So potent was the magic of William Shipley’s presence that in four years the town had reached six hundred inhabitants. Next year it received a borough charter from Penn, and its name was changed to Wilmington, in honor of Lord Wilmington, says Ebeling, the German historian. It was a tight little borough, the Wilmington of that day and of fifteen or twenty years later. The burgesses, who at first met about in taverns, at length were comfortably housed in a neat little Town Hall built upon arches over one end of the Second Street market. There were fairs during most of the eighteenth century; fairs to which hundreds came in holiday attire and dancing shoes to make merry to the sound of bagpipe, flute, fiddle and trombone. It is significant of grave Quaker austerity, perhaps, that the fairs were suppressed by act of Legislature in 1785, as nurseries of vice, a scandal to religion, and an offence to well ordered persons. There may have been some excuse for this severity, for indeed with the coming of the English had come something of the brutality of eighteenth-century English manners. Bullies fought naked to the waist in the market-place, and hired ruffians nearly cut down the posts that supported William Shipley’s market-house. The most picturesque modern survival of Wilmington in the eighteenth century is the King Street open-air market, and with it remains the statute against forestalling, made to meet the case of some early monopolist. [Illustration: SHIPLEY BUILDING.] Wilmington’s Quaker peace was little disturbed by echoes of European wars in the eighteenth century, though in 1741 the Christiana was fortified against possible Spanish pirates; but when the war of the Revolution came, Wilmington was loyal and ready. Old folk still preserve the tradition of Washington’s presence in the city just before the battle of the Brandywine, of his gay French officers in the sober house of a Quaker citizen, of President John McKinly’s capture at midnight by a detachment of British sent in after the battle, of the British wounded crowding the houses of citizens and probably saving the town from bombardment by British ships of war in the Delaware. Tradition recalls, too, the visit of Washington in his hour of victory, when he journeyed homeward to Mount Vernon, of his other visit on his journey northward to be inaugurated as President at New York, and of still another visit in 1791, when he made his famous progress through the country. On that last visit, riding in his chariot of state through little Brandywine village, opposite Wilmington, on the left bank of the Brandywine, he stopped at the house of miller Joseph Tatnall, to learn that he was at the mill, and then, with those great strides of his, walked through the village street to the edge of the stream, entered the mill, and talked with the courageous patriot Quaker of his services to the army during the war. [Illustration: OLD FRIENDS’ MEETING-HOUSE.]