Life of
Isaiah V. Williamson
Bensalem Township is where we begin. You never heard of it? That is not to be wondered at, for there was nothing to star it on the map until a few years ago. Even now, though it lies along the Delaware River between Philadelphia and Trenton, it is thought of as an out-of-the-way farming region, in old Bucks County, Pennsylvania, celebrated for old-fashioned, straightforward, well-living farmers, chiefly of Quaker ancestors, who, according to tradition, remain county-contained and still vote for Andrew Jackson at the quadrennial Presidential elections.
Bensalem is not a railroad center. The trains simply hurry by on their way to and from New York. Neshaminy Creek, which forms its northern boundary, is not deep enough to make it a shipping point. Mills, factories, and mines, which give importance to a region and bring it in touch with the outside world, are not to be found within its boundaries.
But it has a greatness all its own that will abide and enlarge as time goes on, because of a lad born in old Bensalem more than a hundred years ago. Men are living who knew him when he was little and who proudly saw him grow to an honored manhood. They had been unwilling to leave to old scrapbooks of desultory and disconnected newspaper clippings the telling of the story of his life. Therefore, it has been possible to go among them and to jot down what they have said of Isaiah Williamson. It is well worth while to collect the notes, and put them in authentic permanent form for the sake of the thousand and sixteen boys who at this writing[1] have already felt his influence in their lives.[2] We are moved to do this also for the sake of the tens of thousands more, just beginning to live, who cannot but be influenced for good when they read of this poor country boy. There is inspiration in the story of the Bensalem lad who, in a simple way, amassed a great fortune and used it wisely during his life by sinking wells and safeguarding them, that their life-giving streams might flow on through the ages to come.
Let us go back to old Bensalem, whose queer name breathes benediction and peace. We shall keep on a straight turnpike with our story, which will best be told as simply as possible.
On a late summer afternoon, not so very long ago, two old friends, rather up in years, stopped as they were walking along a road in Bensalem Township. The man of smaller stature, not more than five feet, six inches in height, thin and rather bent of shoulders, paused to point out to his comrade of early years a one-and-a-half story weather-beaten farmhouse. The man whose little kindly hand pointed out the old house said to his friend, as they stood together on Clover Hill, "Under the roof of that house is where I first opened my eyes." The speaker was Isaiah Vansant Williamson, who, with his old friend, had gone back to see kinsfolk and friends in the region of his birthplace and childhood, and to stand once more near the early home of the beloved mother who long before had journeyed on. One of the richest men in Pennsylvania, one of the most influential in the great city where he lived, began his life in that wooden house. There he lived until he was four years old. In 1807, his parents, Mahlon and Charity Williamson, moved their family to the old homestead in Falls Township, the other side of Bristol, near Trenton, where Isaiah's grandparents had lived.
This century-old farmhouse, about four miles from the village of Fallsington, appears today pretty much as it did when Mahlon and Charity Williamson were rearing a family there. After nearly four score years Isaiah Williamson was neither afraid nor ashamed to go back to Bensalem and Falls, and to take with him those with whom he had been associated in later years. This was because he had been an honest boy of good conduct, and because he had lived true to his father's and mother's principles and instructions after he had moved away into the city. It was only an afternoon's ride from Philadelphia, and he returned frequently to meet the friends of his youth and early manhood. These old friends stopped to speak to him as he passed along the country roads making his visits. They called him "I. V.," just as they had done in the early days, and they said to each other, as they went along after the greeting, that "I. V." was "just the same—money has not changed him a speck."
How could he be other than the sunny-faced, gentle-mannered, softly-spoken man he had been from the beginning, when his manners, when his gifts came to him as birthday tokens?
He was "the grand old man" to the country friends, who knew him through and through. Did he not remember them and call them by their first names, asking for the man who broke his leg or lost his sick horse and had to be helped out of some distressing trouble? And was it not done without anyone knowing from whom the person in trouble received help? About the only hatred this true, good Quaker had was "publicity." For that matter, everybody said this much of him, but sadly enough the city people did not stop at that, and though he was persistently criticized, the man does not live who ever heard Isaiah Williamson speak ill of anyone.
