Page 34 - The Hunt - Summer 2020

32 THE HUNT MAGAZINE
summer 2020
One of the most bucolic natural sanctuaries in the Mid-Atlantic region
is the stretch of Brandywine Creek that flows between Chadds Ford, Pa., and its Wilmington terminus. There you’ll find tree-lined parks, thickets of woodland, winding lanes along the hillsides, and few sounds except the rippling of water flowing over rocks and boulders.
It wasn’t always like this. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Brandywine was a major manufacturing center for the young nation, thanks to the weight of water. Its liquid force first turned giant wheels, then turbines, to produce everything from flour to cloth to gunpowder.
The first local miller is believed to have been Timothy Stidham, a Swedish colonist who, in 1679, constructed a mill in Wilmington on the west side of the Brandywine near where Adams Street comes down to the water. It was a time of change. The area was passing from Swedish and (later) Dutch control as it became an English colony under the guidance of William Penn.
Stidham and his sons began by milling barley and producing flour. From that modest start, milling flourished along the Brandywine through the next century. According to H. Clay Reed’s Delaware: A History of
(Previous spread and above) The remains of E.I. du Pont de Nemours’ gunpowder mills are now part of the Hagley Museum. (Opposite page) Lucas Clawson,
an authority on the region’s mills.