STATE-HOUSE INN.

THE crowds of gay passengers who now promenade the line of Chestnut street, especially the younger part, who behold the costly edifices which crowd the whole range of their long walk, have little or no conception of the former blank and vacant features of the street, devoid of those mansions in which they now feel their pride and admiration. It is only forty years ago since the north side of Chestnut street, facing the State-house, now so compact and stately in its houses, had but two good houses in the whole line of the street from Fifth to Sixth street; but one of these now remain-the present residence of P. S. Duponceau, Esq., at the north-east corner of Sixth street. The whole scene was an out-town spectacle, without pavement, and of uninviting aspect. In the midst of this area stood the State-house Inn, a small two-story tavern, of rough-dashed construction, very old, being marked with the year 1693 as its birthyear. It stood back a little from the line of the street, but in lieu of a green court-yard to gratify the eye, the space was filled with bleached oyster shells-the remains of numerous years of shells left about the premises at occasions of elections, &c. It looked like a sea-beach tavern. That single and diminutive inn for a long time gave all the entertainment then taken by the court-suitors, or by those who hung about the colonial Assemblies and the primitive Congress. But desolate as it looked in front and rear, having a waste lot of commons instead of garden shrubbery, and the neighbouring lots equally open and cheerless, there was a redeeming appendage in a range of lofty and primitive walnut trees, which served as distant pointers to guide the stranger to the venerable State-houseitself beyond the verge of common population.

Of those trees we have something special and interesting to say: They were the last remains within the city precincts of that primitive forest which had been the cotemporary of Penn the founder. There they had stood at the infant cradling of our nation, and had survived to see our manhood and independence asserted in that memorable "Hall of Independence" before which they stood.

When Richard Penn first came to this country, and was shown by Samuel Coates these primitive remains of his grandfather's eventful day, the crowd of associations which pressed upon his mind made him raise his hands in exclamation, and his eyes burst forth in tears.

It would have been grateful to have retained those trees, but they came to the axe before their time, to make way for city improvements. The last of them was taken down in 1818, from before the

office of Mr. Ridgway, No. 183, from a fear that its height and heaviness, in case of being blown over, might endanger the houses near it. In falling across the street diagonally, it reached with its branches the eastern end of the State-house-as if to take its last leave of the Hall of Independence there. It was found to be sound, and to have had one hundred and forty-six years' growth. Several snuff-boxes, inlaid with other relic wood, have been made from its remains, and distributed among such as have fellowship with such local recollections.*

As early as the days of William Penn, the inn had been used as an out-town tavern. The ancient black Alice, who lived there, used to tell with pleasure, that Master William Penn would stop there and refresh himself in the porch with a pipe, for which she always had his penny.

In the colonial days it was long known as "Clarke's Inn," at which he had the sign of the "coach and horses." All that we can say of mine host" is, that he prepared dogs-real dogs!-for cooking the meat of the epicures and gentry! In 1745 he advertises in the public prints, that "he has for sale several dogs and wheels, much preferable to any jacks for roasting any joint of meat." Few Philadelphians of modern times would be likely to understand what was meant. Our modern improvements are so great that we have little conception of the painstaking means they once employed for roast meats. They trained little bow-legged dogs, called spitdogs, to run in a hollow cylinder, like a squirrel, by which impulse was given to a turn-jack, which kept the meat in motion, suspended before the kitchen fire. We pity the little dogs and their hard service while we think of them! As cooking-time approached, it was no uncommon thing to see the cooks running about the streets looking up their truant labourers. What a relief to them was selfmoving jacks! and, still more, what have tin kitchens since produced for us!

Mr. Edward Duffield tells me that when he was a boy he saw the voters of the whole county giving in their votes at Clarke's Inn. On that occasion he saw the whole crowd put in commotion by an accident which befel a horse there. He had been hitched to a fence, and in pulling backward fell into a concealed and covered well of water; after being got up once he fell down a second time, and was again recovered-strange to tell-without injury! Such a covered and concealed well, of excellent water too, was lately discovered near there in the garden of Jacob Ridgway.

After the Revolution the inn was known as the "Half Moon," by Mr. Hassell; and much its attractions were increased by the charms of his only daughter Norah, "passing fair," who drew after her the Oglebies of the day.

* Since penning the above publication, “ La Fayette in America,” Vol. 2, page 232 speaks with much commendation of such a box given to General La Fayette.

WASHINGTON SQUARE.

THIS beautiful square, now so much the resort of citizens and strangers, as a promenade, was, only twenty-five years ago, a "Potter's Field," in which were seen numerous graves, generally the receptacles of the poor, and formerly of the criminals from the prison. It was long enclosed in a post and rail fence, and always produced much grass. It was not originally high and level as now, but a descending ground, from the western side to a deep gulley which traversed it in a line from Doctor Wilson's large church to the mouth of the present tunnel on Sixth street below Walnut street. Another course of water came from the north-west, from beyond Arch street, falling into the same place. The houses on the street, along the south side of the square, were but a few years ago as miserable and deformed a set of negro huts and sheds as could be well imagined.

In the centre of the square was an enclosed ground, having a brick wall of about forty feet square, in which had been interred members of Joshua Carpenter's and the Story families, caused by the circumstance of a female of the former family having been interred there for suicide--a circumstance which excluded her from burial in the common church grounds of the city. There was an apple tree in the centre, under which Mr. Carpenter was buried.

