As perhaps the most storied little river in America, the Brandywine continues to inspire and delight. The establishment of First State National Monument was a fitting culmination of centuries of public interest in a singularly attractive region. But in the twenty-first century, we face great challenges in preserving this fragile valley at the heart of Megalopolis, which has always existed in uneasy balance between two antithetical impulses—it is a myth-generating paradise, paragon of unspoiled bucolic nature, yet a wealth-generating engine subject to exploitation and overdevelopment. If we are going to save the Brandywine for our children, we need to begin by understanding its fascinating history and why it has always mattered.
Chapter 1
Fish Creek in New Sweden
Long ago, a little river flowed through desolate, wind-whipped tundra. Mammoths drank from the torrent, Brandywine water freezing to their matted brown fur. Such were the strange sights met with 150 centuries ago in the Ice Age, as the stream rushed through snowcovered wastes toward a shipless sea.1
Jump ahead fifty centuries: the mammoth are extinct. Only now, the first humans begin to prowl the land, spears in hand. It is still cold; long reaches of time have yet to elapse before the climate moderates and forests of oak and hickory clothe these hillsides, bleakly draped in low mats of scraggly gorse. In places, freeze-thaw cycles are gradually strewing steep slopes with huge, round boulders of Brandywine blue rock, creating the jumbled landscapes we know today.
Eventually Lenape Indians hunted in these forests, in little bands that came and went with the seasons. They numbered a few hundred at most, making this fertile valley in aboriginal times as sparsely populated as rural Alaska is today. They strung fishing weirs along the Brandywine to catch alewife and shad that clogged the waterways every spring. A cave along the east bank afforded a refuge: Beaver Valley Rock Shelter, where archaeological excavation has yielded arrowheads, stone chips, and clay potsherds from transient hunting parties in the Woodland period, before 1000 a.d.2
To keep the forests open and easy to hunt through, the Lenape set fires in winter, filling the air with smoke and sweet fragrance, a smell that wafted for miles and could be detected even out at sea, by men who suddenly arrived in ships from unknown lands far away. For these strangers, the smell of burning forests, torched by the native people, was their first hint of land, of the mysterious shores of the New World.3
De Vries at the Rocks
On January 14, 1633, a little ship passed the mouth of the creek—still a nameless stream—and pulled up to an outcrop called the Rocks on Minquas Kill, today’s Christina River. (Dutch explorers named creeks throughout the territory of New Netherlands kill; “Minquas” referred to a warlike tribe who lived far west of the Christina.) On board ship was David de Vries, a tough Dutch artillerist who had fought many wars at sea, braving Turks and Barbary pirates.
De Vries had come to America to oversee a fledgling colony at the mouth of the Delaware River called Swanendael (near today’s Lewes), named for the fat swans that stood out among its abundant birdlife. The whole region newly belonged to the Dutch Republic, and Swanendael was to be the Dutch West India Company’s whaling outpost: whale oil was worth a fortune in Europe. Even upriver at Minquas Kill there were whales, de Vries was pleased to note—he saw one spout six or seven times there.
De Vries had come to the Rocks to gather ballast for his ship. Here the crystalline Piedmont touches the oozy Coastal Plain; here stones were available as they almost never are farther down the sandy-shored Delaware Bay. Five years later, de Vries’s rivals, the Swedes, would make the lonely Rocks the site of their nation’s first permanent settlement in the New World—European states jockeying for position amid the wilds of a little-explored, dauntingly immense continent. But all this lay in the future. As his men hauled stones aboard ship in 1633, de Vries little imagined the Swedes would ever come to threaten Dutch hegemony in the Delaware Valley. He was more worried about the British, starting to extend their influence north from Virginia, where they had settled at Jamestown twenty-six years before.
Past the buttonwood. Europeans have known the creek for nearly three centuries. Some sycamores that shaded the early explorers still grow today. Andrew Wyeth, First Traders on the Brandywine (1940).
And mostly his mind was on the troublesome Indians. Sent to oversee Swanendael just months after its establishment, de Vries had found it burned, its inhabitants massacred, their bones and skulls bleaching in the field where the hapless settlers had been slaughtered while hoeing tobacco and grain. Following this grim discovery, de Vries spent weeks sailing up and down the Delaware River seeking corn and beans from whichever Indians seemed cooperative, narrowly avoiding getting killed himself and finding the Lenapes convulsed with fear of the Minquas, who had sent war parties against them from the west. In these bellicose times they had no food to give him, not even for his best trinkets and knives. The Minquas had flattened their crops, burned their houses. Eventually de Vries would have to voyage all the way to Virginia to buy basic supplies from the upstart British, so he could make the long journey home to Holland and civilization.
At the lonely Rocks that day in 1633, de Vries looked around him in wonderment. The scenery was “beautifully level, full of groves of oak, hickory, ash, and chestnut trees, and also [grape] vines which grow upon the trees.” It was a land of unimaginable abundance, he thought, but wasted on bands of quarrelsome Indians. And it was fearfully cold—how could this part of America be so frigid and yet lie at the latitude of Spain, he wondered bitterly.4
The Rocks had a fine advantage: here ships could pull in and escape the ice floes that drifted down the mighty Delaware all winter, threatening to crush their wooden hulls. Minquas Kill had the makings of a port—though now it dozed in winter sunlight, uninhabited, huge forest trees rubbing their branches together in creakings no one heard unless an Indian happened to drift by in his dugout canoe. And here, in stately silence, the waters of the Brandywine—perfectly pure—joined the Minquas amid reeds of the tidal marsh where ducks and muskrat teemed.
De Vries was one of the very first white men to visit the Brandywine. It was the Dutch Golden Age—back home, Rubens and Rembrandt were painting—and he had been sent as part of ambitious Dutch efforts to exploit the lucrative fur trade. The Dutch West India Company’s hired navigator, Henry Hudson, had first laid European eyes on the Delaware River twenty-four years earlier, and a handful of brave explorers followed. A year after de Vries’s visit, a British adventurer named Thomas Yong, recently arrived at Jamestown, sailed up and down the Delaware in a shallop, seeking the Northwest Passage and boldly nailing the coat of arms of King Charles I to a tree in haughty defiance of Dutch claims.
Yong likely saw the Brandywine during this summer 1634 expedition, during which he traded beads, pipes, scissors, and cloth with Indians who pulled alongside in their canoes and offered eels, or beaver and otter skins. The forests were astonishingly dense and dark, except where the natives had hacked out a clearing and planted corn.
Yong gazed upon what seemed to be the mythical land of plenty: the waters of the Delaware River teemed with sturgeon, and there were birds in quantities “so great as can hardly be believed,” an “infinite number” of pigeons, blackbirds, turkeys, swans, geese, duck, teal, widgeon, brant, herons, and cranes. A hawk chased a flock of partridges across the wide river, and Yong and his companion shot forty-eight of them as they flew over the boat—that was a haul not greatly out of the ordinary.5
The Dominion