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Chapter 2

Pride of Penn’s Woods

The crucial episode in the settlement of the Delaware Valley came in 1682 with the landing of William Penn at New Castle, where he claimed today’s entire state of Delaware as the “three lower counties” of Pennsylvania. Then he sailed upstream to found Philadelphia. Already his promotional map showed the new colony (Latin for “Penn’s Woods”) embracing the “Brande vine,” considered one of the most important waterways of the bountiful region. His new holdings, Penn said, “hath the advantage of many creeks or rivers … some navigable for great ships, some for small craft: those of most eminency are Christina Brandywine Skilpott & Schulkill; any one of which have room to lay up the Royal Navy of England, there being from four to eight fathom water.”¹

With great efficiency, Penn’s territory was chopped up into parcels and sold off to eager settlers, as shown on the official Thomas Holme map of 1687. “County of Chester” is seen subdivided as far west as the Brandywine—where it abruptly gives way to forest primeval—with plantations confined to the area between Great Bend and the Forks (where the east and west branches of the creek divide), centering on “Brumadgam” or Birmingham, named ambitiously for the prosperous town in the English Midlands. East of the lower Brandywine lies, on the map, “the Proprietary Mannor of Rockland”—a name later famous from paper-milling at the village of Rockland. Many of the original, west-running parcel lines still appear as modern property divisions in Chester County, more than 330 years later.

More British maps would follow, including one of the famous “circular line” dividing today’s Delaware from Pennsylvania. First drawn in December 1701 with the “horsedyke” at New Castle as its radius, running due north to an oak tree with twelve notches on the west bank of the Brandywine near Great Bend, the round shape of the boundary is unique in all the American states. In 1750 another twelve-mile radius was drawn, meant to clarify the original. Tradition holds that the New Castle courthouse cupola was appointed the center of this circle, but, in fact, the boundary was difficult to draw and not nearly precise enough to line up on one building—so irregular, in fact, it actually had multiple centers from which it was measured. First State National Monument embraces the green on which the courthouse stands in New Castle as well as the historic No. 14 Bound Stone, part of the circular border, in the park’s Woodlawn section on the Brandywine.²

The flood of Quaker settlers—Pennsylvania’s population broke twenty thousand by 1700—seemed to spell doom for the Lenape Indians (see Plate 3). Their chieftains sold spacious inland tracts to Penn in 1683 but reserved one mile on each side of the Brandywine for hunting and fishing. Under the leadership of Checochinican (Person of Few Words), they huddled for security at Queonemysing, or Indian Town, in Great Bend. This settlement did not last long, however; soon the Lenape had fled west or perished, the last, locally, being the itinerant basket maker “Indian Hannah,” who died near Embreeville on the West Branch in 1802 and whose grave, with the coming of romanticism, became something of a shrine for poetical types. Today the site of Indian Town dozes beneath rolling fields, one of the most important archaeological sites in all the Mid-Atlantic, though barely explored.

Further upstream, old Lenape graves were frequently excavated by curious settlers, and farmers collected artifacts of the vanquished native peoples. When West Chester celebrated its centennial in 1899, locals put their findings on public display: an iron tomahawk, heaps of stone tools and colorful trade beads, an Indian skull and jawbone, and more than five thousand arrowheads, or “darts.”³

Gone, too—mostly within just a few years of the Quakers’ arrival—was much of the superabundant wildlife every seventeenth-century settler had commented on. Penn himself had glowingly described “elk, as big as a small ox, deer bigger than ours, beaver … turkey (forty and fifty pound weight) … phesants, heath-birds, pidgeons and partridges in abundance …. brands, ducks, teal, also the snipe and curloe, and that in great numbers … wild cat, panther, otter, wolf.” Now all were greatly reduced or driven to extinction. In the 1740s, Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm could report that “things are greatly altered”; gone were the days you could kill eighty ducks in a morning. A farmer in his field along the Brandywine at Wilmington shot the last beaver in 1770, it was said (though these pesky tree-fellers are now back). As late as 1838, “wagon loads of the passenger pigeons were brought into Philadelphia and were seen in heaps in the market,” but they too subsequently vanished from the scene. “Many of those [animals] which originally inhabited our woods have gone, with the red men of the forest, never to return,” botanist William Darlington declared in an 1826 speech, “and others are daily becoming more rare.”⁴

