Judith on the Queen Mary

In and Around Brandywine.   Have you been to Brandywine? That's Brandywine, Delaware and environs. Judith, seen on board the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA, and I, snapped in San Diego on the Star of India, just made our third pilgrimage to Brandywine and the Greater Wilmington region.

Lou on the Star of India

The Mercer Mile
Born in 1856, Henry Chapman Mercer grew up privileged and eccentric in Doylestown, Pennsylvania and after European travel, financed by a wealthy aunt, and college, he settled in his hometown. There he built his home, which he called Fonthill; the Moravian Pottery & Tile Works, and The Mercer Museum. Fonthill, fashioned to reflect snippets of boyhood fantasies, is a castle of reinforced concrete decorated with thousands of inlaid ceramic tiles. It wouldn't be all that fascinating, except that Mercer, with no training as an architect or builder, designed and supervised construction of this wildly asymmetrical edifice, training himself and his crew of local unskilled laborers as he went. Designed from the inside out -- he planned the rooms, then bonded room to room and covered all with a shell of walls -- the castle of over one hundred rooms has winding staircases, concrete window fenestrations (who needs windows that open?), concrete bookcases filled with over 6000 books (many of which he annotated and indexed himself), Greek pottery, and zillions of prints. And tiles. Miles of tiles, including on the mantelpieces in the 18 bathrooms.

Mercer also trained himself to make the tiles, building a factory of reinforced concrete -- what else? -- near his home.

Fireplace decorated with Mercer tiles.

Fireplace tile including Mercer's Plus Ultra (More Beyond) motto.

The Mercer Museum, like his home, is operated today by the Bucks County Historical Society, of which HCM was a founding member. The Society maintains both the home and the museum to Mercer's standards. Mercer, who was a leading practitioner of the early twentieth century Arts and Crafts movement, favored hand-crafted over machined goods and established his museum to house an extensive collection of hand fabricated tools and utensils. Trained as an archaeologist, but bored by having to dig up and interpret the distant past, Mercer decided to collect the artifacts of the recent past -- primarily 19th century -- before they disappeared. His museum is a comprehensive and exhaustive hodgepodge of hundreds of thousands of tools, utensils, vehicles, signs, furnishings, stoves, cigar store Indians, musical instruments, and other appurtenances of 18th and 19th century America. Like Mercer's book Ancient Carpenter's Tools: Illustrated and Explained, Together With the Implements of the Lumberman, Joiner, and Cabinet-Maker, which has just (March 2000) been made available in paperback, his museum is an historian's delight, but definitely not a playground for the kids.

Dupont's Nemours
Also wealthy and a tad eccentric, but much more mainstream, was Alfred I. Dupont, scion of Delaware's gunpowder -- war pays -- and later chemical Duponts. He built Nemours, near Wilmington, as a self-sustaining estate for himself and his third wife, Jessie Dew Ball. The estate, now on the grounds of the Dupont Children's Hospital, is open to the public by guided tour (with reservation) only.

It showcases a mansion of over 140 rooms, including a subterranean fitness center, billiard room, movie theater and dual bowling alleys. Decorated in grand style, the mansion is populated by paintings of Dupont progenitors and photos of the family.

Ultra modern for its time, the mansion featured a central vacuum, dual boilers and water heaters (it's always good to have a spare), its own spring water bottling room, a generator (Nemours had electricity before the White House), a cold fur storage room, and system gauges in Mr. Dupont's bathroom to monitor it all. The mansion overlooks a Versailles-style garden with colonnades, reflecting-swimming pools and statuary aplenty. In earlier times, the estate grew its own vegetables and flowers. It got meat and poultry from a captive ranch across the road. For more about Alfred and Jessie Dupont and Nemours, check out Joseph Frazier Wall's Alfred I. Du Pont: The Man and His Family from Replica Books, June 2000.

The Barnes Collection
A few years ago you retired to devote yourself to improving the world through art. What you retired from was the very successful company you founded to market the silver-protein antiseptic trademarked Argyrol, which you had co-discovered earlier. Your name is Albert C. Barnes, M.D., and your passion for art won't be satisfied until your collection includes works by Picasso, Seurat, Rousseau, Modigliani, El Greco, Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Degas and others.

Cardplayers & Girl by Cezanne ( Click for blowup. )

In addition to paintings, the Barnes Foundation collection includes sculpture (notably Lipchitz), furniture, and ceramics. It was raining the day we visited, so we passed on the arboretum associated with the Foundation. But that too is said to be top-drawer.

Chadd's Ford Inn
We'd like to pretend we come back to Brandywine over and over because of an overwhelming hunger for art, history, and the great outdoors, and certainly that is true in part. But the splendid food, service and ambience at the Chadd's Ford Inn also motivates our migration mightily! The chef is skilled, creative, and responsive to folks with dietary restrictions; the waiters, especially Sharon and Erica, fall all over themselves getting things right; and the two-hundred year old inn is tastefully preserved and hung with representative local art (mostly Wyeths). In more than a dozen visits, we were only disappointed once, and then because our meals were a tad overcooked. Pricing is reasonable ($50 to $60 for two without wine,) and reservations strongly recommended. The Chadds Ford Inn: Routes 1 & 100 just across the street from the Brandywine River Museum on Rt.1 in Chadds Ford, Pa 19317. Phone: 302-388-7361.

Chadds Ford Inn Update: 2005
Our opinion of the Chadds Ford Inn has changed for the worse. Please read Chadds Ford Inn -- Don't Go There before venturing forth. Please let me know if you have different information.

And while I'm doing commercials, another long-time favorite is Richie's Cleaners & Tailor right here in Inwood.