Joshua Gilpin

Along with his brother, Thomas Gilpin, Jr. and his uncle Miers Fisher, he established the first paper manufacturing business in Delaware in 1787 at the Brandywine Village.

Gilpin traveled to England in 1811 and collected information on the latest techniques in paper manufacturing including the Fourdrinier and Dickinson machines.

Gilpin took copious notes during his travels on many topics including political and social conditions, wages, standards of living and his impressions of towns and countrysides.

They came from Kentmere in Westmorland, and maintained links with their English cousins, including William Gilpin, the artist.

Gilpin's father, Thomas, was a correspondent of Benjamin Franklin, but was suspected of disloyalty during the American Revolution and was exiled to Winchester, Virginia, where he died in 1778.

He kept a diary of his travels with voluminous notes about the people he met, the industrial processes he inspected and his impressions of the towns and countryside.

[9] During his time in England he gathered information about the application of chlorine to the bleaching of paper-stuff and applied that knowledge to his mill in Delaware.

They lived in Yealand Conyers, and Gilpin was able to gather more information about new paper manufacturing methods, this time the cylinder-mould paper-making machine, developed by John Dickinson.

[15] The Gilpin machine first produced paper in February 1817 and was used in the printing the edition of Poulson's Daily Advertiser published in that month.

Joshua was elected in 1803 as a member of the board of directors to the newly formed canal company and was involved in making a new survey.

[22] Gilpin died on August 22, 1841, at his Kentmere residence in Wilmington, Delaware[23] and was buried at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia.

[33] For his second trip to England, between 1811 and 1815, a number of notebooks survive, including one describing paper-making machinery,[34] and another, textile mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire.

He married on August 5, 1800, Mary Dilworth, at the Quaker meeting house in Yealand Conyers, Lancashire.