Life of Isaiah V. Williamson

Front matter

Life of Isaiah V. Williamson

by John Wanamaker

Philadelphia & London J. B. Lippincott Company 1928

The Background

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 have already felt his influence in their lives. 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; 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.

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. 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. Something like a century later it occurs, for instance, in one of General Washington's letters during the Revolution.

"Head Quarters, Trenton Falls, 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.

"George Washington.

"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.

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, 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.

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The Preparation

The little eight-sided schoolhouse by the roadside, toward Mahlon Williamson's farm, did not hold Isaiah for long. He soon outgrew it. In keeping with the family tradition for education, his parents made the sacrifice of putting him in the excellent Friends' School at Fallsington, a pay school for more advanced teaching. But before and after school Isaiah was a helper on the farm. He was then about twelve years old and walked daily the eight miles to and from school, lucky enough sometimes to catch a ride on the way. Most likely Peter and John, his brothers, were there also; and the Vansant children, cousins on his mother's side, from another part of the county. There were boys of the Baldison family, too, of whom John, the eldest, was Isaiah's intimate friend. And among the boys and girls of other families, there was one girl in particular, the daughter of Harvey Gillingham, store at Fallsington, of whom more will be said further on.

Isaiah's cousins, the Vansant children, would be his daily schoolmates and playmates; they were of good, solid Dutch stock, which was also Isaiah's inheritance on his mother's side. She was descended from Gerrit Vansant, who came to this country in 1651, as he testified in taking the oath of allegiance at New Utrecht, Long Island, in September, 1687. The records of the Dutch Reformed Church at that place note the baptism of several of Gerrit's children. Gerrit and his son, Jacobus, purchased land on Neshaminy Creek, each having about one hundred and fifty acres, the deeds being dated and recorded in December, 1698; and there they finally settled. Charity Vansant, of the fourth generation from Gerrit, was born in Bensalem Township, just at the close of the Revolutionary War, November 16, 1781. She was a woman of sympathetic nature and was Isaiah's confidant, having much influence over his early life.

At the time Isaiah attended the Orthodox Friends' School, the Hicksite split had not occurred, and of course the Hicksite meeting house—adjoining the Orthodox meeting house at Fallsington to this day—had not been built. The schoolhouse attached to the original meeting house of the Friends was built about the middle of the eighteenth century.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, about 1815, Jonathan Palmer was the principal teacher of this school, a man said to have been uncommonly well-educated for that day. He was supported partly by the Friends' Meeting, and partly by the farmers who sent their children to be educated.

The sessions of the school were held six days in the week—in the morning from eight to twelve, and in the afternoon from one to five o'clock, except in winter, when they closed an hour earlier. During the eleventh and first months (November and January), the girls were kept at home at work, to make room for the boys at school; in the fourth and fifth months (April and May) the boys were obliged to stay home in order to give the girls a chance; and during the seventh and eighth months (July and August) there were no school sessions because all the boys and girls were needed in the farm work.

In this school, among other studies, Jonathan Palmer taught English, French, Latin and mathematics—including geometry, trigonometry and surveying.

Of the Baldison boys in the school at this time, John—a year older than Isaiah, and his special comrade—was fond of mathematics, and gave particular attention to surveying; his brothers made a specialty of French. Isaiah, also, had his predilections; while he took the general course right through, his favorite studies seem to have been mathematics in various forms, surveying, and French—the latter being kept up in later years after he went to Philadelphia, where he took private lessons from a good French teacher. Isaiah is spoken of as having been "a bright student" while in the Friends' School. It may be assumed that his lively and fun-loving spirit would enter into the sports and pastimes and good-natured joking that every wholesome schoolboy shares. But that he was faithful to his work and was really interested in his studies may be safely inferred not only from his lifelong characteristics, but from the fact that he continued them by taking private lessons from Palmer after leaving school and while he was a clerk.

Presumably three years at the Fallsington School carried our diligent, conscientious lad as far as his teachers could. He was now between fifteen and sixteen years old, and on the question of whether he should become a farmer or not, his parents no doubt had much to say. Any such boy who makes a confidant of his mother, as he did, and who had been brought up as members of the Society of Friends train their children, would not make a decision except with his parents' consent and approval.

