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Preface

American Arcadia

It comes down from the Welsh Mountains and twists its way through some of the prettiest countryside in the middle states before gushing along a rocky gorge at Wilmington and meeting tidewater. The quintes-sential Piedmont stream, running lively over the rocks, the Brandywine finally loses itself into the flat and featureless Christina River, which joins the Delaware Bay.

Centuries ago, the Brandywine wove together two of the thirteen colonies. Finding its source in the wooded hills of the second-largest colony, Pennsylvania, it ended in the second-smallest, Delaware—later the first state. Every traveler who went north to south through colonial America crossed the Brandywine, usually in Wilmington, often stopping to admire its phenomenally productive mills, which made this valley a crucible of the Industrial Revolution. Finally, its importance to the early nation was immortalized by its being the scene of the largest land battle of the American Revolution, the Battle of the Brandywine, fought by George Washington’s armies around Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, one steamy late-summer afternoon, September 11, 1777.

From that day forward, the fame of the Brandywine has never subsided. Early tourists came to see the battlefield and, with the onset of the romantic movement around 1800, to delight in the valley’s verdant beauty. Writers visited, and artists, until finally there flourished the so-called Brandywine school of painters, centered on Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth. Perhaps the most famous American painter in the world, Andrew Wyeth, spent nearly a lifetime portraying the Brandywine scene.

Today the Brandywine Valley is famous for its cultural institutions and its outstanding gardens and museums, all of which derive from a long heritage of thoughtful attention to history, pride of place, and quality of life. So important is the Brandywine to the nation, 1,100 unspoiled acres along the creek—called Woodlawn—were recently earmarked for inclusion, advocates fervently hoped, in a brand-new national park, the first Delaware has ever had.

“If proponents prevail,” National Geographic reported, the country would at last suitably honor the Brandywine “and the outsize course that it has cut through American history.” Then in March 2013, President Obama established First State National Monument, the four-hundredth unit of the National Park Service. Its flagship component is the Woodlawn tract on the Brandywine’s sinuous shores.¹

The Brandywine Paradox

A single stream, 150 feet wide, flows beneath the I-95 bridge at Wilmington, where 200,000 drivers cross daily; but in a cultural sense there are actually two Brandywines. One is the everyday river that was dammed to provide power to nineteenth-century industry and is now piped into our homes and businesses for drinking water: a prosaic, workaday water-course we might call the Brandywine of milling and manufactures. And then there is the other river, suffused with historical lore and patriotic meanings, a repository for dreams and high ideals—offering romantic inspiration to poets and artists for generations—the Brandywine of myth and memory.

As distinct as they may appear, these two Brandywines are, in fact, inseparable. They weave and coil about each other, running down through the centuries, and the historian must account for both paradigms in every era, a perennial paradox.

For example, when Washington Memorial Bridge was dedicated as Wilmington’s civic gateway in 1922, throngs of citizens gathered by the Brandywine to celebrate the city’s role as an expanding center of commerce and industry, as belching smoke stacks along the lower creek boldly attested. And yet the river of myth and memory was lauded too, with speeches referring to the epic Battle of the Brandywine and all the poetic associations that surround one of America’s most storied streams. At the end, a parade of 1,200 girls strewed flowers on the water. So did Delawareans take a holiday from their jobs in mills and factories and the offices of chemical corporations to pay moving tribute to their beloved river, a ceremony that seemed almost worthy of the ancient world, when Greeks sought to appease the old, shaggy gods and subtle nymphs that lived along the banks of every stream in Arcadia.

The practical river, the poetical river: we will meet them both in this book, and it is never quite clear where one begins and the other ends. After all, it was the riches that the Brandywine fostered that first allowed citizens leisure to enjoy it and to establish scenic parks along its edge; that made it possible for mill owners to buy framed pictures of their factories showing them embowered in all the forested greenery of the landscape painter’s art; and eventually for du Ponts to set aside vast acreage as unspoiled, idyllic tracts, forming what we today call Chateau Country. Without these underpinnings of wealth, the Brandywine might have languished in obscurity, unnoticed and unheralded, like more rural rivers do—who sings, for example, of Tug Fork River in Virginia or Conococheague Creek in Maryland, though they are each longer than the Brandywine? Or it might have been allowed to degenerate into a polluted ditch, as many waterways in Megalopolis have done—including Naamans and Chester Creeks just eastward, with ragged, cinder block margins crowded by shopping malls and subdivisions. Wealth encouraged the broad-minded, expansive urge to celebrate the Brandywine and provided a means to safeguard the river through wise preservation. So the prosaic has ultimately fed and protected the poetic here, until the two mindsets can hardly be disentangled (see Plate 1).

