Page:Historic towns of the middle states (IA historictownsofm02powe).pdf/394

This page needs to be proofread.

per foot, and "drink." In order to save wages the men of the parish came as they found leisure and hewed the timbers. Masons and other skilled mechanics came from Philadelphia, then "a clever little town," and with them came Dick, a negro mortar-mixer.

Notwithstanding the erection of the new church, the community seems to have grown away from the scene of the original landing, until in 1731 Thomas Willing, son-in-law of Andrew Justison, of Swedish blood, laid out upon the Christiana front, half a mile from the Rocks, a new town modelled upon the rectangular plan of Philadelphia. The first house in Willingstown, built at the corner of Front and Market streets, bore in its brick gable a stone with the inscription, "J. W. S., 1732." Three years later the place was only a small hamlet, but in that year Willingstown had a new birth, for then William Shipley, a wealthy, well educated and energetic English Friend of Ridley in Pennsylvania, came to the place and made himself, so to speak, its second founder. He came through the influence of his second wife, Elizabeth Lewis, a preacher of his own sect, who saw in a vision a goodly land lying at the foot