banker Stephen Girard, however, and he told of Girard's hurrying into his grand- 

 father's store one morning to volunteer financial help for Nathan Sellers, without 

 endorsers, when an erroneous report of his failure got abroad. 6 



Nathan Sellers moved about 1817 to a new home in Upper Darby Township, 

 which he called Millbank; and Coleman's family, including George Escol, moved 

 into the Market Street store. In 1828, an association by Coleman with John Brandt, 

 of Lancaster, Pennsylvania — who had devised a particularly good machine for form- 

 ing and setting the teeth in textile cards and card clothing — led to the building of 

 shops that were named Cardington, near Millbank on the Marshall Road. 



The Cardington shops grew rapidly. In addition to cards and carding machinery, 

 Coleman Sellers and his sons George Escol and Charles (two years older than George) 

 built a line of papermaking machinery. 



In 1832, when he was nearly 24, George Escol spent several months in England 

 to observe and learn whatever he could of papermaking machinery. 



Shortly after returning from England, Sellers was married, in 1833, to Rachel B. 

 Parrish. A house at Cardington was enlarged for their use, and during the several 

 years that they spent in Cardington two daughters and two sons were born into their 

 household. 



After the death of Coleman, in 1834, the sons engaged in general machine work, 

 building, among other things, two locomotives for the state railroad of Pennsylvania 

 and steam engines and other machinery for the branch mints then being established 

 in North Carolina and Georgia. In the depression that followed the panic of 1837, 

 the enterprise failed and the Philadelphia chapters of George Escol Sellers's life were 

 effectively closed. 



With his elder brother Charles, George Escol then established in Cincinnati a 

 plant to make lead pipe in continuous lengths from fluid lead. While he remained 

 in Cincinnati, George Escol sold his interest in the lead pipe plant, organized the 

 Globe Rolling Mills and Wire Works, and designed and promoted a grade climbing 

 locomotive 7 that he preferred not to enlarge upon in his recollections. 



In 1849, u 'hile they were in Cincinnati, George Escol and Rachel adopted Louisa 

 Stockton Peale, the orphaned daughter of Edmond Peale, one of George Escol's 

 many cousins. A last daughter, born to Rachel in 1852, survived only two months. 

 During the ensuing eight years their second son and both daughters died, all three 

 of them around 20 years of age. In the fall of i860 Rachel died, leaving her husband 

 with but one surviving son and an adopted daughter. 



During and after the Civil War, Sellers spent several years in southern Illinois 

 on the banks of the Ohio River, engaged in an abortive scheme to use the pithv 

 swamp canes as paper stock, and pursuing as an avocation the study of Indian 

 mounds in the vicinity of his home. The results of his speculations and experiments 



6 Memoirs, book 1, p. 42. 



7 Obituary in American Machinist (March 30. 1899), vol. 22, pp. 250-251. See also George 

 Escol Sellers, Improvements in Locomotive Engines and Railways (Cincinnati, 1849) and Observations 

 on Rail Roads, in the Western and Southern Stales, and of the Introduction of the Pioneer System, for Their 

 Construction (Cincinnati, 1850). John H. White, curator of land transportation, Smithsonian 

 Institution, will have a chapter on the Sellers grade-climbing locomotive in his forthcoming work on 

 Cincinnati locomotive builders. 



XVll 