Despite all the ecological changes, numerous ancient trees survive today from the first years of English settlement, the glory of our muchaltered landscape—a concentration of giants virtually unrivaled anywhere else along the Eastern Seaboard. A tulip tree older than our nation, twenty feet around, stood at the DuPont Experimental Station above Rising Sun Bridge—a tall sentinel patched with concrete that unfortunately died in 2013. For a century artists showed this giant in their paintings of Walker’s Mill. On the Winterthur estate stands a tulip tree seventeen feet eight inches in circumference and soaring to 162 feet, the tallest tree in the state of Delaware. “It would be a tree of note even in the Smokies,” a visiting expert marvels. On the main lawn of the house grew a white oak that, according to my ring count after it was sawed down, sprouted in the late seventeenth century. Such extraordinary trees have outlived every other living thing from that remote era—certainly every animal and person has long since been swept away—and yet these venerable veterans still burst into green life each spring, as if they were three years old and not three hundred.

Recently there has been a flurry of tree-measuring by the Native Tree Society. Their results are astonishing. At 138 feet tall, a Winterthur beech is the tallest of that species the group has measured anywhere in the country. Sixty-seven trees at Longwood qualify as Pennsylvania State Champions. A tulip tree there hits 164.2 feet—incredibly, the tallest hardwood standing in the northeastern United States. A visit to just one section of Brandywine Creek State Park revealed more giants: seventy-three tulip trees over 130 feet tall (one at 160 feet), sixteen of these more than fourteen feet in girth—no wonder Thomas Jefferson called this species “the Juno of our groves.” Society members across the nation responded excitedly to the announcements: “That’s more big poplars than Steve and I have measured in the entire state of Ohio.” “There just aren’t many places with so much quantity and quality. I’m astounded.”⁵

The survival of these specimens owes much to the du Pont family’s traditional love of trees, dating back to the romantic era when immigrant Eleuthère Irénée du Pont signed his traveling papers “botaniste.” Winterthur historian Maggie Lidz tells me,

It’s crucial that there has been a continuous history of tree care, right back to the 1830s, when the Winterthur property was described as “as wild as the mountains of Virginia.” The family kept the house surrounded by trees, which was a choice not followed much elsewhere—they valued the trees that highly. Later on, Colonel Henry A. du Pont wouldn’t let anybody cut the trees, and he had Charles Sargent down from the Arnold Arboretum to document them. Today, we couldn’t have Azalea Woods or March Bank without the tree cover. Trees are what give the garden such a strong sense of identity, not just locally but nationally and internationally.

Brave Brick Houses

With the British settlers came real, permanent architecture. Thousands of years of Indian occupation have left virtually no trace today, except for the occasional arrowhead in a muddy cornfield. And few if any authentically Swedish or Finnish log cabins remain. By contrast, the Brandywine Valley has dozens of sturdy structures surviving from the earliest years of Quaker settlement—homes of industrious farmers who built them to last.

The ideal, said one observer of seventeenth-century Pennsylvania, was houses “built of brick, some of timber, plaister’d and ceil’d, as in England”; “brave brick houses,” Penn himself called them. The surprisingly many homes that survive from these early years help make Chester County second in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in National Register of Historic Places properties, with more than three hundred total. Only the city of Philadelphia boasts more.

