Betsy poses with Rocky Bluewinkle
We skipped our morning exercise routine and started north (relatively) early, intent on conquering (or at least seeing some of the sites) in New Castle (Delaware’s first capital) and Wilmington (the largest city in the state).
Am I overusing (parenthetical) references?
Time (or the lack thereof) and the odd schedules at some of the sites prevented us from making any claim to total victory, but we did get a pretty good feel for these two important (and quite different) cities.
After determining that the ferry to Ft. Delaware (which is on an island in the Delaware River) did not run on weekdays until mid-June we started with a tour of George Read II’s house (this is the son of the guy who signed the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution). GR II built the place on waterfront in New Castle in the early 1800s in a clear attempt to become the most ostentatious person in the fledgling country his father helped create. With 22 rooms and 14,000 square feet of living area GR II could clearly declare “mission accomplished.” Apparently he was the Donald Trump of his day.
A docent from the Delaware Historical Society who appeared to be in the early stages of dementia took us on our own personal tour of the house, which has fortuitously had just four owners in two-plus centuries, including the DHS.
Read II had some financial troubles and a local guy that grew up next door and made a fortune trading with China bought the house in the 1840s. His family kept it until 1920 when it was purchased by a wealthy, childless couple that liked to party and appreciated history. The partying wife, Mrs. Philip Laird, lived in the house into the 1970s and left it to the DHS when she died. Thus, it is considerd one of the best preserved early American homes in the U.S.
Mrs. Laird and her husband also bought and restored many other buildings in New Castle and she played a significant role in preserving the historic buildings in the downtown area along the riverfront.
Today downtown New Castle may be the country’s closest and most realistic example of early 19th Century architecture.
As discussed in previous posts Delaware had a close and sometimes confusing relationship with Pennsylvania and opinions vary about precisely when (or if) it became a colony separate and apart from Pennsylvania. One thing that is not disputed is that when Penn first stepped ashore in North America it was in New Castle.
Penn soon relocated further north on the Delaware but he, Pennsylvania and particularly Philadelphia, have undeniably cast a long shadow over Delaware ever since.
Built in 1732 the New Castle Court House was the site of many important events, including the separation vote in June 1776 when, according to our excellent tour guide, the “lower three counties of the Delaware” voted not only to separate from Pennsylvania but to also declare independence from Great Britain.
The (very) old New Castle Court House.
Why then, I ask him, was there all the hoopla a month later over the vote of the Delaware delegation to the Continental Congress’s declaration of independence if Delaware had already declared its independence (recall that Read voted against the declaration and Caesar Rodney had ride through the night to Philadelphia to break the tie, as detailed in a previous post)?
His answer was, essentially, that it was a “confusing time” and the exact sequence of events is uncertain.
From New Castle we drove into downtown Wilmington, which is clearly a deeply troubled city.
Downtown Wilmington reminds me of the way American cities used to look in the 1970s, basically a shell of office buildings that empty out all the White people at5 p.m., leaving a Black ghetto.
At one of our stops a few days ago I read that Wilmington may have suffered more than any other city during the race riots of the late 1960s. Apparently the National Guard troops were brought into restore order and the city was under martial law for nine months straight, making it the longest Federal occupation of a city in U.S. history.
Clearly the city leaders are trying. They have attempted to fix up the downtown streets and have built a really nice walkway along the Christiana River, but the evidence of social decay is pervasive.
One of the things that I have observed about Delaware, not just in Wilmington but throughout the state, is that there appears to be a very sharp divide between Black and White.
Roughly two-thirds of the state is White, about 22 percent are Black and Hispanics (likely undercounted) make up the rest. There does not seem to me to be much intermingling and I just get the sense that there is not much upward mobility for the Blacks.
Delaware has a very complicated racial past, being neither northern nor southern. It was a slave state but, as they take great pains to point out when discussing this topic, it had a higher proportion of free blacks than any other state. From what I can tell desegregation did not go well here and a very high percentage of schools here are private. Perhaps as much as anything, that may have reinforced what seems to me to be an unhealthy polarization of haves and have nots that is drawn along racial lines.
We went to the DHS library in downtown Wilmington in search of information about the lineage of George Read and, of course, they were closed on Wednesdays. We also did a "drive-by" of the "new" New Castle County Court House. Because of better port facilities and its location at the confluence of the Christiana and Delaware Rivers Wilmington supplanted New Castle as the county seat in the 1800s and the state capital was moved to Dover during the Revolutionary War because of (well-founded) concerns that New Castle was more prone to attack by the British.
