortunately both red and black ink on a table near by, he drew a picture which he endeavored to conceal when his mother and sister entered. The mother, noticing his confusion, requested him to show what he was hiding. Mrs. West looked at the drawing with pleasure, and said to her daughter, “I declare, he has made a likeness of little Sally,” and kissed him with fondness and satisfaction. This is chronicled in Galt's “Life of Benjamin West” as “the birth of fine art in the New World.”

The old house at Swarthmore also brings to mind the piquant romance of which West was the hero. Elizabeth Shewell was an orphan girl residing with her brother in Philadelphia. This brother, an ambitious man, urged her to marry a wealthy suitor, but she refused, having already pledged her vows to West. Thereafter a close watch was kept upon the girl, and orders given to the servants to refuse admittance to West if he ever came to the door. For five years Elizabeth waited; then assisted by friends, watching within and without, — Benjamin Franklin was one of them, — she descended a rope-ladder from the window of her room, and was hurried into a waiting carriage and driven rapidly to the wharf, where a ship was ready to sail. The father of West received her, cared for her during the voyage, and delivered her to the eager lover, who came aboard the ship at Liverpool and embraced her rapturously.

“Hast thou no welcome for thy old father, Benjamin?” asked the aged Quaker, who stood, smiling, to behold their joyful meeting.

“That I have, father!” cried the son, and the father never after felt a moment's neglect.

The lovers, upon their arrival in London, went at once to St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, a favorite church for weddings to this day, and marriage sealed a union which never knew discord or sorrow. West, in after-years, sent a portrait of his wife as a peace-offering to her brother, who never looked at it, but had it stowed away in the garret of his house. One of his grandchildren remembers having beaten with a switch the portrait of his “naughty aunty” who smiled upon the children playing in the attic, where she had gone to weep, a lovelorn maiden, — smiled upon them from her calm estate of wedded bliss in England.

Swarthmore lies midway between Paoli and the Delaware, and from it a railroad runs to Kennett Square, another quaint Quaker village, now indissolubly bound up with the name and fame of Bayard Taylor. This poet was born and spent his early youth in or near Kennett Square, and when he had won fame and fortune he realized a dream that had haunted him in his travels and, in 1859, built Cedarcraft, a dignified mansion placed in the midst of a broad domain about a mile from the town of Kennett and facing the home of his youth. Nearing it from the village, one catches a glimpse of the house through the trees that cluster about it, but, as one drives or walks on, it is soon shut from view by a grove of oaks and chestnuts that rise like a wall on the hither side of the estate. A low hill ascended, one comes to a wide rustic gate, which opens into a short woodland drive, at the end of which stands the house, kept in excellent condition by its present owner.

A substantial, two-storied structure of red brick, with corners of gray granite, Cedarcraft has a spacious and a cosy look, such as a poet's home ought to have. Taylor loved it as he did no other spot on earth, and within its walls he did the greater part of his best work, for it was at Cedarcraft that he wrote “The Poet's Journal,” “The Masque of the Gods,” “Home Pastorals,” and “Deukalion,” his two novels, “Joseph and his Friends” and “The Story of Kennett,” and the major portion of his translation of “Faust,” — the crowning literary effort of his life.

Taylor left Cedarcraft for the last time in the summer of 1877. He died a few months later in Berlin, whither he had gone as United States minister. In March, 1879, his body was brought back to America and laid to rest in Longwood Cemetery, a few miles from Kennett, where a modest monument marks the graves of the poet and of his first wife, Mary Agnew. But it is Cedarcraft that is and will long remain Taylor's most, speaking memorial. Its owner should count himself a fortunate man, for in possessing it he possesses more than his house and his grounds, — the home in which a famous and gifted poet once lived, and which will always be associated with his memory, — a shrine to which reverent pilgrimages will be made in the years to come.

Kennett Square, a handful of houses lying along clean roadways, remains as in Taylor's time a distinctively Quaker community, and Oxford and Calvert, to the west and south of it, are still given over in the main to members of the Society of Friends. Calvert, settled in 1701, and known until very recently as Brick Meeting-House, is the oldest of the three, and most of its people dwell on lands given to their forefathers by William Penn. Thrift rules in Calvert, and abstinence and prudence regulate its morals. The inhabitants under protest pay tribute to the State and Federal governments and a subsidy to support a national army. Moreover, there is the tradition of a long-gone day, what time the whole country thrilled with martial music and the tread of soldiers marching to the battles of the Civil War, that came freighted with dire import for peaceful Calvert, whose simple souls as yet realized but dimly that war had the nation by its throat.

On the day noted, however, a government tax-gatherer invaded the community in the interest of his duty to lay a war tax there, and a tranquil-minded patriarch, the wealthiest and most influential citizen of the village, impelled by his resolute scruples against warfare, persistently refused to pay his individual assessment. He placidly accompanied an officer of the law to the shire town and was lodged in the county jail, where, sustained by his conscience, he bore imprisonment with meekness and fortitude. After he had been confined there a week or more a wealthy citizen of another faith paid the Quaker's war tax, and the old man went back to his home and hill-side acres.

Since then Calvert has been a hamlet without a history, a domain given over to peace, where Time's course is as smooth as a June breeze in the meadows. Peaceful and benignant, yet retiring and self-contained, the Quakers of Calvert seldom, if ever, seek converts among the people about them, but on each First Day they faithfully gather at the Old Brick Meeting-House, one of the Friends' most widely known landmarks, within the walls of which seven generations have worshipped after the fashion taught by Fox and Penn, and attendance at one of their meetings proves an experience not likely to be soon forgotten. When all the seats are filled there is stillness for a time, and then the voice of some Friend “moved by the spirit” will be heard. Beginning in ordinary tones, the utterance soon rises to the peculiar sing-song of the sect, — fascinating and appropriate when used by some sweet-voiced woman Friend, but grating not a little on worldly ears when in the nasal twang of some fervent male exhorter. This finished, perhaps some one will offer prayer. Now and then a member whom the spirit has never moved before will get up, speak a few words, and sit down. It is seldom that more than two or three speak. A clasp of hands across the low partition, which divides the meeting-room into two parts, by the man and woman nearest each other on the front seat ends the service, and with the rustle of the women's dresses and the noisier footfalls of the worshippers follows the quick emptying of the house.