Well-built houses of extremely early date testify to the great wealth that now began to accrue—this being, by lucky chance, some of the most fertile farmland on the entire Eastern Seaboard. Penn was delighted to find “a fast fat earth, like to our best vales in England, especially by inland brooks and rivers, God in his wisdom having ordered it so … the back-lands being generally three to one richer than those that lie by navigable waters.” No wonder settlers hurried inland, away from the Swede-infested Delaware River, and crowded the Brandywine’s banks in the district they called Birmingham.⁶

And the houses they built have become famous for their picturesque charm. Even in the 1860s they were considered well worth visiting, as novelist Bayard Taylor wrote of one of them in The Story of Kennett: “A hundred years had already elapsed since the masons had run up those walls of rusty hornblende rock, and it was even said that the leaden window-sashes, with their diamond-shaped panes of greenish glass, had been brought over from England, in the days of William Penn.” As a lad of fifteen, the antiquarian Taylor had drawn a picture of a colonial farmstead on a diamond pane “taken from the window of a house erected in the year 1716.”⁷

West of Chadds Ford, the primitive-looking brick Barns-Brinton House (1714), today a museum, served early settlers as a tavern on “Ye Great Road to Nottingham” in the colony of Maryland. Andrew Wyeth showed it in a painting, Tenant Farmer. Nearby is that time-capsule of a place, Kennett Meeting, a sober, whitewashed hall of Quaker worship (c. 1713) that briefly formed a defensive position for Americans in the Battle of the Brandywine. Soldiers lie buried in its graveyard, a little German flag today marking Hessian remains.

On the river near West Chester at Taylor’s (or Black Horse) Run, at the upper end of North Creek Road, stands the Abiah Taylor House, with a 1724 datestone and 1753 barn (oldest extant in Pennsylvania) across the way. Even in the nineteenth century it was “pointed out to strangers as the original dwelling” hereabouts. This brick landmark, built by a farmer and miller who arrived from Didcot, England, shortly after 1700, was recently restored by architect John Milner with leaded casement windows of the kind early homes inevitably had.⁸

The much-photographed John Chads House (c. 1725), now owned by the local historical society, stands on a steep slope at Chadds Ford, looking down on its original springhouse. Chads (originally the family name was Chadsey) inherited five hundred acres here from his father and operated a ferry over the creek, serving travelers. His crossing fees varied from one shilling six pence for coach or wagon to four pence for a horse and rider or an ox, cow, or heifer down to three halfpence for a hog. Chads’s redoubtable widow, Betty, remained in the house throughout the battle, hiding “her silver spoons dailey in her pocket.” The fieldstone dwelling with pent eave, sheltered by a white pine already sizeable in a drawing of the 1840s, is another fine example of early construction by the pioneering English. Milner praises its harmonious relationship with the land, being “hunkered into the hill and protected from the north winds. The way settlers sited their buildings to take advantage of water sources and protect them from weather creates the Brandywine aesthetic in terms of architecture and function. These structures have such incredible personality.”⁹

One of the oldest and best of this nationally important collection of colonial dwellings is the Brinton 1704 House. As we have seen, Penn’s Quakers quickly pressed right up to the Brandywine in Birmingham, recognizing the fertility of the creek bottoms and seeking to avoid established settlers on the Delaware. Cutting down the magnificent forests was followed by the planting of winter and summer wheat, buckwheat, rye, barley, oats, and Indian corn. Turkeys, wild geese, and ducks were for the moment plentiful, and venison could be purchased from the Indians. “We had Bearflesh this fall for little or nothing,” a new British arrival reported. “It is good food, tasting much like Beef.”¹⁰

Among the early Quaker immigrants to this place of nature’s largesse was seventeen-year-old William Brinton, who came with his parents in 1684 from Staffordshire. They settled near the Brandywine close to today’s Dilworthtown—then in the trackless wilderness—and spent the first winter in a nearby “cave.” The Brintons quickly built a house and began preparing the land for agriculture. So successful were they, William Brinton was able, within twenty years, to erect an exceptionally large dwelling of stone, today’s Brinton 1704 House. Its interior frame made lavish use of thick oak and walnut, so abundant was timber in those days.

