By Ken Mammarella
Contributing Writer

The Brandywine Valley is famous for its beauty, its history and its industries, as these writers have eloquently noted.

“God with His Hand Divine must have patterned after Heaven when He made the old Brandywine,”  Christian C. Sanderson writes in a poem quoted by Elizabeth Humphrey and Michael Kahn, in Brandywine.

“The Brandywine … certainly ranks as one of the most historic rivers in the United States,” Bruce Edward Mowday writes in a postcard collection titled Along the Brandywine. That includes the influential Battle of Brandywine on Sept. 11, 1777, the largest single-day engagement of the American Revolution.

“In terms of game-changing innovation, the Brandywine Valley at Wilmington was effectively the Silicon Valley of its day,” W. Barksdale Maynard writes in The Brandywine: An Intimate Portrait, a well-researched and beautifully written book.

Let’s take a journey exploring lesser-known elements along the Brandywine, thanks to these books; The Brandywine, by Henry Seidel Canby; Red Men on the Brandywine, by C.A. Weslager; and other research.

The game of the name

The Brandywine has had a bewildering number of names over the centuries.

The local Native Americans called it Wawaset, Wawa and Wawasan. That eventually led to places like Wawaset Park, a planned community in Wilmington that’s on the National Register of Historic Places, and Wawa, a community in Delaware County made famous as the site of the first dairy of the Wawa convenience store chain. “Wawaset” means “near the winding bend,” according to the University of Delaware Water Resources Center. The Wawa logo is a Canada goose, even though experts say some Native Americans used “we’we” for the snow goose.

The Lenape – who themselves had multiple names, including the Lenni Lenape and eventually the Delaware – may have also called it Tankapanicum, Tankopanicum or Trancopanican, meaning “rushing waters.” The name was resurrected for an orchestra founded by Alfred I. du Pont that’s the earliest ancestor of the Delaware Symphony. That name means “stream of little tubers,” referring to ground nuts found nearby.

Another Lenape name for the waterway, according to Weslager, was Sitakonk or Sittakunck. And the waterway was also called Suspecough, meaning “at the muddy pond,” according to the center.

The Lenape and William Penn in 1685 signed a treaty about using the Brandywine and its banks, but European colonists increasingly encroached on the Lenape reservation. The area’s last Lenape, called Hannah Freeman, died in 1802. Tribal members moved west, perhaps repeating “allummeuchtummen,” which means “go away weeping.” The Lenape – who only numbered 300 to 500 when the Europeans arrived, Weslager estimates – have re-established a community near Cheswold.

The European perspective

The Swedes who were the first Europeans to colonize its banks called it Fiskielkjilenin, the center says, meaning “fish stream” and anglicized as Fishkill.

Shad was likely that fish. “American shad was without doubt a major food source for the Lenape due to its abundance and migratory behavior which made it easy to catch,” writes the Brandywine River Restoration Trust, which wants to bring back the shad to the Brandywine. “During the spring migration they were so plentiful that the river was said to be ‘boiling’ with shad.”

Multiple stories compete for the derivation of the Brandywine name. 

The boring but probably true one is that it was named for Andren Braindwine (or Brandwyn, sources vary), who in 1670 bought (or sold, sources vary) 200 acres on the creek. The English who followed anglicized the name. One evocative one is that it came from the wreck of a Dutch ship carrying brandy (“there is no historical proof,” Weslager sniffs). The center suggests one more: it’s named after brannvin, a Swedish potato liquor.

And finally: there is no consensus whether the Brandywine is a creek or a river.

The 2 most important families

Two families have had huge influence on the Brandywine in both its industry and its beauty. The story of the du Ponts – gunpowder, chemicals, thousands of jobs, lots of financial support for local culture and many stately properties since opened to the public – is well-known.

Less so is the story of the Bancrofts, particularly the visionary William Poole Bancroft.

“It was Bancroft’s vision of preserved green space, accessible to all people, regardless of class or wealth, that allowed for the preservation of the Brandywine Valley that we know today,” the National Park Service writes.

