Guys, I'm sorry. I thought these photos were public domain, but now I have my doubts. I am going to take them off out of an abundance of caution.
Idle real estate browsing is one of my hobbies that I have been doing for years and years, almost since they first listed houses for sale on the internet. Living in New York, I always have fantasies of living out in “the countryside” (wherever that is) or at least somewhere with acres of open land, my own woods, maybe a pond or a lake, and a historic house of some sort. I browse on Preservation Directory and Circa, and sometimes on plain old Zillow and StreetEasy. Usually I imagine something like a Southern plantation house.
or a New England colonial.
I fall in love with a different house every week. And that's when I'm letting myself imagine living anywhere up and down the Northeast and even Southeast coasts of the United States. I am a Northeasterner, but I could see myself living in one of the Carolinas one day, or Virginia or Maryland. And of course I have to look at Louisiana plantations, just for good measure.
My favorite place to go as a child in Delaware was the Hagley Museum in Wilmington. The museum grounds cover more than 235 acres and the Brandywine Creek (growing up I thought it was a river) runs through the middle of the property. It includes a working version of one of the mills with a waterwheel which the Dupont family used to build their fortune milling gunpowder.
The area was rich in willow trees, which were used to produce charcoal for the gunpowder, and nearby quarries of gneiss were used to produce the stone they build the mills out of.
As a child I went there many times and saw the powder yards, the mill, the original workers’ village where people lived and where you could try things like baking cookies on a wood stove and carrying water with a shoulder yoke with a bucket at either end. All of this was set in the picturesque and terribly green Delaware woods, full of sycamores, maples, sassasfras, beech, oak, chestnut, horse chestnut and willow trees by the water. I always imagined I felt the presence of the original Lenni Lenape Indians moving through the woods with me. There was a feeling of reverent nature everywhere you went.
But the best part of the whole thing to me was the original DuPont family house, Eleutherian Mills, which I believe, long before I knew the name for it, established my love of the Georgian style of architecture.
From the Hagley Museum website:
“High on a bank of the Brandywine River overlooking the original powder mills, E. I. du Pont, founder of the DuPont Company, built his home. Five generations of du Pont family members lived in the house since it’s completion in 1803, each leaving their mark. Today you will see it much as it was when the last family member lived there, filled with furnishings and collections of American folk art, alongside treasured family pieces and items brought with the family from France when they left in 1799.”
The best time to visit was at Christmas time, when the staff would decorate nearly every room of the house in the style of the 1800s, with lavish greenery, candles, lace, and multiple Christmas trees.
It gave me a magical and mysterious feeling that made it seem as if the modern world had vanished and that the 1800s were alive again, with me alive in them!
There would be a giant Christmas tree in the living room with presents wrapped in beautiful old paper, and dolls, a train, jacks, early antique child’s ice skates, and other fascinating objects.
The table would have a Christmas feast on it that looked absolutely real, and the children’s stockings would be hanging on the mantel.
And since it was winter there was often snow all around, and we would go to the giant carriage house behind the mansion and drink hot cider while we looked at the old phaetons and cabriolets and giant swooping wooden sleighs on runners that transported the family two hundred years earlier.
I know that my love of historic houses was already in place long before we moved to Delaware when I was 9, but it was fostered and expanded by experiences there.