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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

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