The Brandywine - W. Barksdale Maynard

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“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

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