The Brandywine: An Intimate Portrait

Abstract

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.