'The Brandywine' tells the story of a local celebrity landscape

The Brandywine

An Intimate Portrait

By W. Barksdale Maynard

University of Pennsylvania Press. 253 pp. $34.95 nolead ends

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Reviewed by Michael D. Schaffer

The Brandywine is a stream of contradictions. People can't even agree on whether to call it a river or a creek. So it shouldn't be surprising that W. Barksdale Maynard's finely drawn portrait of the historic waterway revolves around what he calls "the Brandywine paradox" - a persistent tension between nature and industry, past and present, "the Brandywine of milling and manufactures" and "the Brandywine of myth and memory."

Maynard, a freelance journalist, Princeton University lecturer, and Brandywine Valley resident, has written a chatty, charming history. "Probably no other American river of such petite scale is so famous," he writes - a sentiment that would be hard to dispute.

Even if nothing else had ever happened there, the Brandywine would have become famous - or notorious - as the scene of military disaster. On America's first dark 9/11 - Sept. 11, 1777 - a British force marching on Philadelphia routed Washington's army at the Battle of the Brandywine, fought over the incongruously pleasant countryside around Chadds Ford. It was, writes Maynard, "the military nadir of the Revolution." The British took Philadelphia; Washington wintered over at Valley Forge.

The Brandwine's swift current made it ideal for water-powered industry. The years after the Revolution saw a boom in milling. More than 100 mills crowded the stream's banks at one point. If it could be made in a mill in the 19th century, it would be made on the Brandywine: flour, paper, cloth, and the foundation of the du Pont economic empire, gunpowder. And these mills were state-of-the art. "In terms of game-changing innovation, the Brandywine Valley at Wilmington was effectively the Silicon Valley of its day," Maynard writes.

The du Ponts, who arrived on the Brandywine in 1802, "present the whole Brandywine paradox in microcosm," Maynard writes. The family has been "at the cutting edge of modernization and high technology, yet arch-traditionalists in their attitude toward cultural heritage and the landscape."

No such dichotomy has bothered the great Brandywine artists: Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, and, most celebrated of all, Andrew Wyeth, avatars of the pastoral, historic Brandywine. Andrew Wyeth's fame also brought fame to the Brandywine, "which seemed the very distillation of Early Americanness for those hungry for a return to patriotic roots."

The Brandywine paradox persists in the 21st century, as housing developments spread over farm fields. Preservation or development? The only way to resolve that tension and save the Brandywine, Maynard argues, is to understand what the Brandywine means - something his book should help accomplish.