John Bancroft, a Quaker cabinetmaker, moved to the area in 1831, and his brother, Joseph, followed, setting up a cotton mill. Joseph’s son, William Poole Bancroft, helped form Wilmington’s parks commission and headed the group for 19 years. He donated the land for Rockford Park, and he also was a force behind Brandywine, Judy Johnson, Kosciusko and Haynes parks, all in Wilmington. In the 1880s, he also retained Frederick Law Olmsted, the most highly regarded landscape architect in the country, to look at the park situation in Wilmington.

In 1901, Bancroft “set out to preserve the unmatched beauty of the lower Brandywine Valley for residents and future generations to enjoy,” according to Woodlawn Trustees, the group that he created. “It is the only example of a community planning experiment in the United States that established an entity to ensure its goals were achieved long-term.”

He and his trustees have built hundreds of units of affordable housing in The Flats and the East Side sections of Wilmington, created open space for the community to enjoy in Beaver Valley (acreage that’s now the dominant part of First State National Historical Park) and donated money to buy a farm that became Brandywine Creek State Park.

Over the years, Woodlawn Trustees has raised money to perpetuate this philanthropy by selling land abutting the west side of Concord Pike, north of Wilmington.

Aesthetics, art and antiques

“It would be hard to take in even a fraction of what the [Brandywine] Valley has to offer in a single day,” Lisa Foderaro writes in a New York Times travel column. “Better to say the weekend and savor the region at the unhurried pace of the Brandywine River itself.”

The valley’s first tourists date back to at least 1780, when the Marquis de Lafayette – who experienced his first Revolutionary War action at the Battle of Brandywine in 1777 – revisited the site.

Part of the beauty comes from all the nearby gardens started by the du Ponts, going back to  Éleuthère Irénée himself, who trained as a botanist. 

The beauty and tranquility were recognized by many artists, some united as the Brandywine school. It’s a realistic style of illustration, but it was briefly a real-life school along the Brandywine.

The school was founded by Wilmington native Howard Pyle, who in 1898 and 1899 taught at Turner’s Mill in Chadds Ford and hosted gatherings at Painter’s Folly, his nearby home. Pyle rented the property from his uncle, Samuel Painter, whose name lives on as Painter’s Crossing.

Pyle’s goal “was to found a great artistic movement for the nation … rooted in love indigenous rural landscapes,” Maynard writes. His legacy lives on with the “modern conception of knights and pirates” (think Disney swashbucklers), and his death led to the formation of the Delaware Art Museum.

One of Pyle’s students was N.C. Wyeth, whose son Andrew was maybe even more influential. Grandson Jamie Wyeth and other artists continue the tradition.

Preservation and a ‘mania’

Important organizations helping to protect the beauty of the area include the Brandywine Valley Authority, founded in 1945 as America’s first watershed protection organization. 

The Brandywine Conservancy followed in 1967, focused on preserving the land, water, natural and cultural resources of the Brandywine-Christina watershed. Its museum opened in 1971 in an old mill on the Brandywine, with the Wyeths and other local artists prominent in its collection.

In 2017, a group now called the Brandywine River Restoration Trust formed to bring back the shad to the river, who were made unwelcome by dams that were built as early as 1720.

The conservation and recreation is united in the Brandywine Creek Greenway, an initiative of the conservancy. “The Greenway boasts over 36,000 acres of protected open space, one National Historical Park, one state Scenic Byway, three major state parks, over 40 municipal parks and 69 miles of trails and sidewalks,” the conservancy says.

The conservancy is also working on a 22-mile recreational route called the Brandywine Water Trail.

And a significant trend in American interior design began in the 1920s at Dower House, the oldest continuously inhabited house in West Chester, less than four miles from where the east and west branches of the Brandywine meet in Lenape.

Joseph Hergesheimer was considered an “important” writer in the 1920s but is largely forgotten today, Maynard writes. His 1926 book “ ‘From an Old House’ helped turn antiques collecting into a great contemporary mania: as Hergesheimer himself complained, it ended the days “where you could find a colonial ladder-back chair for 15 cents, sitting cobwebby on some farmhouse porch.”

When the valley led the nation

The Brandywine’s unusual geography – convenient water power from its steep drop and yet easy access to Delaware River and shipping to points beyond – attracted a lot of entrepreneurs.