For all the significance of the Brandywine, there has been no lengthy book about its history and culture since Henry Seidel Canby, the best-known Delawarean man of letters, wrote The Brandywine in the Rivers of America series (1941), with illustrations by a young Andrew Wyeth. Pieces of the story have been told, but no modern publication has woven together a myriad of colorful episodes, so that they can be seen as inter-related human phenomena happening in a single, surprisingly intimate domain. This book aims to fill that need—to tell the fascinating story of one of America’s most appealing small rivers.

That Lyrical Name

Everyone asks, what is the origin of the name “Brandywine”? It dates back to the earliest years of European settlement and refers to a popular drink of the day, Dutch distilled (or “burned”) wine, brandewijn, nick-named “brandy.” Generations have puzzled over how a river came to be named for a beverage. Some have claimed a ship full of brandy sank at the mouth of the creek, and venerable wreckage was sometimes pointed out as evidence. Others say the name originated not with brandy, but with an early settler: a certain Finn, Andrew Brandwyn or Braindwine, lived on the creek around 1660, about the time this stream (originally called Fish Kill or Fish Falls) was variously renamed Brandewyn, Brainwend, or Brandywine Creek.

But possibly Andrew derived his name from the waterway, not the other way around. To offer two further conjectures: an orchard of medlar trees is reported to have produced good brandy along the lower creek in the 1670s. Or perhaps the answer lies in the distinctive color that brandy implies: it seems plausible that settlers were struck with how the creek’s water, following a thunderstorm upstream, was tinted yellowish-brown with runoff as it poured into the clearer Christina.²

Whatever its origin, “Brandywine” is a pleasing name, one that was profitably used to market the finely milled Brandywine flour of the eighteenth century, Brandywine gunpowder from DuPont factories in the nineteenth, and the Brandywine School of artists in the twentieth—typically, a mix of purposes both pragmatic and lyrical. The name “Brandywine Corn Meal” was considered so valuable in the West Indies trade, local millers filed a lawsuit in 1857 to protect it. Today the marketing is aimed at tourists who come to see the attractions advertised by the Brandywine Conference and Visitor’s Bureau and the bucolic art at the Brandywine River Museum of Art.

By the way, is it a creek or a river? The Brandywine is of in-between size, and both usages have their adherents. “You may call it a stream, a creek, or a river with equal propriety,” historian Wilmer MacElree assured an audience in 1911. “The government insists on calling it a ‘river,’” a Wilmington newspaper complained in 1944, preferring “creek” as more traditional. In fact, all the very early accounts label it a creek—as stream scientists still tend to—but a 1768 act called for “regulating the fishing in the river Brandywine,” and in recent years that term has gained the upper hand.³

But surely the ribbon-like Brandywine in its leafy valley barely qualifies as a “river” when compared with great neighboring waterways: its 325 square miles of drainage are dwarfed by the Delaware River with 12,809 square miles and, to the west, the mighty Susquehanna River with 27,580. Probably no other American river of such petite scale is so famous. Although little, it is unusually varied: going upstream, one passes the abandoned, red-brick factories of Wilmington, the wooded ravine at Hagley, swamps teeming with bullfrogs at Chadds Ford, breathtakingly beautiful horse country near Embreeville, a roaring steel mill at Coatesville, and eventually Amish farms where cattle cool themselves in the creek in a scene that looks nineteenth-century.