The fact that Isaiah's brothers were well grown and able helpers on the farm made it possible for him to choose some other employment. More than that, the brisk, bright, energetic lad, careful, accurate and trustworthy in all his habits, who took the lead in doing the store errands, showed a developing aptitude for business, though not in an extraordinary manner. He was simply a prompt, painstaking, dependable, industrious fellow with good sense and right principles, with a greater liking for a store than the farm.

Naturally, he thought of the store at Fallsington, where his family dealt and where he was known. He applied there for a position. The storekeeper, Harvey Gillingham, was willing to take him as an apprentice. In those days, the system of apprenticing was the rule everywhere and, so far as is known, young Williamson became an indentured apprentice for a term of six or seven years.

Every one that knew Williamson intimately, knows that up to his death, he earnestly maintained that the best thing that happened to him when he was young was his apprenticeship to Harvey Gillingham. In those days, the apprentice was obliged to live with his employer, and received beside his board, lodging, and clothes, not more than fifty dollars the first year, with increases of wages each year. Beside the little store in the village of five hundred inhabitants, Gillingham had a grist mill near the store and later a lumber yard.

These conveniences for the farmers to get grocery and drygoods supplies, and to turn into flour their wheat, and supply building materials, made the Gillingham Store "at the Corners" a centre not only for the village but all the surrounding townships. It supplied everything for the farm and the household, stoves, agricultural implements, hardware, clothing for women, men and boys.

The farmers brought in their poultry, eggs and butter, their pork, potatoes and apples, their wheat and oats, and traded them for harrows and harness, muslin and silk, soap and tobacco, powder and shot.

Gillingham's supplies came from Philadelphia, and thither he hauled the accumulated produce and sold it to the country produce dealers there for cash. Generally the wagons were driven to Morrisville or Bristol, where the miscellaneous cargo was transferred to a sailboat and carried to Philadelphia.

Gillingham's business was considerable, as shown by his books. One winter, for example, nineteen hogsheads of sugar were brought up to him from Philadelphia, with other goods in proportion.

Young Williamson threw himself, with heart and soul, into this whirl of country trading life, and everything goes to show that in Mr. Gillingham he had a splendid teacher and that he was an apt, enthusiastic scholar. The boy soon did a man's work, was never tired, never absent, never idle and, of course, earned and received more wages.

At the store he was known not as a dandy, but as a fine, attentive lad. His quick, manly ways pleased the far-seeing, solid Broadbrims. They recognized merit, integrity and industry in him, and their wives found him alert and polite as he rushed out to help them down from the farm carriage, to tie their horses, and to carry in their bundles. They appreciated his bright ways and bright words, knowing all the while that there were deeper depths of his nature, reserve forces, aptness and comprehension even in those formative days of young manhood.

It is wonderful how the memory of personality, of courtesy, of willingness to oblige, remains through the years, and comes down from one generation to another. Isaiah Williamson was working in the Gillingham Store eighty years ago, and yet Mrs. Rose Parsons Case, of Morrisville, remembers her mother speaking of Isaiah V. Williamson with admiration. Probably that mother went to the store in her early married days, and yet she talked to her daughter so enthusiastically about the Philadelphia philanthropist in his storekeeping days that Mrs. Case was able recently to quote her mother as having said: "He was a young man of sterling worth, prompt and deft in waiting upon customers, respectful and polite to all, an admirable clerk, as much in in the business pertaining to the store as was Mr. Gillingham, the proprietor."

The lessons of Quaker thrift and industry, of conservatism and economy, which Isaiah had been taught at home by his wise and cautious parents, became advancing studies in those seven memorable years spent in Gillingham's store and home. He would hitch up a wagon and drive around the country to pick up all sorts of country produce. In this way, he learned how to make a good trade. Twice a year the stock of the store had to be replenished in Philadelphia, and he was occasionally sent there to make purchases to replace goods sold out.

Isaiah's fairness, good temper, straightforwardness and absolute trustworthiness, and withal an inherited modesty, made him popular and a general favorite with every one coming into contact with him. Recognized by Mr. Gillingham and his customers to be important and useful, young Williamson never assumed any sense of it and was the same unconceited chap that he was the first day he came into the store.

He spent his Sundays with his parents, and with them and his brothers and sisters attended the Friends' Meeting. The years sped on happily and prosperously, as the young fellow grew in wisdom and ability for business life.