At the Pennsylvania-Delaware line, the Brandywine digs a channel through granite “and in less than four miles, it descends 120 feet, in a mad rush to the Delaware River and on out to the sea,” Joseph Frazier Wall writes in Alfred I. du Pont: the Man and His Family, in an excerpt featured atop Hagley Museum’s landing page for its Delaware’s Industrial Brandywine project.

“No industrial planner could have designed a better terrain for 18th-century industry, for the river has its fall line immediately above its broad, sluggish estuary,” he continues. “This felicitous union of fall-line power and tidewater transportation within a stretch of only four miles was highly attractive to the proto-industrialists of the 18th century.”

Another cool Hagley page is its Brandywine Oral History Project, featuring interviews done as early as 1954 with 150 people who lived and worked in the Brandywine Valley.

Flour, paper, textile and gunpowder dominated the mills – numbering more than 100 by 1800.

“Brandywine Mills” was a brand for flour, set up after the Revolutionary War after various mills agreed to inspections to insure quality. The price of wheat and flour was determined on the Brandywine at the end of the 18th century “because of the efficiency and quality of the product,” Mowday writes. Brandywine was also the name of a cornmeal, Maynard writes.

A condo complex on the mouth of the Brandywine honors that legacy with its Superfine Lane address, named for the high-quality flour ground there.

Paper, textiles and gunpowder

By 1787, brothers Thomas and Joshua Gilpin set up Delaware’s first paper mill. In 1816, Thomas patented a machine to make continuous-roll paper, and a year later set up America’s first paper-making machine. A mill near Rockland was reportedly the nation’s largest papermaker about the time of the Civil War, Maynard writes.

“Brandywine” was a brand of paper, famed for its cheapness and whiteness.

In 1790, Oliver Evans received America’s third patent for inventing machinery to improve moving grain and flour through the mill.

In 1794, Jacob Broom set up Delaware’s first cotton mill. He moved operations upriver and, after a disastrous fire, sold his land to the du Ponts.

In 1802, E. I. du Pont set up that famous gunpowder facility. Making gunpowder was the ninth business proposal for the du Ponts. Their first was creating a utopian community called Pontiana, probably in Virginia. But they didn’t raise all the money that they needed; speculation made land prices high; and the du Ponts, as foreigners, couldn’t buy land in America. They faced the same legal issue in Delaware at first, so E.I.’s brother Victor applied early for U.S. citizenship. 

Making gunpowder was a tough business, hence the DuPont Co. insistence on safety, a philosophy that continued for centuries. That said, going “across the creek” meant to be killed in an explosion.

Log cabins, Conestoga wagons and tomatoes

The mills declined with the development of steam power, the popularity of the turbine over the water wheel, roller mills replacing grist stones, an increasingly erratic water flow from deforestation upstream and export limits during the first world war. The mills’ legacy lives on as buildings converted to other uses and the names of so many roads. Ditto for the entrepreneurial families.

“The log cabin, which became such a powerful folk symbol in our politics and represents the coming to power of the West in the nation, began at the mouth of the Brandywine,” Weslager writes. Credit the Swedes and Finns who started arriving in 1638.

The Conestoga wagon, another icon of America’s westward push, was developed in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County to ship grain under a canvas cover to Wilmington’s port, he continues. 

In 1830, the Bush & Lobdell foundry started, and “it helped pioneer modern techniques, such as research and development and even the hiring of traveling salesmen,” Maynard writes.

“In the decade before the Civil War, Wilmington led the nation in iron shipbuilding,” Richard Urban writes in “The City That Launched a Thousand Ships” (albeit mostly on the nearby Christiana River).

And finally, there’s the Brandywine tomato, flavorful and delicate. The 1890 Johnson & Stokes seed catalog says it was named by Thomas H. Brinton of Chadds Ford, “who has probably grown and tested more varieties of tomatoes than any other person in the United States.” On Sept. 35, 1888, he describes his discovery, in a note excerpted on padutchcompanion.com. “I am pleased with it. It is certainly a magnificent, new, most valuable and distinct variety, and worthy of the name Brandywine after that most beautiful of all streams, which flows near our Quaker village.”