682 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1959 
Washington’s answer to Potter’s misconception was twofold; first, 
to court-martial the officer who had failed to remove the stones, and 
second, to remove the millstones at once! Finally, on November 8, 
the stones were taken from the mills at Brandywine, and business 
there was temporarily suspended. By December 29, General Small- 
wood and his Continentals had reoccupied Wilmington and had 
received permission from Washington to put “one of the Mills to 
work” grinding “Flour and Horse Feed.” Smallwood was reminded, 
however, to grind nothing in excess of “what you and the inhabitants 
may want.” After the British evacuated Philadelphia in June 1778, 
restrictions were eased and the mills at Brandywine once again began 
normal operations (27). 
After the war recovery was swift, and a succession of visitors, 
foreign and domestic, wrote of their impressions of Wilmington. 
The Comte de Ségur found it “a place of considerable commercial 
activity” in 1782 (28), and, by 1785, Elkanah Watson made a point to 
stop in the town “to examine the most extensive flouring mills on 
the continent” (29). In the same year a young London merchant, 
Robert Hunter, conveyed the impression of a healthy economy when 
he related that at Wilmington the flour mills “were never known to 
cease working, summer or winter” (30), to which Dr. James Tilton 
added that in really busy times the mills ground “perpetually day 
and night” (81). Francis Asbury thought Wilmingtonians were 
overly engrossed in politics in 1791; even so, little interfered with the 
business of milling, not even politics, although most of the Brandy- 
wine millers, unlike their Philadelphia brethren, were inclined to be 
Democrats (32). Few visitors were more succinct or more typically 
French than Moreau de St. Méry who, in 1794, looked at both 
Wilmington and her mills and said “magnificent” (88). 
The 18th century was fast coming to a close when Isaac Weld 
visited the merchant mills at Brandywine. Unimpressed by the town, 
he was delighted by the mills where “no manual labour is required 
from the moment the wheat is taken to the mill till it is converted into 
flour, and ready to be packed” (84). Soon after Weld, the Duke de 
la Rochefoucault Liancourt also marveled at Oliver Evans’s ingenuity 
as he toured the Brandywine Mills. In addition to these wonderful 
machines, Liancourt observed that the mills were “not employed 
for the public” but only for the “private service” of the owners. The 
mills at Wilmington were called a “flour manufactory” and were 
not unlike those at London Bridge and Paris; although Liancourt 
noted that the French mills were driven by a steam engine (35). 
Robert Proud’s “History of Pennsylvania” cited the flour manu- 
factories on the Brandywine and Wissahickon Creeks as the best in 
America and “perhaps ... not inferior in quality to any in the 
