It is pleasant to think of the young couple settling their new home on Penn Square (where not many years before the Indians had a colony), near a spring of clear water under a giant hickory tree. It was on this very spot that the chieftains of “Hickory Tribe,” as they termed themselves, met to confer with William Penn, the wise and kindly Quaker.
Governor Thomas Pownall visited Lancaster in 1754 and wrote that it was “a pretty and considerable town, increasing fast and growing rich.” So we can be certain that when Robert Fulton’s parents established a home of their own on Penn Square, they felt they had a bright future before them.
Two little daughters, Elizabeth and Isabella, were born to Mr. and Mrs. Fulton while they lived in this house and were among the first children to be christened in the new church. Mr. Fulton had a strong voice and was chosen to “lead the psalm” in the old Court House, where services were held until the church could be built. He sang the opening words of each division of the psalm and the congregation joined in unison for the later words.
In 1763 Mr. Fulton signed the charter for the town library, the third to be established in the American colonies. Thomas and William Penn, Esquires of the Province, drafted the papers and named the library “Juliana” after Thomas Penn’s wife. He was a son of the famous old William Penn, who had conferred with the Hickory Indians, and for whom the state of Pennsylvania had been named.
The new church, the Juliana Library, and the Union Fire Company, together with his business, kept Robert Fulton well occupied, but they yielded friendly comradeship and varied interests. In 1765 Mr. Fulton sold his Lancaster home and moved his family to a farm of more than three hundred acres on Conowingo Creek, in Little Britain Township, which he had purchased the preceding November. It lay sixty-five miles from Philadelphia, but not many from Lancaster, so they were not far from their friends, though they had to give up active work in the town.
The plastered stone farm-house to which the Fulton family moved is still standing by the country cross-roads. A wide sloping roof shelters the two-story building and overhangs a porch at the eastern end. There the ground slopes to the valley where the Conowingo Creek, a picturesque stream, flows on its quiet way to join the Susquehanna River. It is a place of great beauty and may well have proved attractive to early settlers. The low-ceiled parlors remain as they were during Mr. and Mrs. Fulton’s occupancy, and the upper bedrooms show broad window sills of great age. The fireplace of the old-time kitchen also is unchanged, the sturdy crane swinging in the sooty shadows where Mrs. Fulton hung her kettle to boil, in those distant days of pioneer life. Joseph Swift, of Philadelphia, wrote in after years that his grandmother “well remembered in her youth the preparations which a visit to Aunt Fulton required in the way of baking, boiling and roasting, and in getting ready the camp equipage which the journey through the wilderness required. It was only less formidable than a journey across the Atlantic.”