Living in Mr. Gillingham's family, he was regarded almost as a son and the brother of the Gillingham children. But for the daughter, who was a schoolmate of earlier years, there came gradually into Williamson's heart a deeper affection than brotherly friendship. It is not now known how long they had loved each other, what recognition of their affection there may have been on the part of their families, or even whether there was an engagement to marry. Mary died of consumption while yet a young woman. Isaiah's life was powerfully affected by the loss of his companion. He became restless, troubled, and anxious for a change of scene. This sorrow was always regarded at Fallsington as the chief reason of his going to Philadelphia when he had completed his apprenticeship.

Having always lived in and near Fallsington, knowing everybody and by everybody known, it was not without a struggle that the young fellow turned away to seek his fortune in Philadelphia, which even then was a large city. His few trips for duplicating purchases of Gillingham, who did his own buying, had not left much opportunity for his clerk to become known. Williamson entered the city without a friend save his cousin, Peter Williamson, living on Pine Street, between Eighth and Ninth, opposite the Pennsylvania Hospital.

From his boyhood, he was never much of a talker, but he did a lot of thinking; and seeing that he had quarried everything of knowledge and experience that he could get at the Four Corners store, the only widening avenue of progress open to him was the road to the city, and thither he must go and find his way for himself. The law of growth in the very ground under his feet, as he walked over the fields around his home, was working in the young man's soul. He could not sit down and fold his hands, and let it die out, nor could he stifle it by allowing the thorns and thistles of procrastination and cowardice to spring up to delay him, in spite of efforts of kindly friends advising to the contrary.

From childhood his mother and father taught him to be saving of everything, of clothes and shoes, as well as of the small sums of money that he earned as a boy and that they gave him from time to time.

It was under the home roof that he learned how to be careful in his expenditures, and as a little boy at home as well as a bigger boy apprenticed in a store, that he taught himself how to save. The experience and lessons of these early years were often referred to when he was a prosperous man. He used to say that before spending money it was worth while for any one to think seriously of the lot of things he could do without.

Little by little the savings of childhood, together with what was laid aside of the earnings of the seven years' apprenticeship, amounted to two thousand dollars. This is what he had to carry to the city to build his future with. It was not much money. In fact, it was less than a dollar a day for the seven years of clerking. But it included all the earlier savings. Two thousand dollars! The cornerstone of the future millionaire's life. One would say that this capital was necessary in order to accomplish what Isaiah William accomplished. But the face value of the bank bills and gold was by no means the principal part of the capital gathered together for the investment in his future in the city. Isaiah had:

A good birthright in the family name.

The good name he had earned for himself as a school boy.

A fairly good education.

A well-earned reputation during the fulfillment of his apprenticeship.

Honesty, truthfulness, industry, energy, and good habits, of which the people of Fallsington approved and to which they could bear witness.

A training in storekeeping.

The knowledge that he could earn money and save it if he wanted to.

These seven qualities far outweighed his savings that were to be added to his qualifications as a city business man. Had he lacked any one of these assets of character and experience, and had he disposed of ten times as much money, his equipment would have been far less likely to bring him success. This is only mildly stating the facts.

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Early Years in Philadelphia

The year before Isaiah Williamson went to the city to stay, a quaint little volume was published, entitled "Philadelphia in 1824," whose title page proclaimed it to be "a complete guide to strangers." This book gave the population of the city proper as one hundred and twenty-one thousand, and stated that "the built up parts" stretched along the Delaware River three or four miles, and backed up toward the Schuylkill River to the extent of only about a mile, covered with unbroken buildings on both sides of the street. This central region had as its principal thoroughfare High Street, now Market Street, and was bounded by Callowhill Street on the north, and Lombard Street on the south. East and south of Independence Hall was the finest residential section. Center Square, now covered by the City Hall, was practically open country. The business center was only two or three blocks back from the Delaware, north and south of High Street.

It was on Second Street, near Chestnut, that Williamson secured a position as salesman in a store that dealt in much the same class of commodities as those to which he had been accustomed in the country store at Fallsington. Doubtless he had a reference from Gillingham, who probably recommended him to the owner of this particular store. It is known that the Fallsington people kept up their interest in the youth who had gone to Philadelphia, and bought from him when they came to the city. Some often ordered goods from him by mail.