LITMIR.BIZ

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immigrant Eleuthère Irénée du Pont signed his traveling papers “botaniste.” Winterthur historian Maggie Lidz tells me,

      It’s crucial that there has been a continuous history of tree care, right back to the 1830s, when the Winterthur property was described as “as wild as the mountains of Virginia.” The family kept the house surrounded by trees, which was a choice not followed much elsewhere—they valued the trees that highly. Later on, Colonel Henry A. du Pont wouldn’t let anybody cut the trees, and he had Charles Sargent down from the Arnold Arboretum to document them. Today, we couldn’t have Azalea Woods or March Bank without the tree cover. Trees are what give the garden such a strong sense of identity, not just locally but nationally and internationally.

      Brave Brick Houses

      With the British settlers came real, permanent architecture. Thousands of years of Indian occupation have left virtually no trace today, except for the occasional arrowhead in a muddy cornfield. And few if any authentically Swedish or Finnish log cabins remain. By contrast, the Brandywine Valley has dozens of sturdy structures surviving from the earliest years of Quaker settlement—homes of industrious farmers who built them to last.

      The ideal, said one observer of seventeenth-century Pennsylvania, was houses “built of brick, some of timber, plaister’d and ceil’d, as in England”; “brave brick houses,” Penn himself called them. The surprisingly many homes that survive from these early years help make Chester County second in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in National Register of Historic Places properties, with more than three hundred total. Only the city of Philadelphia boasts more.

      Well-built houses of extremely early date testify to the great wealth that now began to accrue—this being, by lucky chance, some of the most fertile farmland on the entire Eastern Seaboard. Penn was delighted to find “a fast fat earth, like to our best vales in England, especially by inland brooks and rivers, God in his wisdom having ordered it so … the back-lands being generally three to one richer than those that lie by navigable waters.” No wonder settlers hurried inland, away from the Swede-infested Delaware River, and crowded the Brandywine’s banks in the district they called Birmingham.⁶

      And the houses they built have become famous for their picturesque charm. Even in the 1860s they were considered well worth visiting, as novelist Bayard Taylor wrote of one of them in The Story of Kennett: “A hundred years had already elapsed since the masons had run up those walls of rusty hornblende rock, and it was even said that the leaden window-sashes, with their diamond-shaped panes of greenish glass, had been brought over from England, in the days of William Penn.” As a lad of fifteen, the antiquarian Taylor had drawn a picture of a colonial farmstead on a diamond pane “taken from the window of a house erected in the year 1716.”⁷

      West of Chadds Ford, the primitive-looking brick Barns-Brinton House (1714), today a museum, served early settlers as a tavern on “Ye Great Road to Nottingham” in the colony of Maryland. Andrew Wyeth showed it in a painting, Tenant Farmer. Nearby is that time-capsule of a place, Kennett Meeting, a sober, whitewashed hall of Quaker worship (c. 1713) that briefly formed a defensive position for Americans in the Battle of the Brandywine. Soldiers lie buried in its graveyard, a little German flag today marking Hessian remains.

      On the river near West Chester at Taylor’s (or Black Horse) Run, at the upper end of North Creek Road, stands the Abiah Taylor House, with a 1724 datestone and 1753 barn (oldest extant in Pennsylvania) across the way. Even in the nineteenth century it was “pointed out to strangers as the original dwelling” hereabouts. This brick landmark, built by a farmer and miller who arrived from Didcot, England, shortly after 1700, was recently restored by architect John Milner with leaded casement windows of the kind early homes inevitably had.⁸

      The much-photographed John Chads House (c. 1725), now owned by the local historical society, stands on a steep slope at Chadds Ford, looking down on its original springhouse. Chads (originally the family name was Chadsey) inherited five hundred acres here from his father and operated a ferry over the creek, serving travelers. His crossing fees varied from one shilling six pence for coach or wagon to four pence for a horse and rider or an ox, cow, or heifer down to three halfpence for a hog. Chads’s redoubtable widow, Betty, remained in the house throughout the battle, hiding “her silver spoons dailey in her pocket.” The fieldstone dwelling with pent eave, sheltered by a white pine already sizeable in a drawing of the 1840s, is another fine example of early construction by the pioneering English. Milner praises its harmonious relationship with the land, being “hunkered into the hill and protected from the north winds. The way settlers sited their buildings to take advantage of water sources and protect them from weather creates the Brandywine aesthetic in terms of architecture and function. These structures have such incredible personality.”⁹

      One of the oldest and best of this nationally important collection of colonial dwellings is the Brinton 1704 House. As we have seen, Penn’s Quakers quickly pressed right up to the Brandywine in Birmingham, recognizing the fertility of the creek bottoms and seeking to avoid established settlers on the Delaware. Cutting down the magnificent forests was followed by the planting of winter and summer wheat, buckwheat, rye, barley, oats, and Indian corn. Turkeys, wild geese, and ducks were for the moment plentiful, and venison could be purchased from the Indians. “We had Bearflesh this fall for little or nothing,” a new British arrival reported. “It is good food, tasting much like Beef.”¹⁰

      Among the early Quaker immigrants to this place of nature’s largesse was seventeen-year-old William Brinton, who came with his parents in 1684 from Staffordshire. They settled near the Brandywine close to today’s Dilworthtown—then in the trackless wilderness—and spent the first winter in a nearby “cave.” The Brintons quickly built a house and began preparing the land for agriculture. So successful were they, William Brinton was able, within twenty years, to erect an exceptionally large dwelling of stone, today’s Brinton 1704 House. Its interior frame made lavish use of thick oak and walnut, so abundant was timber in those days.

      Well into the nineteenth century, the history-minded Brinton family showed visitors the site of their very first family cabin—an indentation in the ground with an old pear tree nearby, and a swarm of blue-bottle flowers. Brought from England by the Brintons, this plant subsequently became an agricultural pest in the region.

      Thousands of people today can trace their genealogy to these intrepid Brinton colonists, and the Brinton Association of America maintains the house as a museum. William Brinton’s four-greats-grandson led the Union armies in the Civil War (General William Brinton McClellan); his sister Elizabeth was the ancestor, eight generations down, of President Richard Nixon, himself a Quaker. Immigrant James Nixon settled in Brandywine Hundred by 1731, and his son from whom the president was descended fought as a private in the Battle of the Brandywine.

      Restoration of the Brinton 1704 House in 1954 re-created the original twenty-seven leaded casement windows, which give it such a medieval feel. Early artifacts on display include poignant objects brought over on the ship by the Staffordshire family: a mortar and pestle, a glazed-redware ink stand, a pocketbook, and a 1629 London Bible with flame-stitched covers. All these somehow survived the ransacking of the house by British troops in the Battle of the Brandywine, the last hours of which raged in nearby fields, where, at sundown, General Washington observed in dismay the collapse of his army.¹¹

      Another great American family founded on the Brandywine was that of Gilpin. Joseph Gilpin, an English weaver from Dorchester, near Oxford, sailed with his wife and small children in 1695, landing at New Castle. They set out on foot for their plantation in Birmingham, already assigned to them, but could only go ten miles before night set in. They asked for shelter at a settler’s home but were refused. Fortunately there were Indians camped nearby, so they picturesquely “lodged there for the first night on shore, in America.” Hardships were just beginning: “They had at first to dig a cave in the earth and went into it, in which they lived four or five years and where two children were born.”

      Eventually Joseph Gilpin built a frame house with walls of wattle and daub and, in 1754, the masonry home that became General Howe’s headquarters during the battle (on today’s Harvey Road, Chadds Ford; a second Gilpin house was headquarters for Lafayette). The Gilpins had fifteen children

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