Then we stopped by the “Old Swedes” church (an oasis of green in the middle of one of Wilmington’s roughest neighborhoods). It of course closed at 4 p.m. and we arrived at 4:05 p.m. But we did look around the outside of what is supposed to be one of the oldest active churches in the country.
The Swedes came to the Delaware valley about the same time as the Dutch, in the 1630s, and settled in what is now Wilmington, along the Christiana River. The Dutch settled in the Lewes area. They feuded with one another for control but, as we all know, the British ultimately prevailed. Thus the evidence of the Swedes in the colonization period is rather scant. That makes the church, built in 1698, a significant artifact; especially since much of Wilmington has undergone “urban renewal” that few “artifacts” survived.
Something we have noticed is that every church that dates back to the 18th century is surrounded by a cemetery. While it is common in Texas and the Midwest to see a cemetery adjacent to a church here in Delaware the older churches tend to sit smack in the middle of the graveyard, literally surrounded by headstones.
Headstones and azaleas outside "Old Swedes" Church
By now we had had our fill of history and downtown Wilmington, so we headed off to find Frawley Stadium, home of the Wilmington Blue Rocks minor league baseball team.
It turns out that the stadium is in the heart of the small portion of Wilmington that appears to be having some success in revitalizing. There are several new restaurants and museums along the river walk the city has built along the banks of the Christina just south of downtown.
Parking at the stadium was (get this) free! So we parked, used a discount from Wawa (a popular east coast gasoline station) to buy two box seat tickets for $8 each. With an hour or so to kill we walked over to a brew pub that had a nice deck outside and we were sat there sipping fresh brews and watching the people walk/jog on the path. There were also several apparently very serious crew teams rowing up and down the river under the watchful eye of a coach who rode alongside in a boat with an outboard motor.
We had not really looked at the tickets closely and much to our shock and amazement when we walked to our seats we discovered they were on the very front row, almost directly behind home plate! Making it even more awesome, it was Michael Jackson appreciation night!!
If only Betsy had let me sign up for the moonwalk competition.
This is the view from our seats, with downtown Wilmington in the background.
This is the view from our seats, with downtown Wilmington in the background.
I thought the Blue Rocks would be a AAA team but it turns out they are in the “upper level A” Carolina League, a farm club of the Kansas City Royals. The opponent was the Salem (Va.) Red Sox. It was a very enjoyable, crisply-played game, with the Rocks prevailing 3-2.
Built in the early 90s Frawley is a very nice stadium, similar to Wolff Stadium in SA but with more a little more character…including the buzz of traffic on nearby I-95.
Thanks to our great seats we were able to get some good mascot shots.
Supposedly the Blue Rocks have three mascots; Rocky Bluewinkle, a blue moose; Mr. Celery, a stalk of celery that comes out to "CEL"-a-brate when Wilmington scores a run, and; Rubble, a giant blue rock.
We saw quite a bit of Rocky Bluewinkle, who very graciously took some time out for the photo with Betsy that you saw at the top of this post.
However, Mr. Celery appeared on the field only fleetingly and there was no sign whatsoever of Rubble. At one point I wondered aloud why Mr. Celery did not stay out on the field longer and Betsy promptly quipped; "He can't stay out long, he's perishable."
I was however able to get a candid shot of Mr. Celery in the runway under the bleachers and, as you can probably tell by the expression on his face, must have caught him at an awkward moment.
Supposedly the Blue Rocks have three mascots; Rocky Bluewinkle, a blue moose; Mr. Celery, a stalk of celery that comes out to "CEL"-a-brate when Wilmington scores a run, and; Rubble, a giant blue rock.
We saw quite a bit of Rocky Bluewinkle, who very graciously took some time out for the photo with Betsy that you saw at the top of this post.
However, Mr. Celery appeared on the field only fleetingly and there was no sign whatsoever of Rubble. At one point I wondered aloud why Mr. Celery did not stay out on the field longer and Betsy promptly quipped; "He can't stay out long, he's perishable."
I was however able to get a candid shot of Mr. Celery in the runway under the bleachers and, as you can probably tell by the expression on his face, must have caught him at an awkward moment.
It was nearly 11 p.m. by the time we got home, making this our longest day since the drive to Knoxville.
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