1886.1 Oli [Rothrock. 



Those were primitive times, though not entirely simple or 

 guileless. Party spirit ran high as now: there was as much 

 elimination and recrimination, as much bribery, billingsgate and 

 official corruption then as now. We look upon them as slow 

 times because there were no railroad monopolies, no corners in 

 grain, no great strikes and only signs of anything like the Wall 

 street of today. Yet those times and those men were the forces 

 which hastened our unprecedented material growth and cemented 

 our national units into a larger, stronger and more productive 

 whole. We may well say, too, that the subject of this sketch 

 stood among the foremost of his contemporaries, for integrity, 

 public spirit and far-sightedness. It is fairly a question whether 

 this generation will leave as much to its credit, or whether we 

 shall as well resist all tendencies toward national or social disin- 

 tegration. 



Of the successful men of this city a large proportion were 

 country lads, many of them from the counties immediately ad- 

 jacent. It is not improbable that much of Mr. Price's success 

 came from the fact that his duties as a farmer's son had hardened 

 his constitution and given him, along with great endurance, a 

 great tenacity of purpose. There is nothing like regular duty, 

 conscientiously done, to "crystallize vapory intentions." It is, 

 then, to be regarded as a bit of good* fortune that he was born 

 in the country and early inured to toil. In one place he tells 

 us, "In 1809, on my twelfth birthday, I reaped my dozen 

 sheaves" [with a sickle]. 



Yet, with all this, farm life was not much to his liking, for he 

 says he "was fond of reading and entered the counting-house to 

 escape the farm." But the labor there had done its part. He 

 was hardy, and "temperate in all things." 



On May 15th, 1815, he entered the famous shipping-house of 

 Thomas P. Cope. Previous to this, however, he had spent a 

 year in the store and family of Mr. J. W. Townsend, in West 

 Chester. This was a good preparation for his duties with the 