Those who remembered the place long before my recollections, knew it when the whole place was surrounded by a privet-hedge, where boys used to go and cut bow-sticks, for shooting of arrows. Timothy Matlack remembered it as early as the year 1745 to '50, and used then to go to a pond where is now the site of the Presbyterian church, to shoot wild ducks. A. J. Morris, at the same period, remembered when a water-course, starting from Arch street near Tenth street, traversed High street under a small bridge at Tenth street, and thence ran south-eastward through the Washington Square, thence by the line of the present tunnel under the prison, by Beek's Hollow, into Dock creek, by Girard's Bank. The late aged Hayfield Conyngham, Esq., when he was young, caught fish of six inches in length in the above mentioned water-course, within the present square. Another aged person told me of his often walking up the brook, barefooted, in the water, and catching crayfish.

There was a deep gulley from the end of the tunnel, to which a floodgate was fixed by the commissioners, so as to retain the water in the hollow basin then in the field at that place, and when a large quantity was gathered after a great rain, it was all let off suddenly, so as to drive out and cleanse the tunnel. There used to be two or three sinall frame houses on the north-east corner, near the jail, after

wards used by the commissioners as stables for the horses of the din carts. Up Walnut street, nigh the corner of Eighth street, was a row of red painted frame houses; in 1784-5 they were the nearest houses to Schuylkill.

It was the custom for the slave blacks, at the time of fairs and other great holidays, to go there to the number of one thousand, of both sexes, and hold their dances, dancing after the manner of their several nations in Africa, and speaking and singing in their native dialects, thus cheerily amusing themselves over the sleeping dust below! An aged lady, Mrs. H. S., has told me she has often seen the Guinea negroes, in the days of her youth, going to the graves of their friends early in the morning, and there leaving them victuals

and rum!

In the time of the war of independence the place was made awful by the numerous interments of the dying soldiers destroyed by the camp fever. Pits of twenty by thirty feet square were dug along the line of Walnut street by Seventh street, which were closed by coffins piled one upon another until filled up; and along the southern line long trenches, the whole width of the square, were dug at once, and filled up as the voracious grave required its victims. A letter of John Adams, of the 13th April, 1777, says, "I have spent an hour this morning in the congregation of the dead. I took a walk into the Potter's Field,' (a burying place between the new stone prison and the hospital,) and I never in my whole life was so affected with melancholy. The graves of the soldiers who have been buried in this ground from the hospital and bettering-house during the course of last summer, fall and winter, dead of the small por and camp diseases, are enough to make the heart of stone to melt away! The sexton told me that upwards of two thousand soldiers had been buried there, and by the appearance of the graves and trenches, it is most probable to me that he speaks within bounds. To what cause this plague is to be attributed, I don't know-disease has destroyed ten men for us where the sword of the enemy has killed one! We have at last determined on a plan for the sick, and have called into the service the best abilities in physic, &c., that the continent affords." Its final scene, as a Golgotha and ghostly receptacle, occurred in the fever of 1793, after which, the extension of improvements westward induced the City Council to close it against the use of future interments at and after the year 1795.

Some of my cotemporaries will remember the simple-hearted innocent Leah, a half-crazed spectre-looking elderly maiden lady, tall and thin, of the Society of Friends. Among her oddities, she sometimes used to pass the night, wrapped in a blanket, "between the graves at this place, for the avowed purpose of frightening away the doctors!"

The place was originally patented in 1704-5, under the name of "the Potter's Field," as "a burial ground for strangers," &c. The minutes of Council, in September, 1705, show that the Mayor, Re

corder, and persons of various religious denominations, were appointed to wait on the .commissioners of property for a public piece of ground for "a burial place for strangers dying in the city." With a cun of ninety years it was no wonder it looked well filled!

That it was deemed a good pasture field, is evidenced by the fact of its being rented by the council for such a purpose. A minute of council of 14th April, 1766, is to this effect: "The lease of Potter's Field to Jacob Shoemaker having expired, it is agreed to lease it to Jasper Carpenter for seven years, (to the year 1773,) at ten pounds per annum."

It was begun as a public walk in the year 1815, under the plan of G. Bridport, and executed under the direction of George Vaux, Esq. It has from sixty to seventy varieties of trees, mostly of native growth. In a few years more they will have extended their shade in admirable beauty, and those who may exercise beneath their branches will no longer remember those "whelmed in pits and forgotten!"

BEEK'S HOLLOW.

THIS was the familiar name of ground descending into a brook or run, which traversed Walnut street a little above Fourth street, in the line of the present tunnel, called after a resident owner near the place of the intersecting streets. Before the tunnel was constructed it was an open watercourse coming from the present Washington square, crossing under Fourth street above Walnut street by an arch, and out to Dock creek by the way of the present Girard's Bank.

Many men are still living who remember it as an open, deep and sluggish stream, from Walnut street near the present Scotch Presbyterian church, in a line towards the corner of Library street and Fourth street-then a vacant commons there. In proof of the low ground once there it may be said, that when they were digging the cellar for the house No. 73, South Fourth street, western side, below Library street, at the depth of nine feet they came to an old post and rail fence!

I can myself remember, when, a little westward of the brook, on the north side of Walnut street, there stood back from the street a very pleasant two-story old cottage, the residence of the widow Rowen, having a grapevine clustering about the lattice of the piazza, and a neat garden in front. I believe Doctor Cox built his dwelling house or the same premises, nearly forty years ago. The south side of Walnut street was then generally vacant lots; and where the present range of fine houses extends westward from the south-west