The first settler within the limits of the present capital, was a Mr. Gorsuch, who, twenty-eight years after the founding of St. Mary’s, _patented_ some land on Whetstone Point, the present review-ground for the Baltimore militia. Among the earliest who followed, was Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, whose descendant and namesake signed the Declaration of Independence. It is recorded that Charles and Daniel Carroll sold the sixty most eligible acres in the town for forty shillings an acre, which the commissioners paid for in tobacco, at a penny a pound. It was then surrounded with a board-fence, with two gates for carriages, and one for foot passengers; and “provision was made to keep this notable rampart in repair.” Thus Baltimore grew and prospered, till at this day it is one of the most enlightened and agreeable capitals of the United States, the third in size, and with a population rising eighty thousand. A humorous antiquarian gives the following sketchy account of it in one of its phases. “It was a treat to see this little Baltimore town just at the termination of the war of Independence—so conceited, bustling, and _débonair_—growing up like a saucy chubby boy, with his dumpling cheeks and short grinning face, fat and mischievous, and bursting, incontinently, out of his clothes in spite of all the allowance of tucks and broad selvages. Market Street had shot, like a Nuremberg snake out of its toy-box, as far as Congress Hall, with its line of low-browed, hipped-roofed, wooden houses, in disorderly array, standing forward and back, after the manner of a regiment of militia, with many an interval between the files;—some of these structures were painted blue and white, and some yellow; and here and there sprang up a more magnificent mansion of brick, with windows like a multiplication table, and great wastes of wall between the stories, with occasional court-yards before them, and reverential locust-trees, under whose shade bevies of truant school-boys, ragged little negroes, and grotesque chimney-sweeps, _shyed coppers_, and disported themselves at marbles.