Well into the nineteenth century, the history-minded Brinton family showed visitors the site of their very first family cabin—an indentation in the ground with an old pear tree nearby, and a swarm of blue-bottle flowers. Brought from England by the Brintons, this plant subsequently became an agricultural pest in the region.

Thousands of people today can trace their genealogy to these intrepid Brinton colonists, and the Brinton Association of America maintains the house as a museum. William Brinton’s four-greats-grandson led the Union armies in the Civil War (General William Brinton McClellan); his sister Elizabeth was the ancestor, eight generations down, of President Richard Nixon, himself a Quaker. Immigrant James Nixon settled in Brandywine Hundred by 1731, and his son from whom the president was descended fought as a private in the Battle of the Brandywine.

Restoration of the Brinton 1704 House in 1954 re-created the original twenty-seven leaded casement windows, which give it such a medieval feel. Early artifacts on display include poignant objects brought over on the ship by the Staffordshire family: a mortar and pestle, a glazed-redware ink stand, a pocketbook, and a 1629 London Bible with flame-stitched covers. All these somehow survived the ransacking of the house by British troops in the Battle of the Brandywine, the last hours of which raged in nearby fields, where, at sundown, General Washington observed in dismay the collapse of his army.¹¹

Another great American family founded on the Brandywine was that of Gilpin. Joseph Gilpin, an English weaver from Dorchester, near Oxford, sailed with his wife and small children in 1695, landing at New Castle. They set out on foot for their plantation in Birmingham, already assigned to them, but could only go ten miles before night set in. They asked for shelter at a settler’s home but were refused. Fortunately there were Indians camped nearby, so they picturesquely “lodged there for the first night on shore, in America.” Hardships were just beginning: “They had at first to dig a cave in the earth and went into it, in which they lived four or five years and where two children were born.”

Eventually Joseph Gilpin built a frame house with walls of wattle and daub and, in 1754, the masonry home that became General Howe’s headquarters during the battle (on today’s Harvey Road, Chadds Ford; a second Gilpin house was headquarters for Lafayette). The Gilpins had fifteen children in all, and there were forty-five grandchildren when he died, start of a huge cohort of Gilpins that would fan out across a growing nation. In time, one descendant was a U.S. senator from Idaho; another lived in Duluth and treasured an iron spiral candleholder set into an oak stand—inscribed date, 1686—which Gilpin had brought with him to America. The descendants of Joseph and Hannah Gilpin had an extraordinary impact on the region around the Brandywine: they included the founders of the tree collections at today’s Longwood Gardens and Tyler Arboretum, the industrialists who helped get serious milling underway on the Brandywine at Wilmington, and the men who first envisioned the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal across Delmarva.¹²

Glazed Headers, Pent Eaves

All these early Chester County houses are nationally important for their deep history and their craftsmanlike excellence. Architect Milner lives in the Abiah Taylor House he restored and has described the power these old dwellings have exerted in creating a modern tradition of neocolonial design—the past directly shaping the present in this Brandywine region of such heightened historical susceptibility:

The early vernacular architecture of southeastern Pennsylvania has had a profound influence on my own work for the past three decades. The treasures of this region afford almost limitless inspiration for the restoration of historic buildings as well as for the design of new buildings in the context of an exceptional landscape. The more I work on these remarkable structures, the more I feel a connection with the craftsmen who created them, and the more I am inspired to carry on the tradition.¹³

Milner greatly admires the architect Brognard Okie, a staunch anti-modernist of the early twentieth century who restored the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia and re-created William Penn’s mansion on the Delaware River, in addition to developing a charming style of country house based on early colonial examples. “He responded to the spirit of colonial woodwork,” Milner notes, “but applied his own personal style.” Okie remodeled the Dower House outside West Chester for novelist Joseph Hergesheimer, an exercise that says much about the dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist culture of the valley. For Hergesheimer, the Dower House (1712) had “the air of the past, of an early Quaker pastoral, had remained like the tranquil scents of a simple garden.” In Okie he found a man of “fanatical honesty” who, even more than the novelist, “lived almost wholly in an immaterial world, not of words but regretted old Pennsylvania houses” long since demolished.

