After Isaiah Williamson withdrew from Williamson & Burroughs, in 1837, he began to travel in his own country and abroad. While he enjoyed the novelty of foreign lands, his tremendous belief in the great development of his native land led him far afield in the United States, seeking first-hand opportunities before investing his fortune.
The hardships of travel did not deter him—and there were hardships in those early days of a kind we do not dream of. Where the railroads went he followed them to the railheads. But much of his travel had to be in a stage coach or on a river steamer. Everywhere he studied industrial developments. He knew all of his own state, in a thorough way that few people even today, when travel is so easy, know Pennsylvania. His favorite trips were to the iron, coal and timber lands, where he gathered information that stood him in good stead in after years. Pittsburgh had a lifelong fascination for him. Up to his death he watched the progress of the steel industry.
These travels, profitable to the shrewd investor that he was from a business standpoint, broadened his ideas and outlook, and gave him an appetite for travel that led to the European trip he had long looked forward to. Leaving in May, 1841, on the Great Western, whose voyage was 13 days, 9 hours to Clifton.
From a well-written diary of his travels, kept by Williamson, probably only for his own eyes to refresh his memory in after years, much is discovered of the man himself, his sorrow in leaving friends, his enjoyment of his companions making the same "Grand Tour," his sympathetic nature, humor, and tireless energy to make the most of time and opportunity, his farseeing shrewdness in observations recorded of people, places and customs. The intensely human side of him is revealed in contradistinction to "the money bag man" that some people took him for. There are a hundred and thirty-four pages of twenty-four lines and about three hundred words on a page, all written with neatness in a small, round hand, clear as print, the i's being dotted and the t's crossed with punctilious care.
Apparently he was out to see everything that was to be seen. If he reached a city in the late afternoon, he must start right at sightseeing that very evening. Naturally, he gives larger space to the prolonged sight-seeing in such cities as London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Edinburgh and Dublin. Everywhere he visited cathedrals, art galleries, theatres, business houses, factories, wharves, charitable institutions; and expressed himself with sympathetic shrewdness about what he saw. He had his positive opinions and comparisons as to the good, bad and indifferent in art, music, oratory and ceremonial. His appreciative comments on the great men of history, literature and art, as well as on living personages he saw, were brief and passing. But they were enough to show that he was not only well informed but often held a point of view that was peculiarly his own. He did not just echo the words of the guide, the guide book, or the work he was reading. As a traveller he was individualistic. And he felt. His heart responded to the great things of art and nature—to the grandeur of cathedral and mountain, to the beauty of stained glass or velvety lawn and waving meadow, to the colors and figures of tapestry, and to the light and shade of encastled river and lake. Many things that he saw were not mentioned in the guide book.
He was sympathetic, too, to human conditions, pitiful toward poverty and sorrow; and humorously cynical of shams. He knew, also, when he was paying moderate prices and when he was being overcharged.
Transoceanic steamers in 1841 landed their passengers at Clifton, near Bristol. From there Williamson went to London, with stops at Bath and Reading. Before leaving England he seems to have planned his Continental tour with his usual care for detail. Railroads were still few. As in the United States one had to travel between many points by river steamer and stage. From London he went to Brighton, Portsmouth, and the Isle of Wight. The Channel steamer took him up the Seine to Rouen. After a stay in Paris and Lyons, he entered Switzerland at Geneva, first having stopped at Chamonix. A steamer took him along Lac Léman to Vevey. He circled around to Basel, via Freiburg. There he started the journey down the Rhine, with a side trip to Frankfort. He stopped at Mainz, Coblentz, Cologne and Dusseldorf. He left the Rhine at Gorcum to go to Amsterdam by coach, passing through Utrecht. In Holland he saw also Haarlem, Leyden, the Hague, and Rotterdam; and in Belgium, Antwerp, Brussels, and Liége.
Then began at Aix La Chapelle the journey across Europe that few in those days had the time, money, energy, and will to make. The itinerary was: Bremen, Hamburg, Leipzig, Dresden, Magdeburg, to Hamburg again by steamer, to Lubeck by diligence, and by water to Travemunde, where he boarded the Baltic Sea steamer for the four-day trip to St. Petersburg. After ten days in the capital of Russia, he was not dismayed to travel by diligence to Moscow and back. Leaving Russia by the Baltic Sea route to Hamburg, he crossed the North Sea back to London.
What he had seen of Continental culture and civilization made him feel that he ought to study at first-hand the culture and civilization of the land from which his ancestors had come and which was akin to that of his native land. Philadelphians, especially Quakers, feel more at home in England than anywhere else abroad. The diary records visits to Cambridge, Sheffield, Leeds, York, Ripon, Newcastle, Berwick, Kelso, Sidbury, and Melrose Abbey, on the way to Edinburgh. He went from Edinburgh to Dundee on a small steamer; thence to Sterling, Callander, the Trossachs, Dumbarton, and Glasgow. There he took a steamer to Belfast, went north to the Giant's Causeway, and then to Dublin. After Ireland, Wales. He crossed from Kingston to Holyhead; thence to Bangor, Chester, and Liverpool. Once more in England he visited Birmingham, Warwick, and Stratford-on-Avon. The diary ends abruptly with an account of Lord Mayor's day after his return to London in November.
These details are given to show that it was not an idling pleasure excursion that Isaiah Williamson undertook in those days of limited conveniences for rapid travel. He traversed England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Russia; visited the great art galleries of the principal cities and studied the old masters of painting and sculpture; also the great Universities of Cambridge, Edinboro and Glasgow, as well as the hospitals and schools.
So did this country lad, of Fallsington village, choose to do with his first free time, when he spent, perhaps, the largest amount of money that he ever spent for himself in all of his life.