The "A Blazing Sawmill" Story

The home of Lancaster County's Robert Fulton.

It was an ordinary day.  Carol and I are headed once again to have lunch at Chesapeake City, MD.  We decided to take another route today, heading first to Quarryville, PA then picking up Rt. 222S which would put us eventually on Rt. 272S towards the town of Northeast, MD.  Not our final destination, but that's OK since I needed to drop off some of my altered Polaroid prints at Kathy's Corner first.  

This is a hand-colored lithograph from 1856 showing Robert
Fulton birthplace done by John H. Sherwin.  The image shows
two a couple in a carriage drawn by a team of four white horses.

As we headed south on 222 I noticed quite a few street signs calling the highway Robert Fulton Highway.  Just about every place in the USA has someone famous that was born there and this little area where we are now traveling is no different.  We passed into Little Britain Township, so named because the mother country of most of the Scotch-Irish farmer immigrants was England.  

Robert Fulton

As we rounded a turn in the country road we came upon a blue state marker stating that it was Robert Fulton's birthplace.  Really neat little house that was at one time home to one of our country's most famous inventors and painters.  On November 14, 1765 Robert Fulton was born in the house.  Seven years later the family lost the farm and his family moved to Lancaster where his father worked as a tailor.  As a teenager, Robert worked as an apprentice jeweler in Philadelphia painting small portraits for brooches and lockets.  

Another view I took of his birthplace.

It was in Philadelphia that he was exposed to science and inventions.  In 1787 he traveled to England to study painting and his creativity and engineering skills led him to make many inventions.  He is most famous for steam-powered boats, but he also drew plans for a horse-drawn canal-digging machine, prefabricated iron bridges and aqueducts, explosive underwater mines and the "Nautilus", a submarine that could be armed with torpedoes or mines.  He eventually went into business with Robert Livingston, an American Chancellor to France, to make a steamboat that lead to the history making demonstration on the Hudson River.  It was on August 20, 1807 that Fulton took on paying passengers and freight on the "Clermont".  

An artists drawing of the "Clermont" steamboat.  It was said
that a farmer witnessing the maiden voyage ran to is home
along the Hudson yelling, "Lock the doors, the devil is coming
up the river in a blazing sawmill!"

Then in 1810 he and his new partner, Nicholas Roosevelt, built the steamship "New Orleans" in Pittsburgh.  It was launched a year later and traveled to its namesake.  Well, I hoped out of the car and took photos of the really neat stone house that has been restored to it's original condition.  Just had to have something to show when I wrote about one of the most famous of citizens who was born near my hometown of Lancaster, PA.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.