Birmingham Township.

the line of demarkation cut his original tract into almost equal parts, giving a like portion to both of the counties. The first winter the emigrants passed in the "backwoods," that of 1685-86, was unusually rigorous, bringing in its train severe privations. To such extremity was the household reduced, owing to their remote situation, that the family tradition records they would all have perished by starvation had not the Indians supplied them with game and grain. His settlement, or the tract patented to him, had on it at the time an Indian town. The savages never disturbed him, but, on the other hand, always seemed glad to be of service or minister, so far as they could, to his or his family's necessities.

Slowly the land in that locality was settled, but the residents for several miles, who were mostly of the society of Friends, would occasionally hold religious meetings at his dwelling, which was familiarly termed "the cabin." When George Keith sowed dissension in the society, William Brinton leaned to the precepts of the former, but he ultimately became reconciled, and died in 1700, at threescore years and ten, in full membership with Friends. His wife had died the preceding year, and both were buried on the homestead farm; the place of their interment being on the right-hand side of the road leading from Dilworthtown to Painter's Cross-road. William Brinton had acquired considerable real estate subsequent to the patent mentioned, and at his death was considered as possessed of large means.

William Brinton, the younger, who was a stripling of seventeen when his father settled in Birmingham, at the age of twenty-three married Jane, a daughter of Richard Thatcher, of Thornbury. After his father's death, he built, in 1704, a stone house a short distance south of Dilworthtown, which, still standing, remained for over a hundred and seventy-five years almost as it was when he erected it. It is only in the last few years that it has undergone any alteration. He was an enterprising man, being one of the projectors and owners of a company grist-mill in Concord, the first located in that section, and was largely instrumental in the erection of Concord Friends' meeting-house, to which he contributed liberally. His wife, when fifty-four years of age, in 1724, accompanied Elizabeth Webb, a ministering Friend, in a religious visit to New England, the entire journey being made on horseback. From a letter written by her from Long Island, it appears that she was particularly pleased with a horse she saw there "with a white star in his face." In 1695 he was constable of Birmingham, and in 1713 was a member of the Legislature from Chester County. He died in 1751, aged eighty-four years. The offspring of this couple - from whom all the Brintons derive descent - was numerous. Edward Brinton, their third son, died in 1799, aged ninety-four years. From the birth of his grandfather, William Brinton, Sr., the immigrant, in 1630, to the date of his own death, is an interval of one hundred and sixty-nine years, - a remarkable period of time to be covered by three generations in one family.

William Brinton's, Sr., daughter, Ann, about or shortly after her father left England for the province, had intermarried with John Bennett, a blacksmith, who, with his wife, immigrated the next year and settled on lands of his father-in-law. In 1686, John Bennett was appointed constable for Birmingham, which is the first official record of that municipal district in our county's annals.

The next settler in Birmingham, after Brinton and his son-in-law, Bennett, were Peter and Sarah Dix, which name in the lapse of years was changed to Dicks. The land patented to him was the first tract taken up extending to Brandywine Creek, and thereon he built his cabin in the thick forest, with no neighbor nearer than about two miles away. This tract was not located within the limits of the present county of Delaware, but the dividing line runs along the southern and part of the eastern boundary of his estate. His son, Peter Dicks, however, played a prominent part in our colonial history in his efforts to foster manufacturing, and will be referred to elsewhere.

Joseph Gilpin and Hannah, his wife, are believed to have settled in Birmingham in 1695, certainly not later than that date. They were people of position in England, being descended from Richard de Guylpin, to whom in 1206 the baron of Kendal gave the manor of Kentmere, as a reward for having slain a ferocious wild boar that infested the forest of Westmoreland and Cumberland. Under the will of William Lamboll, of the city of Reading, England, Joseph Gilpin received a part of the large tract of land which had been surveyed and located in Birmingham in 1683, to Lamboll. Gilpin, as did all the Quaker settlers of the day, knew the power of religious oppression, and gladly came to the province to take possession of his inheritance. When he settled on the estate he dug a cave at the side of a large rock, on the present farm of Albin Harvey, wherein he resided for a number of years, and where thirteen of his family of fifteen children were born.¹ It was on this property that two valuable varieties of apple originated, - the Gilpin, also called carthouse and winter red-streak, and the house-apple, also called gray house-apple. They were two of several hundred of new varieties produced from seeds brought from England by the first settlers. Only these two were worthy of perpetuation by grafting.