12. A Visit to the Mills 

 of the Brandywine 



In 1 817 or 1 818, George Escol Sellers, not yet 

 ten years old, journeyed with his father to see 

 Thomas Gilpin's new cylinder paper machine 

 on the banks of Brandywine Creek, just north 

 of Wilmington, Delaware. The area was a 

 center of industry that included mills for the 

 manufacture of paper, flour, gunpowder, cotton 

 goods, and textile machinery. 



The paper mill of Thomas Gilpin had been 

 established 20 years earlier by his elder brother 

 Joshua Gilpin and Miers Fisher. 121 Flour mills 

 had been in operation since before 1 750, and 

 by the 1 780's several were employing Oliver 

 Evans's bucket- and screw-conveyors. 122 The 

 powder mills were those of E. I. du Pont cle 

 Nemours, who had opened them in 1802. 

 William Young's cotton factory and the machine 

 shops of the Hodgson brothers have been men- 

 tioned in chapter 9. It was in the Hodgson 

 machine shops on the Brandywine that George 



Escol's uncle, Franklin Peale, had learned the 

 machinist's trade. 



Thomas Gilpin's paper machine, patented in 

 1816, 123 was based upon the similar machine of 

 John Dickinson, of London, patented in 1809. r2i 

 Details of Dickinson's machine had been obtained 

 through the extensive European travels of Joshua 

 Gilpin l25 and from Lawrence Greatrake, who 

 had returned to England on personal business 

 at the time the Gilpins were considering the 

 practicability of producing machine-made paper 

 in America. 126 



Other cylinder paper machines followed Gil- 

 pin's, as related by Sellers. Of John Ames's 

 patent for a cylinder machine, the editor of the 

 Journal of the Franklin Institute commented in 1833 

 that he could detect nothing novel in the Ames 

 specification, since Ames was merely adapting 

 a design that had originated in France and that 

 had since been improved in England and in the 

 United States. 1 -' 7 



121 The Gilpin mill is featured in the Hagley Museum, 

 located on the Brandywine at the site of early Du Pont powder 

 mills, a few miles above Wilmington, Delaware. See Harold 

 B. Hancock and Norman B. Wilkinson, "Thomas and Joshua 

 Gilpin, Papermakers," The Papa Maker (1958), vol. 27, no. 

 2, pp. 1 -10; and, by the same authors, "The Gilpins and 

 Their Endless Papermaking Machine," Pennsylvania Magazine 

 of History and Biography (October 1957), vol. 81, pp. 391-405. 



96 



>'-- Peter C. Welsh, "Brandywine: An Early Flour-Milling 

 Center," Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian 

 Institution . . . 1959, pp. 677-686. Illustrated, and with notes 

 that arc bibliographic in scope. 



123 U.S. patent, December 24, 1816. No restored drawing 

 exists, but a reconstruction of the machine from existing draw- 

 ings located by Hancock and Wilkinson (see note 121) is on 

 the cover of The Paper Maker (1958), vol. 27, no. 2. 



121 British patent 3 191, January 19, 1809. 