On the patio. In the 1920s, novelist Joseph Hergesheimer “re-created” the Dower House, turning the 1712 farmhouse into an enclave of timeless values where he could flee the frantic twentieth century.

Together Hergesheimer and Okie tackled the restoration. Okie insisted on using solid oak beams for the door frames, joined with oak pins: “That was the old way to do it. That, then, would be our way.” (Thus they “repudiated the use of screws in the Dower House” as excessively modern.) They began a search for venerable lanterns, cupboards, latches, box locks, and “the smallest brass knobs imaginable,” along with hinges of H, L, and clover shape. Old wood came from barns, stone was cut from abandoned quarries, huge boxwoods were trucked in from homesteads in the region. Local antique expert Francis Brinton helped; Hergesheimer said the meeting between Brinton and Okie “was very affecting—two men lost in their singleness of allegiance to the past in Pennsylvania.”

Not that the Dower House restoration was wholly authentic; windows were enlarged and a sleeping porch added. But the final results deeply impressed the nostalgic Hergesheimer, who brooded on the ancientness of the place: when in 1712 “the pins were thrust home above the latches, the doors, the house, was fastened upon a forest hardly broken by the settlement” of Penn. “Slipping into the night it was absorbed in a silence that, emphasized by the wind in the trees, the nocturnal animals, reached across the continent from ocean to ocean…. It’s impossible now to conceive of such a silence, such a deep resonant hush. How soon it vanished!”¹⁴

Surely the Dower House—still standing proud today at 100 Goshen Road, West Chester—and its various peers make Chester County, all in all, just about the best-preserved colonial landscape in the nation. There are so many of these houses—because the settlers built in brick and stone, more likely to endure. Driving the twisting back roads, usually with some frantically impatient suburbanite on your tail, you glimpse these dwellings out of the corner of your eye, their lumpy walls of robust stone, raised by hand so long ago. The most exciting are often the ones not yet restored, with moldering window sash and crumbling slate-tile roofs and improvisational Victorian additions, such as bay windows surrounded by fish-scale shingles, or scroll-saw porches, and with tattered curtains of parti-colored fabric behind half-broken window panes, and the bricks at the top of the chimney knocked loose and about to fall. Where the whitewash has flaked away, perhaps a row of glazed header brick peeps forth, the ruddy clay and Coke-bottle-green glaze as snappy as in the very best work in old Philadelphia. Or maybe you can find joist holes filled with rotten wood where a pent eave once jutted, that distinctively Pennsylvania feature. It seems priceless to discover these unrestored houses, because possibly the next time you drive by, they will be undergoing yuppified restoration—or even reduced to a pile of rubble by a snorting yellow backhoe.

Such houses, now so aged, were once ultramodern symbols of the dynamic transformation of the American countryside as forests gave way to fields and crops. The Brandywine was emerging as, one might say, the model farming district for the nation. From his Como Farm beyond Marshallton on the West Branch, John Beale Bordley, a founder of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, experimented with crop rotation, giving advice to farmers everywhere in his popular books published after the Revolution. Already Colonial newspapers had been full of advertisements boasting of the riches of the Brandywine bottomlands.

For example, one John Gillylen sold a farm near Downingtown in 1765

containing 468 acres, with … 113 acres cultivated; the whole plantation is plentifully stored with springs and streams of water, one of the forks of Brandywine runs near a mile through the land; an orchard of 9 acres with near 500 of the best fruit trees…. The land is all new, the crop that is now in the ground is but the third…. Likewise to sell, a negroe boy, aged 13, and a negroe girl, aged 15, both have had the small pox, and sold for no fault. I design to pay all my debts, and forewarn any person or persons from cutting hoop poles, or any timber … off my land.¹⁵

