Page 40 - The Hunt Winter 2021
P. 40

                  s we make a living in the businesses of the present (and hopefully the future), we’re surrounded by the
bittersweet remnants of the Brandywine Valley’s colonial and post-colonial past. The cobbled streets of
New Castle continue to outlast the generations that have trod on them. Just upstream from the Port of
Wilmington, an abandoned canal leads to nowhere, and an old millrace along the Brandywine River is
filled with dead leaves and fetid water.
If your peer through a fence along Wilmington’s
Pennsylvania Avenue, you’ll catch a glimpse of a
once-grand mansion, its dirty windows staring blankly. A burned-out factory building still haunts the banks of Red Clay Creek in Yorklyn. Just north of the Pennsylvania line, a former dairy farm’s abandoned structures litter a parcel along Route 100. And in the hills of Landenberg, steam locomotives—their tracks long since disappeared—once roared through a dramatic cut through solid rock.
When it was determined that Delaware would be a part of England—first combined with Pennsylvania, then as
a colony of its own—wooden sailing ships from Europe regularly docked in colonial New Castle. They were there to carry animal skins, lumber, produce and other raw materials back to England and Europe. Often those ships arrived carrying cobblestones as ballast to help the ship ride low in the water on its trans-Atlantic journey. Here, the stones were used to pave streets. Perhaps America’s best preserved colonial town, New Castle still has a block or two of them.
In post-colonial years, wooden ships needed protection from the winter ice floes on the Delaware River. Between 1803 and 1882, seven stone piers were constructed in New Castle harbor for ship protection as the tide carried ice up and down the bay. In 1982, the piers were added
to the National Register of Historic Places and are still visible today.
 38 THE HUNT MAGAZINE winter 2021-22
(Previous page and here) Remnants of the abandoned NVF facility.
(Opposite page) The cobbled streets of New Castle.




















































































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