Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920 -- Childhood and youth
My great-grandfather became "a Friend by Convincement," as the Quakers
called the Friends not born in their Society; but I do not know whether
it was before or after his convincement that he sailed to Philadelphia
with a stock of his Welsh flannels, which he sold to such advantage
that a dramatic family tradition represents him wheeling the proceeds in
a barrel of silver down the street to the vessel which brought him and
which took him away. That was in the time of Washington's second
Presidency, and Washington strongly advised his staying in the country
and setting up his manufacture here; but he was prospering in Wales, and
why should he come to America even at the suggestion of Washington? It
is another family tradition that he complied so far as to purchase a
vast acreage of land on the Potomac, including the site of our present
capital, as some of his descendants in each generation have believed,
without the means of expropriating the nation from its unlawful
holdings. This would have been the more difficult as he never took a
deed of his land, and he certainly never came back to America; yet he
seems always to have been haunted by the allurement of it which my
grandfather felt so potently that after twice visiting the country he
came over a third time and cast his lot here.
He was already married, when with his young wife and my father a year
old he sailed from London in 1808. Perhaps because they were chased by a
French privateer, they speedily arrived in Boston after a voyage of only
twenty-one days. In the memoir which my father wrote for his family, and
which was published after his death, he tells that my grandmother formed
the highest opinion of Boston, mainly, he surmises, from the very
intelligent behavior of the young ladies in making a pet of her baby at
the boarding-house where she stayed while her husband began going about
wherever people wished his skill in setting up woolen-mills. The young
ladies taught her little one to walk; and many years afterward, say
fifty, when I saw her for the last time in a village of northwestern
Ohio, she said "the Bostonians were very nice people," so faithfully had
she cherished, through a thousand vicissitudes, the kind memory of that
first sojourn in America.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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