When President Barack Obama created First State National Monument, part of the intention was to preserve what remains of these kinds of early Brandywine agricultural landscapes. The official proclamation notes that the 1,100-acre Woodlawn section of the monument contains at least eight structures from the eighteenth century. “Because Wood-lawn has been relatively undisturbed, it still exhibits colonial and Quaker settlement patterns that have vanished elsewhere.”¹⁶

At Old Swedes Church

Much as Roman Londinium reverted entirely back to forest before eventually being resettled as medieval London, so the old Swedish town beside the lower Brandywine at Fort Christina vanished during the years of rapid English inroads, finally being resurrected after sixty-seven years as the city of Wilmington. During the intervening period, little remained as a reminder of New Sweden except for the surnames of local farmers and a single place of worship, Old Swedes Church, built for remnant Swedes in English days. Historical interest in Fort Christina remained, however; when traveler Peter Kalm came through in the 1740s, he was given a relic, a Swedish silver coin of 1633, dug up when a new fort was built on the site of the old to protect the British against French and Spanish privateers.¹⁷

Fort Christina’s occupants had buried their dead not in the wide, waterlogged marshes but on a slight rise northward, where Old Swedes Church now stands (in Virginia, Jamestown settlers did much the same). Three Lutheran missionaries arrived from Sweden in 1697 to serve the remaining Swedish colonists; they included the energetic Reverend Eric Björk, who pressed for a new place of worship. By now the Quakers were pouring ceaselessly into the Delaware Valley, and in fact there is little or nothing “Swedish” about the architecture of Old Swedes: an English mason named Yard brought his crew down from Philadelphia, joined by English carpenters John Smart and John Britt. The cornerstone was laid in May 1698, and bluestone walls were up by fall. Lime for mortar was brought from Maryland in a boat. Björk left an account that describes fir pews on either side of a wide aisle, separating the sexes, and a circular precinct at the east end with seats for ministers.

The smith Mattias de Foss wrought dozens of iron letters for inscriptions on the outside walls, including “LUX-L.I. TENEBR. ORIENSEX ALTO” (“Light from on high shines in the darkness”). With its massive stone walls and a red brick bell tower, Old Swedes has attracted artists since the 1840s, including Howard Pyle, Robert Shaw, and the young Andrew Wyeth. A late nineteenth-century renovation upset Pyle, who loved the fabled building and always pointed it out to companions from the train. He loathed “the garish yellow shingles and the crass new woodwork…. Old buildings and fragments of the past are to me very and vitally alive.”¹⁸

For generations, the vicinity of Old Swedes Church was a sleepy rural environs, as Pyle reported in his magazine article, “Old-Time Life in a Quaker Town.” One parishioner recalled how swallows built mud nests under the rafters and darted over the heads of the congregation; cows trundled over whenever they heard the sound of the church bell, knowing the churchyard gate would be left open and they could graze amid the tombstones. “Once our cow left her companions,” the congregant recalled, “and followed grandfather to his pew door.” In a painting now in the Brandywine River Museum of Art, The Last Leaf, Pyle showed an elderly man visiting his wife’s tomb here, with the church in the background.¹⁹

Three hundred years of worship. Few American structures anywhere remain in regular use from the seventeenth century. Howard Pyle illustrated Old Swedes Church for Woodrow Wilson’s book, A History of the American People (1902).

Today, modern industry and a somewhat blighted neighborhood surround Old Swedes, an evocative place nonetheless: it has been called the “oldest church in North America still standing as originally built and holding regular worship services.” Here the visitor’s mind turns back to the long-ago seventeenth century and the very earliest phases of European colonization. When First State National Monument was established, planning immediately began to add Old Swedes to its holdings, the park being meant to “interpret the story of early Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, and English settlement in the region.”²⁰

Back when the 1938 tercentenary of the Swedish landing approached, commemorations were planned, and it was noted that two million Americans were of Swedish descent. The Swedish crown prince solicited donations from all citizens of his country for the erection of a monument at the Rocks. The park was a joint effort, with Swedish artist Carl Milles providing a sculpture and a Philadelphia landscape design firm preparing the site—a dump in the midst of an industrial district along the oily Christina River. American Car and Foundry stood directly across the street, backing up to the Brandywine, and again, not a trace remained of the fort the Swedes had built nor of the marshes that surrounded it protectively upstream and down. During the dedication, an entourage of Swedish dignitaries disembarked from a ship in a lashing rainstorm, accompanied by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

