The town grew like a weed and as rank. Grain was cheap, thanks to the limestone plain just beyond the low primitive rocks. Trade flowed in from the West Indies and Europe. In thirty years the place was bigger than any in the provinces. The Proprietor’s square house set the fashion, built from imported brick. Farmsteads on the road out to the German town of the new immigrants were built of the gray schists of the region. Ship-building began. Pirates lurked in the river below. The Proprietor’s official residence, now gone, fronted on the fouling pool where boats came, and matched the English country-house of South England. A little State House, which closely resembled in outer look the market-house of the same period on Second Street to the south, was built on Market Street, near the open rising ground on which Letitia Penn’s dwelling stood. Merchants’ homes were on its low hill; some of those still there are probably of this period when of imported brick. There is a row of houses on Swanson Street recalling the mechanics’ homes. In green quiet still held, the Friends’ meeting-house was erected—the present building far later. Low houses and warehouses clustered about what is now Dock Street—probably not one left. The swarm of some two thousand houses stretched along the river for what is now a square or two. Beyond were a few fields. Dense forests stood to the Schuylkill, and crowned all the little hills about, save that Fairmount stood bare, as is indeed the fashion of the sterile, rocky height. Schools were opened, of which one survives in the “Penn charter” school on Twelfth and Market. The city began its chartered existence, and the portraits of its first mayors, whose descendants are still part of the active life of the city, recall those of Guildhall, not as with like New England iconography, the Puritan remonstrants of James and Charles. An almanac was issued from the press of Bradford, whose solitary copy in the Historical Society begins printing for the State. A polyglot literature was in progress, apparent in more than one collection. The long, low, brick-built town left its image in 1720 in the picture in the entrance of the Philadelphia Library. Market stalls filled the river end of the street to which they gave a name, and these the civic organization, the peak-towered State House, the courts, the brick houses, the Proprietor’s residence, the city ordinances, the entire machinery of life, followed and imitated as closely as might be, on the edge of the wilderness, the market borough of an English shire. The town had had its first big boom and was near wallowing in its first reaction,—houses empty, more money in demand, debts oppressive, and all hope gone, when (1723) the great genius, Benjamin Franklin, who was to be its second founder and save it from Friend and Precisian, Palatinate Dutch, German, and Pietist, walked up Market Street and turned down Fourth in early morning. He was to give Philadelphia its better civilization.