debts. They all went up the river to
Raccoon Creek on the Jersey side, about fifteen miles below the present
site of Philadelphia, and lived at first among the Swedes, who had
been in that part of Jersey for some years and who took care of the new
arrivals in their barns and sheds. These Quaker immigrants, however,
soon began to take care of themselves, and the weather during the winter
proving mild, they explored farther up the river in a small boat. They
bought from the Indians the land along the river shore from Oldman's
Creek all the way up to Trenton and made their first settlements on the
river about eighteen miles above the site of Philadelphia, at a
place they at first called New Beverly, then Bridlington, and finally
Burlington.

They may have chosen this spot partly because there had been an old
Dutch settlement of a few families there. It had long been a crossing of
the Delaware for the few persons who passed by land from New York or New
England to Maryland and Virginia. One of the Dutchmen, Peter Yegon, kept
a ferry and a house for entertaining travelers. George Fox, who crossed
there in 1671, describes the place as having been plundered by the
Indians and deserted. He and his party swam their horses across the
river and got some of the Indians to help them with canoes.

Other Quaker immigrants followed, going to Salem as well as to
Burlington, and a stretch of some fifty miles of the river shore became
strongly Quaker. There are not many American towns now to be found with
more of the old-time picturesqueness and more relics of the past than
Salem and Burlington.

Settlements were also started on the river opposite the site afterwards
occupied by Philadelphia, at Newton on the creek still called by that
name; and another a little above on Cooper's Creek, known as Cooper's
Ferry until 1794. Since then it has become the flourishing town of
Camden, full of shipbuilding and manufacturing, but for long after the
Revolution it was merely a small village on the Jersey shore opposite
Philadelphia, sometimes used as a hunting ground and a place of resort
for duelers and dancing parties from Philadelphia.

The Newton settlers were Quakers of the English middle class, weavers,
tanners, carpenters, bricklayers, chandlers, blacksmiths, coopers,
bakers, haberdashers, hatters, and linen drapers, most of them possessed
of property in England and bringing good supplies with them. Like all
the rest of the New Jersey sett