To leap ahead seventy-five years: in 2013, the 375th anniversary of the coming of the Swedes, the king and queen of Sweden visited the site amid great panoply—along with the president of Finland’s parliament—and archaeologists speculated about the precise site of Fort Christina. On hand was a 1990s replica (berthed nearby) of the three-masted, Dutchbuilt pinnace Kalmar Nyckel that had brought the first Swedes, a redoubtable ship that crossed the Atlantic eight times, whereas no other vessel of that era made more than two trips.

A New Town Rises

In 1731, today’s Wilmington was born just west of Old Swedes. The enterprising settler Thomas Willing laid out a grid in emulation of Philadelphia and predicted a great grain-port metropolis would soon rise. Four years later, Quaker William Shipley and friends bought lots in the fledgling place, which rapidly developed as a center for the shipment of grain.²¹

Artist Pyle liked to tell a story of how Shipley, an immigrant from Britain who lived near Philadelphia, first happened to come to Wilmington—a glorious founding myth in which the Brandywine plays a starring role. He said Shipley’s devoutly religious wife, Elizabeth, had a dream: “She was traveling on horseback, along a high road, and after a time she came to a wild and turbulent stream, which she forded with difficulty; beyond this stream she mounted a long and steep hill-side; when she arrived at this summit a great view of surpassing beauty spread out before her.” This, she perceived, was a kind of Promised Land where her family was surely destined to settle.

A few years later, Pyle said, Elizabeth Shipley undertook an actual trip through the Mid-Atlantic in which she crossed “a roaring stream that cut through tree-covered highlands, and came raging and rushing down over great rocks and boulders”—the Brandywine. “The cawing of crows in the woods, and a solitary eagle that went sailing through the air, was all the life that broke the solitude of the place. As she hesitated on the bank before entering the rough looking ford, marked at each end by a sapling pole to which a red rag was fastened, the whole scene seemed strangely familiar to her.”

From the hilltop she saw the bright Christina River, and her vision was suddenly reality. It was here that she and her husband settled in 1735; here the city of Wilmington flourished; and here, William and Elizabeth Shipley’s son, Thomas, founded a dynasty of millers on the Brandywine.²²

Milling was revived on the creek (after the brief Swedish attempt) by Samuel Kirk at the foot of today’s Adams Street in Wilmington in the 1720s, beside the former Stidham mill. Here the creek is shallow, the Indians having used the spot as a ford; later, as we saw, the important Old King’s Road running north to south through the colonies crossed without a bridge. Kirk’s pioneering enterprise became legendary as the Old Barley Mill, a rather primitive “undershot” facility that stood immediately below its dam on the south bank. Sketchy remnants of that dam can be faintly perceived even today, and a millstone lies nearby as a mossy relic.

One of nineteenth-century artist Robert Shaw’s best-known etchings shows Old Barley Mill—a print that hung in the better homes in Wilmington for generations as a nostalgic token of the early years of Quaker settlement. In 1742, milling expanded when Oliver Canby built a dam downstream from Old Barley Mill and shipped processed grain to Philadelphia and even the West Indies—start of serious merchant milling. Within twenty years a complex of mills had begun to spring up around Market Street Bridge.²³

Once again the English settlers wrought ecological havoc. Construction of dams profoundly changed the nature of the creek by cutting off the runs of fish in springtime, species that had, for millennia, come up the waterways to spawn. Shad had once been fantastically abundant—on the Schuylkill, Penn said, you could catch six hundred with a single swipe of the net—but now their numbers crashed.²⁴

