LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

SAMUEL J. LEVICK, from a photograph when about sixty years

of age,

ELIZABETH W. LEVICK, from a photograph, .

Frontispiece

opposite p. 22

opposite p. 161

SAMUEL J. LEVICK, from an ambrotype, when about thirty years

of age,

MERION MEETING HOUSE AND PORTION OF GRAVEYARD, from a

photograph,

opposite p. 175

SAMUEL J. LEVICK, from a photograph, when about forty-seven

years

of age,

opposite p. 219

MERION MEETING HOUSE, from a photograph,

FACSIMILE OF A POSTAL, written by Samel J. Levick, opposite p. 304

opposite p. 412

LIFE OF SAMUEL J. LEVICK.

CHAPTER I.

ANCESTRY AND PARENTAGE.

It has been said that there are comparatively few persons who can name all the eight of their great-grandparents. It is a disadvantage to any one to feel humiliated by an allusion to his ancestry; and it is also a source of regret when progenitors-so far as character and reputation are concerned-have left to their posterity a merely negative inheritance; where all that can be appropriated from the family record is only a list of names and dates. Wealth there may be that has been acquired by diligent attention to business, increased by honest gains, and hoarded from generation to generation, yet when we search for some incidents that marked the career of these plodding ones, some index-boards on the highway of life, something to constitute a biography -we gather only statistics; born, went into business, married, had children, died, left a will; "only these and nothing more."

With Samuel Jones Levick the case is very different; for we find on both sides, a long line of worthy "Quaker” ancestry, and each family that comes into it adds something

to the interest of the history, as well as to the variety of intellect and the strength of character. The names of Levick, Manlove, Hall, Jones, Wetherill, Lewis, Hayes, Fearon, Noble, Garrett, Lovett, Smith and Yeates, call up memories of records and traditions associated with Kent County in Delaware; with Montgomery, Delaware, Chester and Bucks Counties in Pennsylvania; with Burlington County in New Jersey, and with the city of Philadelphia.

The Levicks came originally from France (where the name was written Leveque or Levesque); but they had crossed over to England, and had been living in Derbyshire many years before the first one of the name (so far as we know) came to America. It was in the year 1680 that Richard* and Mary Levick settled in St. Jones County (now Kent County), Delaware. "In the list of grants by the Court of St. Jones, is that to Richard Levick of a tract of land of six hundred acres, called the Shoulder of Mutton, situate and being on the west side of Delaware Bay, and next adjoining land of J. Brinckle, called Lisbon." In the same list of grants there is one for Mark Manlove. The name of Manlove is quite prominent in the records of St. Jones County. We find that one was a Justice of the Peace, two were members of the Assembly, and one was a Captain in the war of the American Revolution.

Richard and Mary Levick had a son William, and he and his wife Sarah Levick, had a son William who married * For a more full account of Richard Levick see Appendix.

Susanna Manlove, the daughter of Mark and Anne (Hall) Manlove. William and Susanna Levick were the parents of Ebenezer, and the grandparents of Samuel J. Levick.

We have the information, from those who knew him, that "William Levick, the father of Ebenezer, was a member and Elder of the Society of Friends, a man much esteemed for his neighborly kindness, for his strict integrity of character, and his earnest and useful attachment to the religious body to which he belonged. He was born on the twelfth of Tenth Month, 1738 (O. S.), and died at his home in Little Creek, Delaware, on the twenty-third of Tenth Month, 1803.

"Susanna Manlove, wife of William, and mother of Ebenezer, was the daughter of Mark and Anne Hall Manlove, and was born on the twenty-sixth of Third Month, 1752 (O. S.). She died on the ninth of Second Month, 1802, more than a year before her husband, though much his junior. In a Memorial respecting her, written by her friend Sarah Cowgill, she is spoken of as a woman of great sweetness of disposition and of marked Christian humility of character."

At the time of his father's death, Ebenezer had just entered upon his thirteenth year, and about three years later he came to Philadelphia and lived with his cousin Rachel Fisher, who like himself, was a native of Kent County. At this early age, and in a strange city, without a mother's voice to comfort, or a father's counsel to direct, did the youth enter upon his preparation for a mercantile life.