The smith Mattias de Foss wrought dozens of iron letters for inscriptions on the outside walls, including “LUX-L.I. TENEBR. ORIENSEX ALTO” (“Light from on high shines in the darkness”). With its massive stone walls and a red brick bell tower, Old Swedes has attracted artists since the 1840s, including Howard Pyle, Robert Shaw, and the young Andrew Wyeth. A late nineteenth-century renovation upset Pyle, who loved the fabled building and always pointed it out to companions from the train. He loathed “the garish yellow shingles and the crass new woodwork…. Old buildings and fragments of the past are to me very and vitally alive.”18
For generations, the vicinity of Old Swedes Church was a sleepy rural environs, as Pyle reported in his magazine article, “Old-Time Life in a Quaker Town.” One parishioner recalled how swallows built mud nests under the rafters and darted over the heads of the congregation; cows trundled over whenever they heard the sound of the church bell, knowing the churchyard gate would be left open and they could graze amid the tombstones. “Once our cow left her companions,” the congregant recalled, “and followed grandfather to his pew door.” In a painting now in the Brandywine River Museum of Art, The Last Leaf, Pyle showed an elderly man visiting his wife’s tomb here, with the church in the background.19
Three hundred years of worship. Few American structures anywhere remain in regular use from the seventeenth century. Howard Pyle illustrated Old Swedes Church for Woodrow Wilson’s book, A History of the American People (1902).
Today, modern industry and a somewhat blighted neighborhood surround Old Swedes, an evocative place nonetheless: it has been called the “oldest church in North America still standing as originally built and holding regular worship services.” Here the visitor’s mind turns back to the long-ago seventeenth century and the very earliest phases of European colonization. When First State National Monument was established, planning immediately began to add Old Swedes to its holdings, the park being meant to “interpret the story of early Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, and English settlement in the region.”20
Back when the 1938 tercentenary of the Swedish landing approached, commemorations were planned, and it was noted that two million Americans were of Swedish descent. The Swedish crown prince solicited donations from all citizens of his country for the erection of a monument at the Rocks. The park was a joint effort, with Swedish artist Carl Milles providing a sculpture and a Philadelphia landscape design firm preparing the site—a dump in the midst of an industrial district along the oily Christina River. American Car and Foundry stood directly across the street, backing up to the Brandywine, and again, not a trace remained of the fort the Swedes had built nor of the marshes that surrounded it protectively upstream and down. During the dedication, an entourage of Swedish dignitaries disembarked from a ship in a lashing rainstorm, accompanied by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
To leap ahead seventy-five years: in 2013, the 375th anniversary of the coming of the Swedes, the king and queen of Sweden visited the site amid great panoply—along with the president of Finland’s parliament—and archaeologists speculated about the precise site of Fort Christina. On hand was a 1990s replica (berthed nearby) of the three-masted, Dutchbuilt pinnace Kalmar Nyckel that had brought the first Swedes, a redoubtable ship that crossed the Atlantic eight times, whereas no other vessel of that era made more than two trips.
A New Town Rises
In 1731, today’s Wilmington was born just west of Old Swedes. The enterprising settler Thomas Willing laid out a grid in emulation of Philadelphia and predicted a great grain-port metropolis would soon rise. Four years later, Quaker William Shipley and friends bought lots in the fledgling place, which rapidly developed as a center for the shipment of grain.21
Artist Pyle liked to tell a story of how Shipley, an immigrant from Britain who lived near Philadelphia, first happened to come to Wilmington—a glorious founding myth in which the Brandywine plays a starring role. He said Shipley’s devoutly religious wife, Elizabeth, had a dream: “She was traveling on horseback, along a high road, and after a time she came to a wild and turbulent stream, which she forded with difficulty; beyond this stream she mounted a long and steep hill-side; when she arrived at this summit a great view of surpassing beauty spread out before her.” This, she perceived, was a kind of Promised Land where her family was surely destined to settle.
A few years later, Pyle said, Elizabeth Shipley undertook an actual trip through the Mid-Atlantic in which she crossed “a roaring stream that cut through tree-covered highlands, and came raging and rushing down over great rocks and boulders”—the Brandywine. “The cawing of crows in the woods, and a solitary eagle that went sailing through the air, was all the life that broke the solitude of the place. As she hesitated on the bank before entering the rough looking ford, marked at each end by a sapling pole to which a red rag was fastened, the whole scene seemed strangely familiar to her.”
From the hilltop she saw the bright Christina River, and her vision was suddenly reality. It was here that she and her husband settled in 1735; here the city of Wilmington flourished; and here, William and Elizabeth Shipley’s son, Thomas, founded a dynasty of millers on the Brandywine.22
Milling was revived on the creek (after the brief Swedish attempt) by Samuel Kirk at the foot of today’s Adams Street in Wilmington in the 1720s, beside the former Stidham mill. Here the creek is shallow, the Indians having used the spot as a ford; later, as we saw, the important Old King’s Road running north to south through the colonies crossed without a bridge. Kirk’s pioneering enterprise became legendary as the Old Barley Mill, a rather primitive “undershot” facility that stood immediately below its dam on the south bank. Sketchy remnants of that dam can be faintly perceived even today, and a millstone lies nearby as a mossy relic.
One of nineteenth-century artist Robert Shaw’s best-known etchings shows Old Barley Mill—a print that hung in the better homes in Wilmington for generations as a nostalgic token of the early years of Quaker settlement. In 1742, milling expanded when Oliver Canby built a dam downstream from Old Barley Mill and shipped processed grain to Philadelphia and even the West Indies—start of serious merchant milling. Within twenty years a complex of mills had begun to spring up around Market Street Bridge.23
Once again the English settlers wrought ecological havoc. Construction of dams profoundly changed the nature of the creek by cutting off the runs of fish in springtime, species that had, for millennia, come up the waterways to spawn. Shad had once been fantastically abundant—on the Schuylkill, Penn said, you could catch six hundred with a single swipe of the net—but now their numbers crashed.24
The Lenape had long depended on the fish, lining the creeks with weirs to catch them, and were horrified by the effects of the Kirk dam, about which they complained to the British governor. A 1727 legislative act called for all dams to be removed from the Brandywine to allow the fish to run, and as late as 1760 four dams were breached by officials; but thereafter dams multiplied (eventually to more than 125 on the whole creek) and several species of fish became extinct. Today there are plans underway to remove or breach several dams on the Brandywine—long disused for any industrial purpose—so that shad, in particular, can run again. As a gesture in this direction, Brandywine Conservancy removed two such dams on the East Branch in 2012, freeing eighteen streammiles from obstruction after more than a century.25
Two Stargazers
As English pioneers pressed ever westward, the question of the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland became troublesome. To settle it, the Mason-Dixon Line was drawn, a drama in which the Brandywine played a part. Culturally, that line ratified what everyone already knew: the Brandywine Valley, on the fortieth parallel, was the southernmost outpost of a thoroughgoing Northern culture, in contrast to Maryland, just a dozen miles away, which belonged to the South.
Elkanah Watson of Massachusetts traveled northbound in 1778 and admired the high level of cultivation, the neatness of agriculture in the Brandywine region: “The contrast, so obvious and so strong, in the appearance of these farms