Poor
Oliver was known to the fat millers of this neighborhood as the
inconvenient person who was always wanting the loan of a thousand
dollars to carry out a new invention. The "thinking men" among them
sagely argued that his improvements would benefit the consumer, by
increasing the supply of flour and making it cheap--a clear detriment
to the interests of capital. Then Oliver plunged desperately into his
idea of steam-motion, losing the faint vestiges of his repute for
wit, and died poor and heartbroken in 1819, the hero of an unwritten
tragedy. The happy hours of his life were the hours on the dusty plank
in the mill-gable at Faulkland.
[Illustration: DEPOT OF THE WILMINGTON AND WESTERN RAILROAD.]
Evans's mill was bought in 1828 by Mr. Jonathan Fell, and turned
into the spice-grinding establishment which is still operated by his
descendants on the same ground. But Fell's business was much older
than that purchase, being a good representative of the ancestral
industries that exist in such numbers among Penn's settlers. Early in
this century the passengers in Front street in Philadelphia laughed
at the juxtaposition of a sign just put up with an older one, the two
reading thus: "James _Scholl_--Jonathan _Fell_." He had purchased the
spice-grinding business of an English immigrant on that site, and now
the same business is carried on at Faulkland, one hundred and seven
years from its commencement, in the thirteenth generation of Fell's
descendants, after a career of accumulated and undeviating success.
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