And the Brandywine’s moods are varied: a novelist described it in 1845 as

at one time, winding slowly, in its silvery silence, through richly-pastured farms; or running broad and rippling over its beautiful bed of pearly shells and golden pebbles … until its waters contract and roll heavily and darkly beneath the grove of giant oaks, elms and sycamores; but soon, like the sullen flow of a dark heart, it breaks angrily over the first obstruction. Thus you may see the Brandywine, at one point, boiling savagely over a broken bed of rocks, until its thick sheets of foam slide, like an avalanche of snow, into a deep pool.⁴

Daydreams of Englishness

Traveling south in search of his wounded son during the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., passed through Chester County and marveled,

Much as I had heard of the fertile regions of Pennsylvania, the vast scale and the uniform luxuriance of this region astonished me. The grazing pastures were so green, the fields were under such perfect culture, the cattle looked so sleek, the houses were so comfortable, the barns so ample, the fences so well kept, that I did not wonder, when I was told that this region was called the England of Pennsylvania.⁵

And no particular spot in that whole region seems more English than the Brandywine. The picturesque stream twists by a flooded swamp quaintly called “Dungeon Bottom,” past historic settlements named for British towns (West Chester and Birmingham), then edges alongside Brandywine Hundred in a state named for Lord De La Warr (land divisions called “hundreds” occur only in Delaware and England). “You have got a hell of a fine country here,” the British officer of 1777 told a Quaker youth admiringly as he surveyed what would soon be a battlefield.

Further Britishness: Because Quakers intermarried, they built great family dynasties that cherished their genealogical connection to the British Isles—to which most had remained Tory loyalists in wartime, standing aloof from the new American mainstream. By 1853 there were 1,400 descendants of early settlers Abraham and Deborah Darlington, for example, and the “tribe” held a reunion. Busy at the gathering was West Chester botanist and amateur historian William Darlington, back from a genealogical tour of Britain. Not only Quakers boasted of their overseas family tree; as Canby noted, many local families sought “to find usually dubious ancestors of impeccable nobility in England.”⁶

Ancestral hearth. History-minded descendants preserved the lowly dwelling that Eleuthère Irénée du Pont first inhabited on the creek. In 1952—150 years after the clan arrived—Mrs. E. I. du Pont III paid a nostalgic visit.

Seemingly quasi-British, too, is the valley’s dainty rural charm: carefully preserved old stone cottages with cluttered colonial hearths, gentrified sports of fox hunting and point-to-point horse racing, and bountiful gardens both public and private. The venerable hunt called “Mr. Stewart’s Cheshire Foxhounds” was established on the river’s West Branch more than a century ago, named for a county in England and taking the unusual step of eschewing American dogs in favor of more authentic ones imported from Warwickshire, England. Brandywine estates could even claim to rival those of Britain, that Garden Isle: an English gardening expert raved of the du Ponts in 1931, “No one family in America has done more for horticulture.” On a bluff over the Brandywine, a cotton-mill magnate assembled one of the finest collections of English Victorian paintings anywhere, the Pre-Raphaelite showpieces now at the Delaware Art Museum. And today local squire George “Frolic” Weymouth is a friend of Queen Elizabeth II, no less, who shares his love of horses.

Along the Brandywine you can visit homes first occupied in the time of Queen Anne, worship in a church erected by English masons before 1700 (though called “Old Swedes” for the ethnicity of its congregation, remnant Scandinavians amid a floodtide of English). The distinctively British tone was noted as long ago as 1866, by Bayard Taylor in The Story of Kennett, the best known novel set in the Brandywine region: “The country life of our part of Pennsylvania retains more elements of its English origin than that of New England or Virginia.” And here, an enthusiast wrote in 1909,

the air has a sweet, tonic quality and the oxen plowing the brown hillsides look tranquil and comfortable. To follow the stream through all its wanderings is to pass close to ancient farm walls and bright old-time gardens, under little arching bridges and beside grassy swamps and cressy islands. Far off sounds the shriek of the steam-thresher, and the cries of farmers at their harrowing comes across the fields…. Our Chester County stream recalls the rivers of England.⁷

As early as 1805, a romantic writer sequestered at “An Admired Spot on the Banks of the Brandywine” drew a connection to British waterways:

Shall Thames and Avon boast the poet’s lays,

And shalt thou pass without the meed of praise?

What are their charms the world so much adore,

That do not smile delightful on thy shore.

The anonymous poet goes on to say,

Could I linger on thy tranquil shore …

How would my thoughts on rapid pinions soar,

From present to the past, from hence to England’s shore.⁸

Given this long tradition of suggestive linkages, it is somehow not surprising that J. R. R. Tolkien named one of the rivers in his imaginary Middle Earth—flowing past the hobbits’ peaceable fields and mills in the Shire, that paragon of mystical Englishness—the “Brandywine.”

