LITMIR.BIZ

      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

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