Did they not all know that city life and money had not spoiled him, though he had gone off early from the Bucks County farm, where he had his first start and entered the village store, and from that ladder, as others have done, climbed up to the city business? In his later days, he became a farmer again—a money farmer; he ploughed for it, planted for it, kept close personal touch on his financial fields of growing crops and from the wise planting and steady watch, reaped great harvests; yet he did not build his life upon it or let the money twist his life into personal aggrandizement, politics or speculation. He never cornered the stock market; he never helped to lock up money, as his vast wealth would have enabled him to do; he never profited by questionable transactions within the companies of which he was a director, by absorption of other companies, freezing out the unasserting and helpless minorities.
He was a well-born man. Let the young fellow of good ancestry never forget that he starts with what the lack of to many another is a lifelong handicap. It is a great thing for any man to be well-born.
Isaiah Vansant Williamson found in his early years that he had much to be proud of in his ancestry, and doubtless his resolve not to do anything to tarnish the memory of their honorable and useful lives held him firmly to the upright course of life that marks every footstep of his long and busy days.
Because it has been thought and said that the people from whom he sprang were insignificant as well as poor, it is necessary to set forth at some detail what is known of these Williamsons that settled in Bucks County nearly two hundred and fifty years ago. Hardworking they were, indeed, but fairly educated themselves, they educated their children and trained them to the good-living, common in all the Quaker homes of that period, no matter how humble; and it was a healthy atmosphere for a boy to grow up in that large family of eight children, making a little world of itself in the farmhouse, with its dairy and barns, smokehouse and toolhouse, cattle, and chores for the six boys and two girls to do. The schoolwork, too, had to go on in the wintertime. The long evenings for lessons and talk around roaring fires of wood-logs burning in the great fireplace, near the old clock which Grandfather Peter brought from England, sixty-odd years before, and their father, Mahlon, recounting often, doubtless, the events of those Revolutionary days, when the British came up the Delaware and fired a cannon at their grandfather's house, at Penn Manor[3]; and Isaiah's father was a baby in that old cradle, in yon corner, when a cannon ball struck the doorstep and bounced over the cradle without hitting anything—and there that same cannon ball was lying in their sight, on the strong corner shelf of their home room. That cannon ball is missing today, but the old clock and the cradle are with Jesse's son, Edward, in his home at Morrisville, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.[4]
A sturdy clean Scotchman was the founder of the Williamson family in America. Dunck Williames, as he spelled his name in the earliest records, arrived in New England, probably in 1660. His name is to be seen on the list of passengers sailing from Taunton, Massachusetts, in 1661, to the Block Island Plantations, afterwards included in Rhode Island. Later, in 1667, with his wife, Wallery, he settled on the Delaware River below what is now Trenton, nearly fifteen years before the advent of William Penn. It was just after the Dutch rulers had been expelled from New Amsterdam. The Delaware Valley had long been a bone of contention between Swedes and Dutch, in which the Dutch got the upper hand.
But many English and Scotch settlers must have already been in the country, because the earliest records at Upland (now Chester) under English jurisdiction (1676) show a number of names of undoubted English and Scotch origin. "Dunck" was a contraction of Duncan, and the "Williames" soon became Williamson. Duncan Williamson must have had some influence with the Court of St. James, for at the time of his arrival he was able to join with eight others in obtaining title to a tract known as Passyunk, and thus became one of the first settlers to get title in the Philadelphia area. The patent was granted by Governor Richard Nichols, in 1667. On July 18, 1676, Governor Sir Edmund Andros granted to Duncan Williamson and Francis Walker four hundred and fifty acres on the lower side of Neshaminy, in the present limits of Bensalem Township.[5] This land extended back from the river. Williamson established a ferry across to New Jersey, which still bears his name. On the Jersey side, at Beverly, some of his descendants settled.
The first Williamson's name is on the list of "Tydable persons under jurisdiction of the court," as belonging to Taokanink (now Tacony), in 1677. In November, 1678, he served on the jury at Upland Court. This is supposed to be the first jury empaneled in what later became Pennsylvania.
The records show that on November 12, 1678, Dunck Williames petitioned to take up one hundred acres "on the lower syde of Nieshambenies Creek, 50 acres thereof att ye river syde and ye other 50 acres up in the woods." The next year, on March 12, 1679, he petitioned to take up four acres of marsh back of his "plantaceion."
Duncan Williamson died in 1699, and was buried in the Williamson family burying-ground in Bensalem Township, about three miles from Bristol. But the name of "Dunk's Ferry" has persisted to this day.[6] Something like a century later it occurs, for instance, in one of General Washington's letters during the Revolution.
10th December, 1776.