As a matter of demographic fact, Chester County was unusually English for generations, hardly experiencing the diverse immigration so familiar elsewhere in the Northeast. The whole region preserved much of its early ethnic character: Philadelphia long had the highest percentage of native-born stock of any large American city, and, a historian wrote in the 1880s, “It is a singular fact that the white races in Pennsylvania [English, Scots-Irish, and German] are remarkably unmixed, and retain their original character beyond that of any state in the Union.”⁹

Lying at the heart of this persistently English-inflected zone, the Brandywine has lured Anglophiles, none more ardent than Howard Pyle, whose vine-clad Wilmington studio in Queen Anne style was described by one visitor as looking “fresh and English.” Here he illustrated the tales of King Arthur, immersing himself in English history and lore. Pyle once wrote, “I doubt whether I shall ever cross the ocean to see those things which seem so beautiful and dream-like in my imagination, and which if I saw might break the bubble of fancy and leave nothing behind but bitter soap-suds.” Instead of traveling abroad, he and his circle made a little England of their own, here in the heart of colonial America.¹⁰

As he wrote in one of his first magazine articles, “Old-Time Life in a Quaker Town,” Wilmington was a place of “many old-fashioned customs”—until lately there had even been bellmen and criers in the streets—and here the “traditions, manners, customs, and peculiarities of old English life have been handed down from generation to generation, as carefully preserved as an old quilted petticoat in lavender.”¹¹

Poets who have sung the Brandywine’s praises have often been reminded of the Thames. The Brandywine is, by elephantine American standards, a singularly compact and decorous little river, modestly confining itself to three counties in Pennsylvania and Delaware and hardly exceeding sixty miles in length: a tidy British scale. Actually the Thames is much bigger, draining an area sixteen times greater. But both rivers serve their respective regions as repositories of historical memory, as touch-stones of local character. As British writer Peter Ackroyd has written,

The Thames is a metaphor for the country through which it runs. It is modest and moderate, calm and resourceful; it is powerful without being fierce. It is not flamboyantly impressive…. It eschews extremes…. The idealized images of English life, with their thatched cottages and village greens, their duckponds and hedged fields, derive from the landscape of the Thames. The river is the source of these day-dreams of Englishness.¹²

Much the same could be said of how the mythic Brandywine functions in the American Mid-Atlantic—as a kind of traditionalist ideal. Here (if we avert our eye from industry and sprawl) is an enclave of quiet agrarian values amid urbanism; here is a beacon of refinement and culture for those who resent the hectic clang of modern life; here is Old America for the nostalgic antiquarian (see Plate 2). Philadelphia writer George Lippard, friend of Edgar Allan Poe, captured this feeling as long ago as the 1840s when, seeking inspiration for a historical novel about the Revolution, he looked around him at Birmingham Meetinghouse along the Brandywine in Chester County and saw “a sight as lovely, as ever burst on mortal eye. There are plains, glowing with the rich hues of cultivation, plains intersected by fences and dotted with cottages; here a massive hill; there an ancient farm-house, and far beyond, peaceful mansions reposing in the shadow of twilight woods.” Here, as we shall often see, the Brandywine seemed an almost old-world antithesis to the vast, smoky, industrializing city of Philadelphia.¹³

In his nostalgic Brandywine Days (1910), poet John Russell Hayes declared that “the old days and the old ways have their natural home in these tranquil valleys; quietude and conservatism are seated here by ancient right.” Hayes adored the Brandywine for its antimodern ethos of “reverie & landscape & old folks & old houses & old farms.” In the early twentieth century, novelist Joseph Hergesheimer was inspired by the region to take “traditional America for a subject,” relishing how “the older lives and days had laid their beneficent tyranny on the present” here. The tenor of such thought—almost a “Brandywine mindset”—can be traced right down to Andrew Wyeth, who wrote of his native hearth in 1965, “I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future—the timelessness of the rocks and the hills—all the people who have existed there.”¹⁴