The Lenape had long depended on the fish, lining the creeks with weirs to catch them, and were horrified by the effects of the Kirk dam, about which they complained to the British governor. A 1727 legislative act called for all dams to be removed from the Brandywine to allow the fish to run, and as late as 1760 four dams were breached by officials; but thereafter dams multiplied (eventually to more than 125 on the whole creek) and several species of fish became extinct. Today there are plans underway to remove or breach several dams on the Brandywine—long disused for any industrial purpose—so that shad, in particular, can run again. As a gesture in this direction, Brandywine Conservancy removed two such dams on the East Branch in 2012, freeing eighteen streammiles from obstruction after more than a century.²⁵

Two Stargazers

As English pioneers pressed ever westward, the question of the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland became troublesome. To settle it, the Mason-Dixon Line was drawn, a drama in which the Brandywine played a part. Culturally, that line ratified what everyone already knew: the Brandywine Valley, on the fortieth parallel, was the southernmost outpost of a thoroughgoing Northern culture, in contrast to Maryland, just a dozen miles away, which belonged to the South.

Elkanah Watson of Massachusetts traveled northbound in 1778 and admired the high level of cultivation, the neatness of agriculture in the Brandywine region: “The contrast, so obvious and so strong, in the appearance of these farms and of the southern plantations, will strike every observer, and can be imputed to but one cause”—the blight of slavery. At the same time, it was said that anyone going south knew they had left Chester County behind when, upon knocking at a door, “the landlord behaves with politeness to you.” Quaker coolness and Southern gentility formed a striking dichotomy.²⁶

The uncertain boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania had sometimes been contested with violence. To finally settle the matter, surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon arrived from England in 1763 and, with sensitive apparatus carefully packed atop a feather mattress, bounced in their wagons thirty-one miles due west of Philadelphia to a marker that had been laid on a prior survey in 1736. That stone lay near the farmhouse of John Harlan, which still exists, amazingly unchanged and quaintly unrestored, in rural seclusion on the West Branch of the Brandywine at Embreeville. Here the surveyors erected a wooden observatory and made astronomical measurements in bitter January cold before setting up the Stargazers Stone, which also survives. It was the start of what one historian calls “the most ambitious geodetic survey ever conducted,” one that would set all future standards for the world.²⁷

From Stargazers Stone they ran a line fifteen miles south into Delaware—immediately crossing the coiling West Branch three times—to place the “Post Mark’d West,” the spot which determined the precise latitude of the Mason-Dixon Line. The industrious Mason and Dixon repeatedly returned to Harlan’s farm during their multiyear survey and spent the colder months there. Once they recorded a frigid temperature of minus twenty-two degrees, though the latitude lay south of balmy Naples. Dr. Benjamin Rush later called their measurement (January 2, 1767) the most intense cold ever noted in the Philadelphia region, remarkable even in that era—hardly conceivable today—when the Delaware River froze solid every winter and Philadelphia shipping was entirely suspended until early March.²⁸

Mason and Dixon are famous for the line they drew, but the greater scientific achievement was their successful measurement of one degree of latitude, part of a larger contemporary effort to understand the true shape of the Earth. This took nearly five months to do, as they recorded the distance all the way from Harlan’s farm to the Nanticoke River in the swamps of southern Delaware. The process began at Christmas 1766, in a tent in Harlan’s backyard, where Mason set up a long-case astronomical clock that had been loaned to him by the Royal Society in London; already it had been used for scientific inquiry at faraway Saint Helena and Barbados and (by Dixon) to study the transit of Venus at the Cape of Good Hope. At Harlan’s, Mason watched the “immersion” of a moon of Jupiter as it passed behind the planet.

Before returning to England, the surveyors came back one last time to say farewell to John Harlan. Shortly thereafter, Harlan is said to have drowned in the Brandywine, which runs right in front of his door.²⁹

The Mason-Dixon Line had ended the chance of bloody conflict between two great colonies. As the 1770s began, the Brandywine Valley seemed about the most prosperous and peaceful locale in the New World—but war clouds would eventually gather, and a huge invading army would soon be on these shores.