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      Pride of Penn’s Woods

      The crucial episode in the settlement of the Delaware Valley came in 1682 with the landing of William Penn at New Castle, where he claimed today’s entire state of Delaware as the “three lower counties” of Pennsylvania. Then he sailed upstream to found Philadelphia. Already his promotional map showed the new colony (Latin for “Penn’s Woods”) embracing the “Brande vine,” considered one of the most important waterways of the bountiful region. His new holdings, Penn said, “hath the advantage of many creeks or rivers … some navigable for great ships, some for small craft: those of most eminency are Christina Brandywine Skilpott & Schulkill; any one of which have room to lay up the Royal Navy of England, there being from four to eight fathom water.”¹

      With great efficiency, Penn’s territory was chopped up into parcels and sold off to eager settlers, as shown on the official Thomas Holme map of 1687. “County of Chester” is seen subdivided as far west as the Brandywine—where it abruptly gives way to forest primeval—with plantations confined to the area between Great Bend and the Forks (where the east and west branches of the creek divide), centering on “Brumadgam” or Birmingham, named ambitiously for the prosperous town in the English Midlands. East of the lower Brandywine lies, on the map, “the Proprietary Mannor of Rockland”—a name later famous from paper-milling at the village of Rockland. Many of the original, west-running parcel lines still appear as modern property divisions in Chester County, more than 330 years later.

      More British maps would follow, including one of the famous “circular line” dividing today’s Delaware from Pennsylvania. First drawn in December 1701 with the “horsedyke” at New Castle as its radius, running due north to an oak tree with twelve notches on the west bank of the Brandywine near Great Bend, the round shape of the boundary is unique in all the American states. In 1750 another twelve-mile radius was drawn, meant to clarify the original. Tradition holds that the New Castle courthouse cupola was appointed the center of this circle, but, in fact, the boundary was difficult to draw and not nearly precise enough to line up on one building—so irregular, in fact, it actually had multiple centers from which it was measured. First State National Monument embraces the green on which the courthouse stands in New Castle as well as the historic No. 14 Bound Stone, part of the circular border, in the park’s Woodlawn section on the Brandywine.²

      The flood of Quaker settlers—Pennsylvania’s population broke twenty thousand by 1700—seemed to spell doom for the Lenape Indians (see Plate 3). Their chieftains sold spacious inland tracts to Penn in 1683 but reserved one mile on each side of the Brandywine for hunting and fishing. Under the leadership of Checochinican (Person of Few Words), they huddled for security at Queonemysing, or Indian Town, in Great Bend. This settlement did not last long, however; soon the Lenape had fled west or perished, the last, locally, being the itinerant basket maker “Indian Hannah,” who died near Embreeville on the West Branch in 1802 and whose grave, with the coming of romanticism, became something of a shrine for poetical types. Today the site of Indian Town dozes beneath rolling fields, one of the most important archaeological sites in all the Mid-Atlantic, though barely explored.

      Further upstream, old Lenape graves were frequently excavated by curious settlers, and farmers collected artifacts of the vanquished native peoples. When West Chester celebrated its centennial in 1899, locals put their findings on public display: an iron tomahawk, heaps of stone tools and colorful trade beads, an Indian skull and jawbone, and more than five thousand arrowheads, or “darts.”³

      Gone, too—mostly within just a few years of the Quakers’ arrival—was much of the superabundant wildlife every seventeenth-century settler had commented on. Penn himself had glowingly described “elk, as big as a small ox, deer bigger than ours, beaver … turkey (forty and fifty pound weight) … phesants, heath-birds, pidgeons and partridges in abundance …. brands, ducks, teal, also the snipe and curloe, and that in great numbers … wild cat, panther, otter, wolf.” Now all were greatly reduced or driven to extinction. In the 1740s, Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm could report that “things are greatly altered”; gone were the days you could kill eighty ducks in a morning. A farmer in his field along the Brandywine at Wilmington shot the last beaver in 1770, it was said (though these pesky tree-fellers are now back). As late as 1838, “wagon loads of the passenger pigeons were brought into Philadelphia and were seen in heaps in the market,” but they too subsequently vanished from the scene. “Many of those [animals] which originally inhabited our woods have gone, with the red men of the forest, never to return,” botanist William Darlington declared in an 1826 speech, “and others are daily becoming more rare.”⁴

      Despite all the ecological changes, numerous ancient trees survive today from the first years of English settlement, the glory of our muchaltered landscape—a concentration of giants virtually unrivaled anywhere else along the Eastern Seaboard. A tulip tree older than our nation, twenty feet around, stood at the DuPont Experimental Station above Rising Sun Bridge—a tall sentinel patched with concrete that unfortunately died in 2013. For a century artists showed this giant in their paintings of Walker’s Mill. On the Winterthur estate stands a tulip tree seventeen feet eight inches in circumference and soaring to 162 feet, the tallest tree in the state of Delaware. “It would be a tree of note even in the Smokies,” a visiting expert marvels. On the main lawn of the house grew a white oak that, according to my ring count after it was sawed down, sprouted in the late seventeenth century. Such extraordinary trees have outlived every other living thing from that remote era—certainly every animal and person has long since been swept away—and yet these venerable veterans still burst into green life each spring, as if they were three years old and not three hundred.

      Recently there has been a flurry of tree-measuring by the Native Tree Society. Their results are astonishing. At 138 feet tall, a Winterthur beech is the tallest of that species the group has measured anywhere in the country. Sixty-seven trees at Longwood qualify as Pennsylvania State Champions. A tulip tree there hits 164.2 feet—incredibly, the tallest hardwood standing in the northeastern United States. A visit to just one section of Brandywine Creek State Park revealed more giants: seventy-three tulip trees over 130 feet tall (one at 160 feet), sixteen of these more than fourteen feet in girth—no wonder Thomas Jefferson called this species “the Juno of our groves.” Society members across the nation responded excitedly to the announcements: “That’s more big poplars than Steve and I have measured in the entire state of Ohio.” “There just aren’t many places with so much quantity and quality. I’m astounded.”⁵

      The survival of

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