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The Grist of the Story
Wilmington's Greenbank Mill show the machinery of a young republic.
(Courtesy Of Greater Wilmington Convention & Visitors Bureau)
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Upstairs, Inglee points to a finger hole in a floorboard. Under that board, she says, was the owner's safe.
The museum, intimate and volunteer-dependent, stages special events just about every weekend. This fall and winter, visitors can learn about homemade games that the new Americans played and the food that was available in the newborn country.
On Sunday mornings, you can visit another type of early-19th-century mill at the Hagley Museum and Library, less than five miles away. On the banks of the Brandywine River, E.I. du Pont began making gunpowder in 1802. Today there is a 235-acre historic site that includes restored mills, the du Ponts' Georgian-style mansion and meticulously kept French gardens. Visitors are bused from the extensive visitor center to the machine shop and past the powder yard to the steam engine house and family home.
"This was one of the first industrial districts in the United States," says David G. Menser, an interpreter at Hagley and president of a Brandywine Village revitalization group. He explains that there were paper mills, textile mills and flour mills throughout the area. "We tend to forget how important bread was to the 18th century. This was the breadbasket of Colonial America."
Flour was a major export to Europe and the West Indies, Menser says.
The Hagley Museum and gunpowder mills are a fancier and larger-scale operation than Greenbank Mill. The former was a factory of death, ultimately killing many workers on-site; the latter, a factory of life. Together they provide a vivid backdrop of post-Colonial ways.
And when you have had enough of early America, you can get back in the car and return to the here and now. Along the way you might stop at a Borders bookstore in Wilmington or Newark and pick up a cup of coffee, think about the progress -- and lack of it -- the country has made, and maybe take a magazine from the shelves to read.
The New Republic, perhaps.
