In speaking of the Pennsylvania Legislature, he 

 called them "the assembled wisdom of the State, 

 that could not see beyond their noses." They could 

 see the grain go into the mill and come out flour, 

 but as to a wagon being moved by any other power 

 than the slow-moving ox, the horse, or mule, or being 

 dragged by man power, was beyond their compre- 

 hension. He had asked no aid other than protection 

 in case of success. It would cost them nothing, yet 

 he had been treated with contempt little short of 

 insult. 



Of the grant from the State of Maryland he said 

 the Hollingsworths, the Ellicotts, the Tysons, and 

 others, were men of enterprise and progress, more 

 so than the average of the time. 



He was very severe in his denunciations of Ben- 

 jamin H. Latrobe, whom he blamed for a report on 

 steam navigation he had made, in which he alluded to 

 him (Evans) as a visionary, seized with steam mania, 

 in conceiving and believing that boats and wagons 

 could be propelled by steam to advantage; while he 

 (Latrobe) demonstrated by figures that could not lie 

 that the entire capacity would be required to carry 

 the engines and fuel, leaving no available tonnage for 

 freight and passengers. 50 The B. H. Latrobe referred 

 to was the father of the very eminent engineer, B. H. 

 Latrobe, Jr., who carried to a successful termination 

 one of the greatest of American enterprises — the 

 Baltimore and Ohio Railway, and other important 

 works. The elder Latrobe was an accomplished 

 English architect and engineer, who designed and 

 erected the first water works of Philadelphia, by 

 which a steam engine on the Schuylkill River raised 

 the water into a brick underground conduit, through 

 which it flowed nearly a mile into a cistern in Centre 



50 This is the report on steam engines in America that Latrobe 

 made in 1803 for transmittal to the Rotterdam and Batavian 

 Societies (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1809, 

 vol. 6, pp. 89-98). 



%c- 



Figure 18. — Oliver Evans (1 755-1 81 9). 

 From Appleton's Dictionary of Machines, Mechanics, 

 Engine- Work, and Engineering, 2 vols. (New York, 



1867). 



Square, the site on which the new public buildings 

 are now being erected. Over this cistern was the 

 engine house, on the top of which, covered by a dome, 

 was the reservoir or basin, to give head to supply the 

 city with water through bored wooden pipes. 



Mr. Evans frequently referred to his blasted hopes. 

 He had succeeded in obtaining indorsements of Prof. 

 Robert Patterson, David Rittenhouse, C. W. Peale, 

 Nathan Sellers, and a number of others whose names 

 I cannot recall, as to the feasibility of his plans. He 

 was meeting with success in interesting parties of 

 means, and was full of hope of demonstrating to the 

 world that he was no visionary, when Mr. Latrobe's 

 report proved too much for him to overcome, and 

 he was obliged to abandon the project of demonstra- 

 tion by outside aid. 



It is now about 66 years 51 since I rode with my 

 father and Oliver Evans from Philadelphia to a mill 



51 This article was written in 1884. That would make the 

 date of the ride 1818, when Sellers was nearly 10 and Evans 

 was within a year of his death at 64. 



37 



