Perhaps the brick mansion most thoroughly representative of the type of Georgian country house, of which so many sprang up about Philadelphia from 1760 to 1770, is Port Royal House on Tacony Street between Church and Duncan streets in Frankford. This great square, hip-roofed structure with its quoined corners and projecting stone belt at the second-floor level; its surmounting belvedere, ornamental dormers and great chimney stacks; its central pediment springing from a heavy cornice above a projecting central portion of the facade in which are located a handsome Palladian window and characteristic Doric doorway; its large, ranging, twenty-four-paned windows with keyed stone lintels and blinds on the lower story, is in brick substantially what Mount Pleasant is in plastered stone, as will be seen in Chapter V. As in the latter, a broad central hall extends entirely through the house, and the staircase is located in a small side hall. The rooms throughout are large and contain excellent woodwork and chimney pieces. Port Royal House was erected in 1762 by Edward Stiles, a wealthy merchant and shipowner, who like many others emigrated from Bermuda to the Bahama island of New Providence and thence to Philadelphia about the middle of the eighteenth century, to engage in American commerce. He was the great-grandson of John Stiles, one of the first settlers of Bermuda in 1635, and the son of Daniel Stiles, of Port Royal Parish, a vestryman and warden of Port Royal Church and a member of the Assembly of Bermuda in 1723. Commerce between the American colonies and Bermuda and the West Indies was extensive, and Stiles' business prospered. He had a store in Front Street between Market and Arch streets, and a town house in Walnut Street between Third and Fourth streets. In summer, like other men of his station and affluence, he lived at his countryseat, surrounded by many slaves, on an extensive plantation in Oxford township, near Frankford, that he had purchased from the Waln family. To it he gave the name Port Royal after his birthplace in Bermuda. To Edward Stiles in 1775 befell the opportunity to carry relief to the people of Bermuda, then in dire distress because their supplies from America had been cut off by the Non-Importation Agreement among the American colonies. In response to their petition to the Continental Congress, permission was granted to send Stiles' ship, the _Sea Nymph_ (Samuel Stobel, master), laden with provisions to be paid for by the people of Bermuda either in gold or arms, ammunition, saltpeter, sulphur and fieldpieces. During the occupation of Philadelphia by the British in 1777 and 1778, Frankford became the middle ground between the opposing armies and subject to the depredations of both. Port Royal House, like many other estates of the vicinity, was robbed of its fine furniture, horses, slaves and provisions.