Wilmington

We arrived in Wilmington on a grey Tuesday, the kind of weather that makes a small city look smaller, and Lia asked, not unreasonably, why we’d chosen it over Philadelphia an hour up the road. By the second afternoon, standing in the conservatory at Longwood Gardens with rain drumming on the glass roof and orchids somehow indifferent to the whole affair, she had her answer. Wilmington doesn’t announce itself. It reveals itself in increments — a converted powder mill here, a hidden garden there — to anyone willing to slow down.

The du Pont legacy

The name du Pont is stamped on nearly everything in this corner of Delaware, and understanding it means understanding the city. We spent a full day at Winterthur, Henry Francis du Pont’s former estate, wandering nearly a thousand acres of naturalistic gardens before losing ourselves inside a house holding one of the finest collections of American decorative arts anywhere — room after room of Chippendale furniture and Chinese export porcelain arranged as if the family had just stepped out. The next morning we drove to Hagley Museum, built on the original du Pont gunpowder works along the Brandywine Creek, where the old stone mill buildings still stand beside the water that once powered them, a rare unvarnished look at the industrial fortune behind the gardens.

Downtown and the Riverfront

Wilmington’s downtown surprised us with its brick-fronted seriousness — banks and law offices housed in buildings built on Delaware’s famously business-friendly incorporation laws, a fact Lia found funnier the more corporate mailboxes she spotted crammed into one small office on North Orange Street. But the real transformation is happening along the Christina River, where old rail yards and warehouses have become a walkable stretch of restaurants, a minor-league ballpark, and the Delaware Museum of Nature and Nearby, its riverwalk busy with joggers even in the grey light. We ate dinner at a riverfront table watching the water go from pewter to black, the kind of unpretentious evening a bigger city rarely offers.

Getting There

Wilmington sits directly on the Northeast Corridor, and Amtrak trains from Philadelphia take barely thirty minutes, from New York about ninety, making the city an easy detour rather than a destination requiring commitment. Philadelphia International Airport is the closest major airport, roughly a forty-minute drive south on I-95. Once downtown, the historic sites cluster within a few miles of each other along the Brandywine Valley, so a rental car earns its keep for a day trip out to Winterthur and Hagley, even if the riverfront itself is easily done on foot.