Birmingham Meeting

68 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION father was more positive and aggressive in his attitude and pronouncements , mother upheld him loyally, and her constant and striking exhibit of the law of love had a strong harmonizing effect in our large family. With her religion was something to be caught rather than taught. "Farewell, my dear, be a good boy," was often the advice given to a departing child. This injunction covered every possible case, threw the responsibility on the individual and so, it seems to me, it was the counsel of wisdom. After father's death in 1876 the headship of the family rested upon her for nearly thirty years. I remember her rising at the dinner table at one of our annual family gatherings, when she was scarcely able to be there at all, and quoting: "Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity." BIRMINGHAM MEETING By William T. Sharpless Probably the state of affairs in this neighborhood, when the Quakers first settled here, cannot be described better than was done by Isaac Sharpless himself, in an article by him that was published some years ago in the Atlantic Monthly. He says, "It was a beautiful corner of Pennsylvania in which the Quaker settlers of 1682 and the following years found a home. The great river fronted it, and streams, some of them navigable, paralleled each other up into the country. The gently rolling upland was covered with a great forest of hard wood which, when cleared, uncovered a soil of unusual fertility and freedom from surface rocks. Within it wandered immense numbers of deer and not a few elk. The only animals of prey were the small wolf and the black bear, neither dangerous under ordinary conditions. The marshes abounded in water-fowl, and at certain seasons wild pigeons and other migratory birds could be captured in abundance by throwing stones into the flocks. There were turkeys, pheasants , and partridges. Shad and other sea-fish were plentiful in the river, and the little streams were amply stocked with trout. " Nor were the settlers unworthy of their possessions. A few BIRMINGHAM MEETING69 men of rank and education began a life of trade in the towns, burying their coats of arms as unworthy a Christian democracy. But the greater part were British yeoman, some landowners in their native country, the most of them renters who had loaded all their furniture, plate, clothing, and in some cases frame houses into the little sailing vessels, and set out on the two or three months' voyage to the free land which the foresight and generosity of William Penn had secured. They had shown their capacity to suffer by lying months and years in British dungeons for a point of conscience, small perhaps, but which, because it was conscience, they had persisted in thinking was worth more to them than property or liberty or life. They had shown their fraternity by offering themselves—man for man and woman for woman—for their unfortunate brethren who were about to die for conscience's sake in the horrible pest-holes of England. They were to find the free air of the woods, a soil as good as the best they had left, a life of conquest over nature to draw out their best energies, and better than all, an ideal commonwealth where persecution should never come, and where fraternity would know no bounds of rank or sect or race." The first settler of Birmingham township was William Brinton or Branton, as the name was then sometimes written, who coming from near Birmingham in England, bestowed the name of his old home on his new home here. He arrived in Philadelphia with his wife, one son, and two daughters in the summer of 1684 and settled on a tract of 486 acres near this place in 1686. To this he subsequently added by purchases until a large part of the land lying between Chester Creek on the East, the Brandywine on the West, the Street Road on the North, and what is now known as the State Road on the South, belonged to him or his immediate descendants. In addition...