e
structures, showing his little museum of curiosities--now a whale's
jaw bequeathed from the old fishing days, now a Revolutionary
cannon-ball--and helps us to realize the ancient times by means of the
music of the mill, which is loquacious now as it was under George III.

Such is a specimen of one of the stout old industries of a hundred
years ago, still surviving and hale as ever, though out of its former
proportion amongst the immense enterprises of modern days. This
article, however, must pass out of the atmosphere of ancient tradition
as quickly as possible, being intended to show the handsome city of
Wilmington with its sleeves rolled up as it were, and in the thick of
the hardest work belonging to the nineteenth century. When steam was
introduced to revolutionize labor, and railroads came to supplement
water-transport, they found the manufacturers of this prosperous town
ready to avail themselves of every improvement, and pass at once from
the chrysalis state into the soaring development of modern enterprise.

That is a feature the citizens point out with a good deal of honest
pride--the prosperity of the old families, enabling them at once to
invest in the most enormous of modern mechanical applications. The
wealthy companies now found here did not go to work by calling for
capital from the large cities: they went to the old stocking, and
found it there. The manufacturers show you, reared in a back office or
sticking on a wall, the ancient family sign, which Washington and La
Fayette regarded at the time of their disasters along the Brandywine.
It is one continuity of thrift.

Take, for instance, some of these Lairds of America, who build ships
along the Delaware as their prototypes upon the Clyde. The Harlan
& Hollingsworth Company claims to be the oldest iron shipbuilding
establishment in America. The money in this concern was local. The
partners were old neighbors, relatives or friends. They worked along
as a firm until 1868, when the huge proportions of their business
induced them to incorporate themselves as a company, still
distinguished by the good old proper names. We stroll into their
domain by the river-side, and if we previously cherished any notion
that shipbuilding was a decayed institution in America, the lively
tumult here will effectually drive the insulting thought out of our
heads. Among a shoal of leviathans stretched out beside the waters
there is the iron steamer Acapulco, waiting for he