A Day in Delaware

After spending a nice day in Delaware visiting New Jersey, we spent the next day actually seeing some things in Delaware.  Our first stop was the Old State House in downtown Dover.  They do a tour of the Old State House beginning at 10 AM, so we arrived shortly before that and spent most of the time trying to figure out where to park.  Apparently they do a weekly market on the Green each Saturday so all the spaces you might otherwise use were filled with vehicles for the vendors.  We parked a few blocks away at the public library.  We were thankful it was a little cooler of a day so we didn’t mind the walk.

The Old State House is a National Parks property, so I was able to get my NPS Passport stamped.  The tour guide gave us a talk about the formation of the state and the uses of the building in the early days.  It had been shared space between the county and the state until such time as the state took over.

The building was slated to be destroyed at one time, but a prominent citizen, Mable Lloyd Ridgely, came forward and spearheaded the movement to save the building.

The building is pretty cool, and they’ve done a good job of restoring it and preserving it.  But the most exciting thing we saw there was a life-size portrait of George Washington.  Next to it was the charcoal sketch that the artist had prepared for approval before painting.  It took him a year to produce the painting, and the tour guide pointed out several differences between the sketch and the final portrait.  We figured that the artist got tired of painting so he just left things off, like the spurs on Washington’s boots.

We walked around the square a little bit after the Old State House and looked at some of the old buildings.  They have a nice self-guided tour that explains a lot of early Delaware history.

From Dover, we drove north to the Wilmington area to visit the Old Swedes Historic Site and Cemetery.  I wrote a blog entry a few months ago explaining why this was important for us to go to.  From my genealogical work on DH’s family, we have traced one branch back to this area of New Sweden in the mid-1600s to a man named Johan Anderson Stahlkofta (now Stalcup).  Several generations of his direct descendants have been buried at the Old Swedes Church Cemetery.

When we arrived at the site, a woman greeted us and when we told her why we were there, she said she knew right where that area was in the cemetery and was able to take us right there.  We’d probably still be wandering around looking for them without her assistance.  She also showed us where some of the related families through marriage were buried.  It’s a beautiful cemetery and is still well tended all these years later. While they don’t do burials there any more, they do still accept cremains.

In 2020, a friend gave me one of those 1,000 Places to Go calendars.  Each day as I tore off a page, I put it into a pile of “been there”, “want to go there”, or “want to go there and realistically could get there.”  When we started planning this trip, I pulled out both of the “want to go there” stacks to see if any might make the cut.  There was one that did – Winterthur Museum and Gardens just outside Wilmington, Delaware.  This property was home to part of the DuPont family, and one of the descendants made the home into a museum, not representing his family’s life there, but a museum that was home to all of America.  Each room in the house is made from or furnished by things reclaimed or collected from all over the U.S.  It was fascinating to see the vast collection of things gathered to display.

There is also a gardens tour which is really a tour of the land portion of the property.  The guided tram tour takes about 30 minutes and brings you from the Visitor Center to the house / museum.  You see more than you could just walking the paths.  I’ve got to get over my thought that “gardens” means “flowers” because in this case it was all about the trees.

Admission to the Winterthur Museum and Gardens is covered by an American Horticultural Society membership which I purchased for us on the first of September (it will last until the end of September 2027).  I paid $70 for the AHS membership; without it, the Winterthur admission would have been $54 for both of us.  We have at least one more place on our itinerary that we’ll be able to use it for a reciprocal admission so we’ll have at least broken even before this trip is even over.

We elected to stay in West Chester, Pennsylvania, just across the Delaware / Pennsylvania border for the night at a Holiday Inn Express.  It was a little complicated to get to because of how the highway was constructed, and there wasn’t much in the way of restaurants nearby.  But there was a Costco!  Gas was $3.99 / gallon, over my budgeted $3.75/gallon, but it was Labor Day weekend, so we expected the gas to be higher.  Delaware is a pretty short state, so we only needed $15 worth of gas, but we knew the next day or two would be longer drives, so we wanted to be topped off.  As for dinner, we found a Fresh Market on the way to the hotel from Costco, so we picked up some chicken salad to have for dinner and saved the leftovers for the next day (my notes for the next day said “eat before you get there because there’s nothing there” which was accurate as you’ll see in our next blog entry).  Fresh Market meets our dining criteria because even though we have a Fresh Market at home, we never go to it.

So, overall impressions of our days in Delaware – it was good – we enjoyed the things we saw and the people we met.  There’s quite a bit to see and do in this First State that we didn’t even come close to seeing or doing.  If you’ve never been, we’d recommend a few days to visit.

Up next:  Valley Forge.

~ Cindy D.