Generation after generation, the mythical Brandywine has offered solace to thoughtful Americans oppressed by modern life, its relentless pace and chaotic lack of fixity. Here in the realm of spinning wheels and splashing milldams they can find venerable certainties. The Thames has always served a similar function, Ackroyd marveling at its endless capacity for inducing “a mood of nostalgia.” “It is in fact remarkable how many writers of the river do comment unfavorably on ‘modern life,’” he writes. “The riparian traveler of 1745 is just as likely to condemn ‘improvements’ as the walker of 2007.”¹⁵

Beauty Changed into Currency

The Brandywine has long functioned as a back-to-nature retreat just westward of Philadelphia, twenty-two miles away (America’s very largest metropolis between about 1750 and 1800, then its second largest to nearly 1890), just as does Walden Pond fifteen miles west of Boston or the Thames Valley west of London. These fabled places are all remarkable for the concentrated attention they received from artists and writers as nineteenth-century romanticism reshaped our understanding of the natural world and made escape from crowded cities seem desirable.

Offering a getaway from urbanism, the Brandywine’s meandering shores have drawn the wealthy for generations. Pioneering forester Joseph Rothrock urged farmers not to cut down the trees that shaded creekside acres because, someday, their property would become much more valuable for residential development than for corn: “Bear in mind, you through whose land the Brandywine flows, that before long the beauty of your meadows can be changed into currency; that every tree and shaded road along the banks will be an element in the bargain between you and a home hunter.” Rothrock seemed to predict today’s house-building boom—way back in 1889!¹⁶

Writing after World War I, Hergesheimer bemoaned the increasing intrusion of modernity—especially automobiles and the suburban culture they allowed—into his beloved valley. “The countryside of my imagination … long ago ceased to exist,” he complained. Classic colonial farmhouses now stood ruinous or had been transformed into upscale “country residences”; old taverns had become tearooms for motorists. With the coming of “great concrete highways,” such as U.S. 1 through Chadds Ford, he saw that “the countryside was contracting, it was growing smaller and smaller and some day it would disappear.” Never mind that he had moved out here from Philadelphia himself and rebuilt one of those old farmhouses, or that one of the noisy cars was his own.¹⁷

In the pell-mell Eisenhower years the Brandywine produced William Whyte, America’s most eloquent polemicist against suburban sprawl, who lamented what he called the most beautiful valley in the country being chopped up by greedy developers. Alas, many of his worries have substantially come true: today’s upscale suburbs with British-sounding names (“Royalwood Estates,” “Beversrede”) have swallowed rolling farmsteads and great turreted and columned country seats that Philadelphians built long ago as summer places, starting just before the Civil War. Everyone dreams of living here: twenty-first-century Chester County, bisected by the Brandywine and home to horse farms and golf courses, is by far the wealthiest county in Pennsylvania and among the forty richest in the nation.

Prosperity has gilded the name Brandywine ever since Quaker farmers grew wealthy tilling some of the most fertile cropland in colonial America here (“Without doubt the area was one of the most affluent agricultural societies anywhere,” a geographer has written), then even richer by milling flour to feed the great cities. They were joined by a French family named du Pont who turned the kinetic energy of rushing river water into the black gold of gunpowder and eventually amassed phenomenal riches as heads of the world’s biggest chemical company. Just one of them, Alfred I. du Pont, made more than $3 million in 1915 from stock dividends alone.¹⁸

Du Pont profits built sumptuous “chateaus” with ornate gardens along the creek in Delaware and allowed the preservation of scenic Brandywine acres that otherwise might have been carved up into industrial sites or housing developments. The opening of these Chateau Country gardens to tourists has lately contributed to giving the region between here and Philadelphia the largest concentration of public gardens anywhere in the nation. The gardening habit goes back many generations in this Anglophile place; botanist Darlington laid out a fine arboretum in a West Chester park and approvingly quoted Washington Irving: “The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is called Landscape Gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied nature intently.”¹⁹

Affluent as it may be—and advertised as a charming getaway—the Brandywine Valley is far from immune to modern ills. As upscale sprawl creeps over its bucolic hillsides, viewsheds are destroyed, water quality degrades. A Life magazine photograph of the Brandywine Battlefield in 1940 showed tumbling barley fields off to the horizon—almost impossible to imagine today, when fancy housing tracts occupy many of those same acres and less than 40 percent of the Brandywine watershed, once a model for the nation in intelligent farming practices, remains agricultural. The three counties through which the creek chiefly flows in Delaware and Pennsylvania are now thronged by 1.6 million people, a number constantly swelling; the watershed alone is home to 235,500. We voraciously remove thirty million gallons from the little river for various uses—every day.

