Figure 3. — High Street, Philadelphia, looking west. The 

 "Market Street Store" of Nathan Sellers was similar to the 

 building in the right foreground. From Charles W. Janson, 

 Stranger in America (London, 1807). Library of Congress 

 photograph. 



began at home in his father's shop. Although he was bound to no particular master 

 as an apprentice, he became certainly a competent machinist, profiting from associa- 

 tion as a boy with such fine craftsmen as Isaiah Lukens, William Mason, his uncle 

 Franklin Peale, and the itinerant German aristocrat known only as Henri Mogeme. 

 Like most other engineers of his generation, the only advanced training that Sellers 

 obtained was in the field or from such books as he was able to command. 



George Escol Sellers was born less than a decade after the great federal period of 

 Philadelphia's history, when President Washington lived across Market Street from 

 Nathan Sellers's store and paper mold manufactory between Fifth and Sixth Streets, 

 when Secretary of State Timothy Pickering lived next door, and when such lumi- 

 naries as David Ritten house were of "the set that congregated about the stove of 

 winter nights in the Market Street store." 5 He could recall personally the merchant 



5 Memoirs, book 1, p. 7!!; book 7, p. 6. 

 xvi 



