The Brandywine: An Intimate Portrait

The Brandywine

The Brandywine

An Intimate Portrait

W. Barksdale Maynard

Also by W. Barksdale Maynard

Architecture in the United States, 1800–1850

Walden Pond: A History

Buildings of Delaware in the Buildings of the United States Series

Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency

Consumed: Rethinking Business in the Era of Mindfulness, with Andrew Benett and Ann O’Reilly

Princeton: America’s Campus

The Talent Mandate: Why Smart Companies Put People First, with Andrew Benett and Ann O’Reilly

Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Fair Play Foundation and by a gift from Eric R. Papenfuse and Catherine A. Lawrence.

Copyright © 2015 W. Barksdale Maynard

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maynard, W. Barksdale (William Barksdale)

Brandywine : an intimate portrait / W. Barksdale Maynard.—1st ed.

p.    cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4677-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Brandywine Creek (Pa. and Del.)—History. 2. Brandywine Creek Valley

(Pa. and Del.)—History. I. Title.

F157.B77M39 2015

To Susan, Alexander, Spencer, and Elisabeth

Contents

Preface

American Arcadia

Chapter 1

Fish Creek in New Sweden

Chapter 2

Pride of Penn’s Woods

Chapter 3

A River Red with Blood

Chapter 4

Rushing Water and Buzzing Wheels

Chapter 5

Thunderous Age of Black Powder

Chapter 6

Industry and War

Chapter 7

River of Nature

Chapter 8 Literary Pastoral

Chapter 9

Painters of True American Art

Appendix

Bridges of the Brandywine

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

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