Seaford

I’ll admit I only knew Seaford by its odd nickname before we visited — the nylon capital of the world, a title it earned when DuPont opened a massive nylon plant here in 1939, the first of its kind, turning a sleepy river town into an industrial boomtown almost overnight. That plant is still running on the edge of town, and locals will mention it with a strange mix of pride and shrug, the way you’d talk about a famous relative you don’t see much anymore. What we actually fell for, though, was the Nanticoke River itself, which curls right through downtown and out to the Chesapeake Bay.

Paddling the Nanticoke

We rented kayaks from a put-in near the old railroad bridge and paddled out as the light went low and orange, the river widening past cypress trees and old crab shacks with their docks half-collapsed into the water. The Nanticoke is one of the least developed rivers on the Delmarva Peninsula, and it showed — no jet skis, no crowds, just herons stalking the shallows and the occasional distant hum of a truck crossing the bridge back in town. Lia, who grew up nowhere near this kind of quiet, kept saying she couldn’t believe how empty it was for a river this pretty.

Downtown and the Gateway sign

Back on land, Seaford’s compact downtown still has the bones of its early-1900s prosperity — a handsome brick commercial strip, a restored movie theater, and a “Gateway to the Beaches” sign that locals seem to regard with a wink, since the actual beaches are still a good 45 minutes away. We ate dinner at a small Southern-leaning spot on High Street, fried chicken and collards, while a table of regulars nearby debated local politics with the kind of familiarity that only comes from decades of the same argument.

Getting There

Seaford sits in western Sussex County, about an hour from the Delaware beaches and 40 minutes from Salisbury Regional Airport (SBY) in Maryland, which is the closest commercial airport. From Washington, D.C., it’s roughly a two-hour drive via US-50 and US-13. A car is essential — this is deep Delmarva farm country with no useful public transit — but the drive in on back roads past soybean fields is a nice quiet lead-in.