he city. On Redclay Creek--a tributary to the Christine, running
into it parallel with the Brandywine--a number of mills have seated
themselves, attracted by its swift torrent, amid scenery of steeps
and rapids comparable to that on the Lehigh about Mauch Chunk. Of
these the most interesting traditions attach to the Faulkland Mills.
Their name may remind the reader of the first novel of the late Lord
Lytton--_Falkland_, written in 1828--but it was given to the spot long
before in designation of a primitive settlement, Faulk's Land. The
association with this site is that of Oliver Evans, the true inventor
of the locomotive, who here worked and dreamed in a mill enriched with
his contrivances.

Evans, like Fitch, is one of the world's lost renowns. Had the
legislators of his time possessed sagacity enough to endow his
inventions, the advantages of steam-transport would have been
anticipated by several years, and the glory would have radiated
from the Delaware River instead of from the Hudson. His design for a
locomotive was sent to England in 1787, disputing priority with the
"steam-wagons" of James Watt. He built steamboats at Philadelphia in
1802 and 1803, and ran them successfully, antedating by five years
the Clermont of Robert Fulton--Fulton, whom people are beginning to
regard, with Mr. Stone, author of the recent _History of New York_, as
the man who has received the greatest quantity of undeserved praise
of all who ever lived. Oliver Evans, born in 1755 of a respectable
family, was a miller at Faulkland, where his smaller inventions were
first put in use. The plank just under the apex of the roof, which he
used to retire to as his private study, was shown until 1867, when the
old mill was burned. Up among the swallows, as he lay on the board--to
which, as Beecher expresses it, he "brought the softness"--the
children of his genius were conceived and delivered. The mill was
full of his labor-saving machines, which clattered to the babbling
Redclay. One of his notions was the mill "elevator" (an improvement of
something he had seen in Marshall's mill at Stanton), by which grain
was raised to the top of the building in buckets set along a revolving
belt which passed from the roof to the bottom, distributing the wheat
with spouts to the bolt. This was set up, by contributions among the
millers, at Shipley's great mill in Wilmington, and also introduced
into his own, where his other inventions of the "conveyer" and the