Sir:
"Yours of last evening reached me at 4 o'clock this morning. I immediately sent orders to Commodore Seymour to despatch one of his gallies down to Dunk's Ferry, and I shall dispose of the remainder in such manner and at such place as will be most likely not only to annoy the Enemy in their Passage but to give the earliest Information of any attempt of that kind.
"To Hon'ble Thomas Wharton, Junr., Esqr.,
"President of the Council
"of Safety, Philadelphia."
Now this Duncan Williamson, founder of the family, was not so absorbed in farm and ferry as to forget the important matter of child-training. For, in 1679, he made an agreement by which one Edward Draufton, also a resident of that township, was to teach his children to read the Bible. The fee was to be two hundred guilders, and the limit of time one year.[7]
It is at least evident that the several-times-great-grandfather Duncan not only had an ideal as to child-teaching and child-training, and wanted it realized, but that he was an American pioneer in that field as well as in others and that his idea remained with the successive generations.
William, the eldest of Duncan's children, inherited the greater part of the father's land by will; and dying at the age of forty-two, left it to his widow and several children. His wife was Elizabeth, daughter of Jan Claessen. William's death occurred on Christmas Day, 1721, and he was buried in the cemetery of Gloria Dei Church ("Old Swedes"), Philadelphia. William's son, Peter, was born before there was any record of births. But we know that he married Leah Le Niser on January 19, 1731, and that when he died in 1760 he left his property in Bensalem Township to his elder son, Jacob. The younger son, Peter, who bore his father's name, was born on January 17, 1735, and moved to Falls Township in 1764, when he married Sarah Sotcher, granddaughter of William Penn's steward at Pennsbury. During the Revolutionary War he lived at Beverly, and among his eight children was Mahlon, the father of Isaiah.
Mahlon Williamson was born on March 15, 1777, and he married Charity Vansant, who brought Dutch and French blood into the Williamson family. Charity's father, Cornelius, married Anne Larzelere, descendant of Jacques La Resaleur. Her grandmother was Charity Van Horn,[8] and her grandfather, Isaiah Vansant, for whom our hero was named Isaiah Vansant Williamson, who was born on February 4, 1803, was, like his father, one of eight children.
(This is evidently the home in which Isaiah V. Williamson spent most of his early life, as Mahlon and Charity Williamson were his parents.)
- ↑ Probably in May, 1907.
- ↑ The author is referring to Williamson's great philanthropy—the trade school that bears his name. The 1016th apprentice was enrolled on April 17, 1907. At the end of 1927 the number of indentures had reached 2293. In the history of the school "over 10,000 applications have been made for admission to the benefits of Mr. Williamson's philanthropy," stated President Pratt on November 16, 1927.
- ↑ The incident referred to occurred when Peter Williamson was living at Beverly, on the New Jersey side of the Delaware, and not at Penn Manor. An armed barge threw a six-inch shot into the house, which passed just over the head of Mahlon.
- ↑ Edward Williamson died on October 10, 1911. The clock is in possession of a niece, Mrs. H. B. Harper, of Trenton; and the cradle is in the Frank Williamson home, in Lancaster.
- ↑ These grants were afterwards confirmed by William Penn.
- ↑ The c in Dunck has been dropped.
- ↑ John Wanamaker evidently got this information from the records of Upland Court, where we find that Edward Draufton sued Dunck Williames for breach of contract. There was some difference of opinion as to Draufton's ability as a quick teacher. The court record reads:
"The Plt demands of this Deft 200 Gilders for teaching this Defts children to Read in one Yeare.
"The Court hayeing heard the debates of both parties as alsoe ye attestation of ye witnesses Doe grant judmt agst ye deft for 200 gilders wth ye Costs.
"Richard Draufton sworne in Court declares that hee was p'sent at ye makeing that ye agreemt was that Edmund draufton should Teach Dunkes children to Read in ye bybell & if hee could doe itt in a yeare or a halfe yeare or a quartr, then he was to haue 200 gilders."
- ↑ The Van Horn family were almost original settlers of New Amsterdam, deriving their descent from Christian Barendtse, who came from Hoorn Brabdant. Charity's father, Peter Van Horn, was a vestryman in St. James P. E. Church at Bristol. The family had been living along Neshaminy Creek for many years before Charity married Isaiah Vansant, in 1732. The father of Isaiah Vansant was married at the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, to Rebecca Vandegrift, in 1707.