Calvert was settled, as I have said, in 1701, and the burial-ground around the Old Brick Meeting-House is now thickly sown with the graves of the hamlet's dead. One of these mounds covers the dust of a woman whose career offers a tempting theme for the story-teller. Elizabeth Maxwell was a comely and spirited English maiden, born in the opening year of the eighteenth century. Her mother and her uncle, Daniel Defoe, — the same Daniel Defoe who wrote “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Plague in London,” — frowned upon the attentions paid her by a young man in London, and eighteen-year-old Elizabeth, angered by their treatment, left home secretly and suddenly and took passage on a vessel for the New World.

The wilful girl, having no money with which to pay her passage, agreed with the captain, as was common in those days, to be sold for a term of years on reaching America. The sale occurred in Philadelphia in the fall of 1718, a number of other persons who came across the sea in like manner being offered at the same time. Andrew Job, of Calvert, attended the sale, purchased Elizabeth for a period of years, and took her to his home, where Thomas Job, his kinsman, fell in love with and married her. After her marriage she wrote her relatives in London of her circumstances and surroundings. Her uncle, Daniel Defoe, replied that her mother had died and left property by will to her. A list of the property came with the letter, and her uncle was desirous that she should take especial care of articles he had used in his study, “as they had descended to the family from their Flemish ancestors, who sought refuge under the banner of Queen Elizabeth from the tyranny of Philippe.” Among the goods sent over were two chairs he had used in his study, and which are still in the keeping of his niece's descendants. Mrs. Job dwelt happily in Calvert until her death in 1782.

Fulton's birthplace is a few miles west of Oxford, in what was formerly Little Britain township, — now Fulton, — in Lancaster County. The house in which the inventor was born is of stone, plastered outside, two stories high, and one end of the long, low structure is higher than the other. At the east end is a small porch set under the overhanging roof. The side of the house, which is, perhaps, fifty feet long, is near the foot of a sunny hill-slope, and through the hollow runs the Conowingo Creek, which empties into the Susquehanna. A large white modest barn is behind the dwelling, and a rusty, narrow-gauge railroad runs before the side yard, at the crossing of a dusty clay road.

When Fulton was born in 1765, the house was used as a tavern, and it is said that his father, an Irishman from Kilkenny, was the proprietor of it for a number of years. The elder Fulton fell into financial straits, and, in 1772, his home passed to the ownership of Joseph Swift, of Philadelphia, in the possession of whose descendants it has remained to this day. This corner of Lancaster County has produced many eminent men. David Ramsay, the historian of South Carolina, was born in Drumore township, near Fulton House, and Oliver Evans, who is said to have made the first traction engine for common roads, came into life on the Red Clay Creek, which flows only a few miles from Fulton's birthplace.

Before he was twenty Fulton left Lancaster County never to return, but as a child playing about the doorway of his father's tavern he no doubt often saw Baron Stiegel sweep by on the way from Philadelphia to his country-seats at Manheim and Shaefferstown. Stiegel was the hero of an exceptional career. Descended from a wealthy and titled German family, he came to America in 1750 and became one of the pioneer iron-masters and glass manufacturers in the colonies. His furnace was at Elizabeth and his glass factory at Manheim. The baron resided in Philadelphia, where he had married an American wife, and his frequent journeys to his iron- and glass-works were imposing affairs. The coach in which he rode was drawn by four, and sometimes eight, horses. Postilions were ever at hand, and hounds ran ahead of the horses.

The reception accorded the baron on these visits by his workmen and retainers was a lordly one. At the first sight of his approach the watchman in the cupola of the mansion he had erected at Manheim fired a cannon, which told the inhabitants their master was coming. The citizens and a band of musicians moved to the residence. Into town the baron swept, and was welcomed with cheers, music, and cannon. The cannon at Manheim was heard at Elizabeth Furnace, twelve miles away, and preparations were made to receive him. On leaving Manheim a salute was fired, and the furnace people knew he was on his way. Near Elizabeth there was a high hill, on which a cannon was placed, and at the first sight of the baron's carriage a shot was fired. The workmen in the furnace ceased their labors and, taking up their music, prepared to receive their master. From the furnace he would drive to Shaefferstown, where he had erected a large tower, on which was a cannon. This tower, since destroyed, was erected for the purpose of entertaining therein his intimate friends, and contained several apartments.

For the better part of a generation Stiegel was the wealthiest resident of the colony, except the Penns. But his wealth was not unlimited nor his business foresight altogether perfect. He lived quite beyond his means and failed. He even was imprisoned for debt. Before the Revolution cut off his resources in Europe a special act was passed for his relief. But he never recovered. His towers stood as the castles of folly, and his former luxury mocked him. He died in obscurity when he filled no higher position than that of a village schoolmaster.

However, his memory is kept alive at Manheim by his former residence, which now forms a part of one of the business houses of the town, and by a yearly function as unique as it is beautiful. When, in 1772, the baron gave the Lutherans of Manheim land on which to build a church, he stipulated that the annual rent should be “one red rose in the month of June forever.” Every year this rental rose is paid to the oldest of Stiegel's descendants, and the ceremony attending its payment has come to be known as the “Feast of the Roses.” Until its observance lapses the name and fame of the eccentric baron will remain unforgotten.