Wilmington’s legend belongs to the general story of the settlements along the Delaware. The discoveries of its site were overlapping; the Quakers discovered the Swedes, who had found the Dutch, who had discovered the Indians.
Wilmington was first called Willing’s Town by a settler, and then Wilmington, from the earl of that name in England, to whom Thomson dedicated his poem “Winter.”
Benjamin Ferris was a watchmaker and historian in Wilmington, Delaware. He was a descendant of Samuel Ferris of Reading, England, who settled in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1682 and of John Ferris, who was among the first settlers in Wilmington in 1748. Benjamin learned the art of watchmaking in Philadelphia when he was fourteen years old.
Ferris was a member of the Religious Society of Friends and, in 1839, was appointed to a committee of the Yearly Meetings of Friends of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore to investigate wrongdoings against the Seneca Indians. Although the Senate rejected the treaty he recommended, he successfully brokered a deal that resulted in about half their land being restored to them.
Such workmen were never matched before, yet the words of Benjamin Ferris, the Wilmington antiquarian, form a part, and a telling part, of the exciting romance signed by Charles Reade. The words of Ferris, unexpectedly earning renown in a work of imagination, trace the accurate tale of the Quaker prophetess, Elizabeth Shipley, who brought her practical husband to Wilmington through the influence of a brilliant dream.
But the spirit of enterprise — the spirit whose results we are now to chronicle — came in only with William Shipley, for whose story we must refer the reader, strange as it may seem, to the latest novel of the first living master of English fiction.
In 1846, Benjamin Ferris published A History of the Original Settlements on the Delaware: From its Discovery by Hudson to the Colonization under William Penn, which described Wilmington as a terrestrial paradise.
[Edited quote]“The builder of Rockwood was Joseph Shipley (1795–1867), a descendant of prominent Quakers and early founders of Willingtown (later Wilmington) who made his fortune in transatlantic merchant banking out of Liverpool, England. Joseph Shipley was the ninth of ten surviving children born to Joseph Shipley (1752–1832) and Mary Levis (d. 1843). (For clarification, the two Joseph Shipleys are referred to as “Jr.” and “Sr.” throughout this collection description.) Joseph Shipley, Sr., inherited the Brandywine mill property of his father, Thomas Shipley (1718–1789), and prospered in that business. Joseph Shipley, Jr., was sent to Westtown School and began work in the Philadelphia firm of his cousin, Samuel Canby. Joseph Shipley worked for Philadelphia merchant James Welsh by 1819, traveling south into Virginia and North Carolina to buy notes from banks for Welsh’s firm. He sailed to Liverpool on October 20, 1819, for what was supposed to have been a short trip on behalf of Welsh. The lucrative transatlantic trade kept him in Liverpool for the next thirty years, and he returned to America only three times (in 1826, 1841, and 1847) before his retirement in 1850. Shipley headed a firm called Shipley, Welsh, and Co. in 1822, bearing responsibility for all of Welsh’s cargoes sent to Liverpool. In 1825, he joined a limited partnership with William and James Brown and Co. firm and continued to conduct business as Shipley, Welsh, and Co. These businesses thrived on the shipment of American cotton to the Lancashire mills but also profited as merchant bankers, granting credits and buying and selling foreign exchange. The transatlantic financial and business crises of 1837 strongly affected Shipley’s finances. Still, in reward for his services during the crises, he was a participating partner in all four of the Brown houses of business. The name of the English house was changed to Brown, Shipley & Co., which is still in operation as a private British bank. Joseph Shipley, Jr., lived in Liverpool from 1819 until 1850 or 1851, when he retired from his career and returned to the Brandywine area to complete the building of Rockwood. Rockwood was designed by English architect George Monier Williams, and the mansion was inspired by Shipley’s Gothic/Italianate home, Wyncote, located in the village of Allerton, near Liverpool. Joseph Shipley reportedly visited the site of land that he would acquire for Rockwood when he visited Delaware in 1847. Shipley corresponded frequently with his brother Samuel Shipley and his nephew Thomas S. Newlin, who helped manage affairs in Delaware and conducted numerous land acquisitions toward the formation of the Rockwood estate. Shipley’s nephew Edward Bringhurst, Sr., supervised building negotiations and contracts in his uncle’s absence. Upon his return to Delaware, Joseph Shipley became known for the horticultural development of his estate. He was elected second vice-president of the Delaware Horticultural Society, and Andrew Jackson Browning cited Rockwood in A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening(1859). Shipley died in 1867, but his will allowed for his sisters Sarah and Hannah to remain as residents of Rockwood until their deaths. Hannah Shipley died in 1891.”
Sources: Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April 1873. Vol. XI;