The Brandywine: An Intimate Portrait by W. Barksdale Maynard (review)

The Brandywine is a paradoxical river. As W. Barksdale Maynard notes in his book’s preface, it is small enough to have once been labeled a creek, yet it is large enough to have had a disproportionate influence on the histories of Delaware and Pennsylvania, the two states it flows through. Over time, that influence has taken two forms. The Brandywine has had a practical side; for three centuries it was a working river whose waters powered various industries that fueled the growth of Wilmington, and along whose banks the French émigré du Pont family built a highly profitable corporate empire on the manufacture of gunpowder and later chemicals. Conversely, it also has always been a “lyrical” (p. 4) river. Its poetic qualities, including its bucolic rural beauty and the sense of tradition, and even nostalgia, that its landscape inspired among the generations of writers, artists, and affluent who passed through the region or built their estates there, have made the Brandywine a river of particular import to American literature and art.

Maynard develops these themes in the nine chapters that follow. He narrates the river’s history in a mostly chronological fashion, although his authorial viewpoint, as expressed through the use of extant historic sites and twentieth-century photos that he relies on to tell his story, is mostly a present-day one; the history he tells is thus a usable one, directly connected to today.

He begins by detailing the river’s early settlement history, as Swedes and then Dutch settlers first claimed the region from its native Lenape inhabitants and built Fort Christina there in the 1630s. William Penn’s arrival in 1682 marked the next important shift to English control, setting the stage for more intensive settlement and use of the river valley and its myriad natural resources. Another chapter details the 1777 Battle of Brandywine, an American defeat that “marked the military nadir of the Revolution” (p. 47). Although a rout, this battle was the most significant single event to have taken place along the river because so many famous men, including George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Benjamin Rush, and General Charles Cornwallis, were there. As “Holy Ground” (p. 66), he thus uses the battlefield and its history to make calls for the more effective preservation of this historic site and its small and too-often-ignored state park.

He then moves on to focus on the river’s industrial development, the clearest manifestation of its practical side and the real generator of the region’s wealth. He traces the rise of water-powered grist, saw, and paper mills in the late eighteenth-century valley, which made the Brandywine a hub of early manufacturing by the 1790s. He then describes the proliferation of iron forges, textile mills, and, most important, the du Pont family’s gunpowder mills, which so defined the river’s nineteenth-century industrial history, making it a contrasting seat of industry and beauty. The du Ponts loom large in Maynard’s story. Their black-powder mills at Hagley Yard made them a fortune between 1812 and the Civil War, one that they used to build themselves fine local estates as well as to promote botany, gardening, and various arts in the region.

The final three chapters, which focus on the river and its valley as a muse for writers, naturalists, artists, gardeners, and even campers, move the work forward chronologically, but do so from a more thematic than historical vantage point. Indeed, it is in these chapters, focused on the nineteenth and especially twentieth centuries, where Maynard most explicitly details how the river’s practical side as a manufacturing hub that generated enormous wealth is in constant tension with its pastoral, sometimes backward-looking and often highly romanticized qualities, ones that he sees most clearly embodied in the lives and works of N. C. and Andrew Wyeth. Much like the du Ponts, the two Wyeths, father and son, merit considerable attention...