A trip to the East Coast is not complete without a stop at the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. A museum of art, home to many of the Wyeth family of artists’ works of art. N. C. Wyeth’s biography by David Michaelis (1998) is an excellent introduction to the Wyeth artists. N. C. Wyeth was famous for his illustration art, his color illustrations making the story of Treasure Island as exciting as the words of Robert Louis Stevenson. As in Poor Blind Man Pew “tapping up and down the road in a frenzy, and groping and calling for his comrades.”
N. C. Wyeth’s son Andrew Wyeth, a famous American artist who painted almost entirely subjects in Chadds Ford and at his summer home in Maine, had a close relationship with the locals in Chadds Ford, who would often find him taking his meals at Hank’s Place at its original location on Creek Road. Jamie Wyeth, son of Andrew Wyeth and grandson of N. C. Wyeth, never met his grandfather, but it would be hard not to recognize his grandfather in Jamie’s features and dressing style. Jamie is also a nationally recognized artist.
A few miles from Brandywine Museum along Baltimore Pike, Pennsbury-Chadds Ford Antique Mall opened early, and our discovery of several historic bridge postcards led us to Brandywine Park in Wilmington, Delaware, twenty five minutes south from the antique mall and across the Pennsylvania/Delaware border. A B&O steam engine with passenger cars is traveling atop a pin-connected Pratt-type high deck truss bridge featured in this postcard, postmarked Wilmington, Del. Sept 20, 1909. Brandywine Park, one of the Wilmington State Parks, has seen many changes since it opened in 1883. The B&O deck truss bridge has been replaced with a highway bridge, atop the original stone piers. A seven-arch railroad bridge constructed with sandstone from Berea, Ohio, towers above the 1880s riveted suspension pedestrian bridge. It was this riveted suspension bridge that had led us to Brandywine Park, a well preserved nineteenth century bridge that could easily be replicated and be more pleasing to view and cross than some of those modern pedestrian bridges seen today.
