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Du Pont descendants still live in the 1923 Granogue mansion, one of many grand estates that have preserved a lush natural corridor along the Brandywine River in Delaware. Portions of the corridor form the backbone of a proposed park.
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The Brandywine River powered American industry in the 19th century. Walker’s textile mill joins many others that dot the riverbanks. Upstream, the DuPont Company made gunpowder; other mills produced everything from paper to snuff.
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Bluebells blooming along the Brandywine River mark springtime in Delaware.
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A Pennsylvania field splashed with grape hyacinths was the site of heavy combat in 1777 during the Battle of Brandywine. British troops outflanked Washington’s army, clearing a path for the redcoats to march on Philadelphia and take the city.
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A reenactor seeks shade during the Battle of Brandywine.
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Inside the John Dickinson Plantation in Dover, Delaware, portraits of the patriot’s parents oversee side-by-side rooms. Dickinson championed colonists’ rights in the run-up to the Revolutionary War and later signed the Constitution.
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As dawn breaks, a lone sycamore tree emerges from the mist at Woodlawn, the 1,100-acre heart of Delaware’s proposed national monument. Industrialist William Bancroft bought this land for a park, predicting in 1909, “It may take a hundred years to work out.”
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Along a road through Woodlawn, oaks and maples shimmer with the season. Woodlawn is one of the last large undeveloped sites in an area increasingly hemmed in by the encroaching outskirts of Wilmington and Philadelphia.
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Painter Andrew Wyeth kept a secret studio a few miles from this Woodlawn farmhouse, creating works of art inspired by the surrounding landscape until his death in 2009. Some of his paintings evoke similar wintry scenes.
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