BELMONT HALL,

NEAR SMYRNA, DELAWARE

WITHOUT disparagement

to other

broods of the "Blue Hen's Chickens," we must admit that those sent out for public service from Kent County were of a game strain. Not fewer than sixteen Governors of Delaware were born in Kent, or were residents of the Peninsular County when elected to office. The long line began with Cæsar Rodney who, in 1778, was made "President of the Delaware State," for the then constitutional term of three years.

Another President was John Cook, a man of wealth and influence in the Province. He came into office in 1783. In 1772, he had County. He

been High Sheriff of Kent

afterwards became a member of the first

Assembly of the State in 1776, and of the committee appointed in October of the same year to devise the Great Seal of Delaware. He also served as a soldier throughout the Revolutionary War, after which he was one of the Judges of the State. His landed estate in and about the town of Smyrna included the extensive tract of arable and wooded land upon which now stands the fine old homestead of Belmont Hall.

The original grant of several thousand acres was made to an Englishman from whom it took the name of "Pearman's Choice." A house stood upon the site of the Hall late in the seventeenth century. The next proprietor after Governor Cook was Moore, another Englishman, who erected the rear and lower wing of the house, as we now see it.

The body of the Hall was added by Thomas Collins, the third Governor, or President, given by Kent County to Delaware. He was a brother-in-law of John Cook, and, like him, the owner of much valuable farming land in the lower part of the State. of the State. He bought the Belmont Hall tract from Moore in 1771, and enlarged the dwelling to its present proportions in 1773. When hostilities between the

Colonies and Great Britain broke out, he garrisoned the Hall and stockaded the grounds outlying it, raising, by his personal efforts, a brigade of militia from the surrounding country and maintaining it at his own expense while the war lasted. In addition to his duties as a military officer he was a member of the Council of Safety, subsequently, a delegate to the Convention that drafted the Constitution of the State, and Chief Justice of the Court of

Common Pleas.

"Belmont Hall" -we learn from a family MS.

66 descended to Dr. William Collins by the will of his father, Governor Thomas Collins, in 1789, and was sold by Dr. Collins to John Cloke, Esq., in 1827. He, in turn, left it to his daughter, Mrs. Caroline E. Cloke Pet

erson, then the wife of J. Howard Peterson, Esq., of Philadelphia. Mr. Peterson died in 1875. Several years later Mrs. Peterson married again, but is still the owner of Belmont Hall, and the plantation connected with it."

The historic mansion is one of the oldest, if not the most ancient, private house in a State where Colonial architecture and old families. abound. Two pictures of it hang in the Relic Room of Independence Hall, Philadelphia. One of the frames contains, in addition to this picture, a Continental specie note made into currency by the signature of WarGovernor Thomas Collins, in 1776. The bricks of the Hall are said to have been brought from England. They are as hard as flint, and rich brown in color. Nails, hinges, door-knobs, and bolts were imported expressly for this dwelling and bear the imprint of the British stamp.

The façade of the Hall is imposing, and the effect of the whole building, set in the centre of a park and gardens twenty acres in extent, and quite removed from the highway, is noble and dignified. One of the most beautiful views of the house is to be had from the garden behind it, where a low terrace falls away from the ornamental grounds to the level of the surrounding fields. The stroller in the winding alleys, looking up suddenly at the ivied gables of the oldest part of the Hall, framed in the broad arch of the arbour at the

top of the terrace steps, fancies himself, for one bewildered instant, in the Old World, in the near neighbourhood of grange or priory, the age of which is measured by centuries, and not by decades. The illusion is borne out by patriarchal trees, knobbed and hoary as to boles, broad of crown, and with a compactness of foliage unattainable by groves less than fifty years old.

The balustrade enclosing the flat central roof of the Hall was put up by Colonel Collins to protect the beat of the sentry kept for months upon this observatory. The officers of the brigade were the guests of the family while the country swarmed with predatory bands of British and Tories, with an occasional sprinkling of Hessians. These last were believed by the peninsular population to be ogres imported especially for the destruction of women and children, each of the monsters being equipped by nature with a double row of carnivorous teeth.

While there was no regular battle fought in the immediate neighbourhood of Smyrna, the region was reckoned peculiarly unsafe for the reason I have given, and skirmishes were not uncommon. Colonel Collins and his home guard