Since 1967 the Brandywine Conservancy, founded by George “Frolic” Weymouth when the valley at Chadds Ford was threatened by industrial development, has fought to save the scenic beauty of this great American place. The organization today holds 441 conservation easements covering 12 percent of the watershed, keeping these properties unspoiled (by various means, 29 percent of the watershed has successfully been protected). But with every passing decade, development pressures seem to expand: of Pennsylvania’s sixty-seven counties, no other was growing so rapidly as Chester County by the year 2000. Until the economy slowed in the Great Recession, five thousand acres were being bulldozed annually there, an expanse equivalent to six of New York’s Central Park. The federal government recently called Brandywine Battlefield one of the nation’s most threatened landmarks, urgently deserving preservation.

One thinks of Goldsmith’s famous eighteenth-century poem, “The Deserted Village,” lamenting how the rich were buying up farms in the English countryside and converting them into private estates:

E’en now the devastation is begun,

And half the business of destruction done;

Even now, methinks, as pondering here I stand,

I see the rural virtues leave the land.²⁰

So, too, does Chester County seem a little less rural every year. The Brandywine paradox (capitalists insistently knocking at the doors of Arcadia) is constantly at work here, says David Shields, associate director of the land stewardship program at the Brandywine Conservancy: “The protected land draws great wealth and more people who want to live there—it’s a double-edged sword for us.”

All the more need for First State National Monument, then. As its debut brochure explains, the park is meant to safeguard “original Quaker settlement patterns … woods and pastures … scenic rock outcrops and wetlands” along the Brandywine’s shores. Federal intervention to save the creek seems warranted, for without question, its role in the life of the country has long been significant. As we saw, much as the Thames Valley has been called a little model for England generally (“an open-air museum of English culture, history and tradition—a microcosm from which a general impression of the whole country can be gained,” one historian writes), so too does the Brandywine seem to encapsulate, for many visitors, what they cherish most about the nation’s colonial heritage, its original agrarian flavor.²¹

In fact, the Brandywine’s early development gave a strong impetus to national trends: One geographer has written that Chester and neighboring counties in Pennsylvania set the pattern in colonial times for the organization of large sections of the greater United States, forming “the prototype of North American development. Its style of life presaged the mainstream of nineteenth-century America; its conservative defense of liberal individualism, its population of mixed national and religious origins, its dispersed farms, county seats, and farm-service villages, and its mixed crop and livestock agriculture served as models for much of the rural Middle West.”²²

And in fact, there are also Brandywine Creeks in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, their names a testament to the dispersal of local settlers to places far removed as pioneers industriously built a republic. These Brandywine notables spread widely. The first booster of Kentucky was John Filson, who spent a childhood on the Brandywine and published his promotional book on the new trans-Appalachian state in, of all places, Wilmington. William Gilpin was born in 1822 at Lafayette’s Headquarters, his family home, then spent his childhood at his father’s milling village beside the Brandywine in Delaware; later he explored the West and was appointed by President Lincoln as governor of Colorado—never missing a chance to boast that he had been “born on the Brandywine battlefield.” Abraham Lincoln himself, a native of Kentucky, was the great-grandson of ironmonger Mordecai Lincoln, who, in 1720, ran a forge “Near ye Branches of the French Creek & the Branches of Brandywine.”²³

As perhaps the most storied little river in America, the Brandywine continues to inspire and delight. The establishment of First State National Monument was a fitting culmination of centuries of public interest in a singularly attractive region. But in the twenty-first century, we face great challenges in preserving this fragile valley at the heart of Megalopolis, which has always existed in uneasy balance between two antithetical impulses—it is a myth-generating paradise, paragon of unspoiled bucolic nature, yet a wealth-generating engine subject to exploitation and overdevelopment. If we are going to save the Brandywine for our children, we need to begin by understanding its fascinating history and why it has always mattered.