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The Brandywine. W. Barksdale Maynard
Читать онлайн.Название The Brandywine
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780812290738
Автор произведения W. Barksdale Maynard
Издательство Ingram
Minuit named his fort after her and, in another spectacular transaction, bought from the Indians the whole western shore of the Delaware River from the Atlantic at Cape Henlopen to the falls at today’s Trenton, New Jersey—and far inland too—setting up wooden stakes that stood, famous landmarks, for generations. The Indians traded these immense tracts for “awls, needles, scissors, knives, axes, guns, powder and balls, together with blankets,” probably thinking the deal was a canny one, since they planned to continue to live and hunt there, unmindful of these puny, legalistic explorers. The Swedes proudly set out to map their vast new territory (which of course embraced the Philadelphia metropolitan region of today), including the Brandywine and all the other “tributaries” and “creeks.” A copy was sent to the Crown.
Thus a flamboyant challenge was hurled at the Dutch, who loudly protested this Scandinavian incursion. Minuit, they said, had no authority “to build forts upon our rivers and coasts, nor to settle people on the land, nor to traffic in peltries.”
Subsequent governor Johan Printz bolstered the Swedish settlement at the Rocks and defied the imperious Dutch leader, Peter Stuyvesant, who erected the rival Fort Casimir a short way down the Delaware River at today’s New Castle, Delaware. Weighing over four hundred pounds, Governor Printz—“Big Guts” or “Big Tub” to the Lenape—inspired awe. When de Vries returned for another American visit, Printz drank his health with a glass of Rhenish wine, toasting the intrepid pioneer navigator. Where de Vries had seen only the Rocks, lonely amid forests and marshes, now there was a sturdy, permanent fort with iron cannon guarding the Christina River and “some houses inside” its walls.6
Upon arrival, Printz had immediately shipped 1,300 beaver skins home as evidence of the great abundance of God’s bounty in New Sweden. Soon the Swedes were trading far inland with the Minquas for “beavers, raccoons, sables, gray foxes, wildcats, lynxes, bears, and deer.” The Lenape vexed Printz with their constant attacks, keeping the Swedes confined to their fortifications. He longed to bring over plenty of troops and guns until he “broke the necks of all of them.” Then “we could take possession of the places (which are the most fruitful) that the savages now possess.”7
In the 1640s, Fort Christina bustled with activity: residents included a commissary, pastor, barber, trumpeter, constable, blacksmith, carpenters, and three soldiers. Outside, stretching to the lazy, tidal-plain Brandywine a short distance away, were fields of tobacco, maize, rye, and barley amid tree stumps, and a roaming herd of cattle and swine. Forests were falling to the steel axes of Finnish settlers, a strapping breed of immigrants brought for just this purpose. Within the walls of Fort Christina debuted the first “log cabin” in America, a typically Finnish housing type, soon to spread everywhere—another Brandywine contribution to the culture of the entire nation.8
Printz dreamed of a great “tobacco plantation”—controversial, since some Swedes rued importation of the filthy weed. Just east at the fledgling Swedish settlement of Manathaan (today’s Cherry Island landfill), a cooper set up a cask-making business and constructed small boats, the very beginnings of European industry in the Delaware Valley.9
Two rivers meet. This 1940s view shows the Brandywine, center, as it flows down toward the wider Christina, left. Downtown Wilmington at upper left. Swedish colonial settlement happened at the narrow isthmus, site of Fort Christina at the Rocks.
The Swedes recognized the potential for water power on the area’s swift streams. Printz built the first “watermill” in the Mid-Atlantic on Cobb’s Creek near today’s Philadelphia, for grinding grain, replacing an earlier windmill that “would never work, and was good for nothing.” He ordered a survey of potential sites (“waterfalls”) for a sawmill that could cut oak to be “bartered in the Flemish Islands for wine,” and although this came to nothing, Printz was prescient in seeing the opportunities for industry on local creeks, where water rushed powerfully over the boulders.10
The last Swedish governor, as it turned out, was Johan Rising, who survived a hellish 1654 voyage across the Atlantic in which a hundred prospective settlers died. Like every new arrival along the Delaware River, he marveled at the many intersecting waterways teeming with geese and ducks. What was later “Brandywine” was being called “Fish Creek” now, appropriately, for “in the creeks there are eel, salmon, thickhead and striped bass.” Like Printz, Rising dreamed of mills, and he was surely referring to the Brandywine when he described “the great fall [where] many waterworks could be placed.” He planned “to construct there a good dam … and then a flour-mill, a saw-mill, and a chamois-dressing mill…. If we could here establish powder-mills it would bring us great profit.”
Confidently, Rising had engineer Peter Lindeström divide the field between Fort Christina and the Brandywine into building lots, where six or eight houses were soon erected—not so many as the twenty-two the obnoxious Dutch had built at New Castle, but the promising start of a port city. Rising and Lindeström improved the crumbling fort, rebuilding it “with good ramparts of turf” and palisades against “the attacks of savages.” Lindeström drew a map that survives; it shows the fort, the town grid, and the lower Brandywine twisting through its mosquitoey marshes.
But it was not savages who brought doom to Fort Christina: it was those Dutch, whom Rising had fatally antagonized by claiming Fort Casimir for Sweden. In August 1655, Peter Stuyvesant’s soldiers, in retaliation, suddenly surrounded Fort Christina, sending boats up the Brandywine to Third Hook, a bluff on the north bank of the creek. From there, they crossed to Timber Island, which Rising owned personally and had partly cleared of its fine trees; it lay in a bend in the Brandywine across from the fort, where the invaders now seized a house and hoisted a flag. Then they dashed up to the Great Falls (today’s Brandywine Park) and nearby heights overlooking the Swedish settlement. Stuyvesant had swiftly “invested Fort Christina on all sides.”
So began the first European military operation on the Brandywine. Stuyvesant sent a letter demanding that the Swedes surrender, then had his troops fire warning shots from batteries at Timber Island and along the Christina River. His Dutch troops slaughtered cattle, goats, swine, and poultry, and “broke open houses.” The Swedish fort was poorly equipped, and a dejected Rising soon met Stuyvesant outside its “sconce” and gave the place up, bringing New Sweden to a humiliating close.
But Dutch rule itself would not last long. The English were pressing in from all sides now, and in 1664 they took control of the entire Delaware Valley.11
By the time Dutch traveler Jasper Danckaerts passed through in the fall of 1679, Fort Christina had vanished, swallowed by the mists of history. He came from the north, crossing Schiltpads Kill, Swedish for “turtle” (literally “creek of the toad with a shield on its back”). This was today’s Shellpot Creek in Delaware, which has now been diverted and no longer enters the Brandywine.12
Along the Shellpot, “a fall of water over the rocks” had allowed construction of a productive grist mill. The Swedish miller showed the curious traveler a dead muskrat hanging up to dry, a creature “numerous in the creeks.” Danckaerts then crossed the Brandywine in a canoe, visiting the former site of Fort Christina as well as the place across Christina River where “Stuyvesant threw up his battery to attack the fort.” Already these places were of historical interest, and Danckaerts seems to have been our first “heritage tourist,” that lucrative industry in modern times. Near the site of the battery, he noted, abundant medlar fruit was harvested by a Dutchman to make “good brandy”: a possible clue, as