Day 21: Northern Delaware & brief forays over the border

We purposely left Delaware (again) today, to look at something in another state.

A very alert blog reader e-mailed me recently about the trip to the Mets game, asking if this meant that we had abandoned our initial plan to “really get to know Delaware.”  The alert reader correctly pointed out that, in my initial post, I said we would leave Delaware only for two Tex-related trips to Annapolis.

That is true. Although we had the idea of making a day trip to Citi Field long before we left home I failed to mention it in the initial post.

However a third trip to Annapolis (for the play) was not originally planned and neither was yesterday’s dash across the border to the Andrew Wyeth Gallery in the Brandywine River Museum in Chads Ford, Pennsylvania.

Like us readers are simply going to have to accept that these forays are merely serendipitous slips from, rather than outright abandonment of, our unwavering commitment to really get to know the great state of Delaware.

Because the trip to Wilmington takes nearly two hours we hopped in the car (after the morning bike/jog to/in the park) and I started driving while Betsy began sifting through the mounds of information we have collected about things to see and do.

The Wyeth gallery in Chads Ford is something that has repeatedly come up in conversations,when we ask Delawarians what they recommend that we see and do during our stay here. When Betsy discovered that Andrew’s granddaughter Victoria would be leading a tour of the gallery our decision was made.

Victoria Wyeth was a hoot, the gallery was fantastic and the scenery was fabulous. It was a great decision.

Victoria is “Andy’s” only grandchild and she gave the impression of having known him quite well, sprinkling her talk with personal stories and recollections. She seemed mildly annoyed when I ask about her grandfather’s relationship with Helga and she stuck to her stance that Helga was simply a model that her grandfather liked to paint because he found her “interesting.” Even though my question was open ended;“what was the nature of their relationship?”; she chose to answer with her own much more specific question; “would you ask your grandparents about their sexual relationships?”

If I knew that my grandfather had hundreds of paintings of the same woman, often nude and spanning decades; yes, I might have inquired about the “nature” of their relationship.

Interestingly, Victoria Wyeth made a glancing reference during her talk that seemed to suggest that she herself had been a nude model for her some of her grandfather’s paintings; painting she apparently keeps out of public view in her own personal collection.

There were about 50 Andrew Wyeth paintings on display in the gallery.

The northern Delaware terrain near the Pennsylvania border is very different from the rest of the state; very hilly and heavily treed, with narrow, twisting roads.

It was beautiful sunny day and the drive was a treat itself.

We took an impossibly narrow, curvy road to look at a covered bridge. What’s interesting about this bridge is not that it dates from the 1850s and had been preserved with substantial effort, but that it was destroyed by a flood in 2008 and a new covered bridge was built to replace it. Thus, we may very well have driven across the newest covered bridge in the world.

We got to the Hagley Museum and Library on the outskirts of Wilmington too late to tour the du Pont mansion (one of several in Delaware) but we did have time to go through the museum and get a better handle on Delaware’s most influential and important family and corporate entity.

The du Pont family patriarch was a confidant of Louis XIV and, in 1799, in what can only be described as a “heady” move, he loaded up the family and moved from France to New Jersey with a bunch of borrowed money, looking for something to invest in.

One of his sons hit on the idea of manufacturing gunpowder, which was in short supply and of inferior quality in the fledgling USA. The du Ponts searched about for the perfect spot to set up a “black powder” manufacturing plant and found it along the Brandywine River in northern Delaware.

For the next century a succession of du Ponts plowed the profits from gunpowder and dynamite sales back into the manufacturing operation. By the time World War I rolled around the company was uniquely (many would say monopolistically) positioned to reap “explosive” profits from the business.

Trustbusters cried foul and that generation of du Ponts saw the handwriting on the wall and sought to diversify. They did so by aggressively plowing profits into chemical research and development that resulted in hundreds of new inventions (like Teflon, Nylon and Tivec, the ubiquitous construction material the construction workers have draped all over the outside of our condo) that America consumers soon couldn’t live without. In fact, as the photo below documents, Betsy took some time out of her busy day to invent a few things herself in one of the Du Pont labs.

To put it mildly the du Ponts have had an outsized influence on Delaware, including some governors and a congressman.  I saw one report indicating their funding for segregated schools for Blacks shamed the legislature into increasing funding for White schools. The company continues to be among the largest employers in the state and there is still a family member on the board of directors.

From the spectacular Brandywine River valley we drove east through suburban Wilmington to “the Wedge”. Alert readers may recall the discussion in an earlier post about the wedge, which was a sort of no-man’s land where Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania meet at the point where Mason and Dixon’s straight survey lines intersect with the half circle that King Charles II drew with compass pointed on the old courthouse in New Castle to settle the dispute between the Penns and the Calverts. The final boundary was not determined until an Act of Congress settled the matter in 1921.

Supposedly there is a tri-state marker and we wanted to see it but had to settle for driving back and forth over the state lines of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware in a vain search.

We stopped at a brewpub near the U of D campus in Newark for a snack and drove home.