LITMIR.BIZ

      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

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