Country House Vernaculars: The Northern Borderlands of Wilmington

Focusing on Wilmington’s “Chateau Country,” this tour will visit many of Delaware’s most famous sites, but with the intention of highlighting the vernacular side of these estates. The building of “country houses” transformed the rural landscapes of the Brandywine region north of Wilmington during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Du Pont family members, DuPont Company executives, and other professionals acquired rural properties outside Wilmington—sometimes assembling several adjacent farms to create a single, large estate—and built sprawling revival-style houses, usually surrounded by formal gardens, landscaped vistas, and agricultural enterprises. This tour intentionally highlights lesser seen dimensions of these country house landscapes, while also showcasing the powerful influence of country house culture on the surrounding suburban and even city architecture. 

The tour begins at Hagley Museum, a 235-acre open air museum on the northern edge of Wilmington that interprets the birthplace of the DuPont Company, the gunpowder works founded by E.I. du Pont in 1802 along the Brandywine Creek. The buses then head to three du Pont family country houses, in various sequences depending on the bus, including Owl’s Nest, Dauneport, and Winterthur. Owl’s Nest (1915) is a Tudor Revival house built by Eugene du Pont, Jr. (now part of Greenville Country Club) and features well-preserved service spaces and a boxwood garden designed by Ellen Biddle Shipman. At nearby Dauneport (1933), we’ll see a country house modeled after George Washington’s Mount Vernon and designed by architect Mary McLaughlin Craig for client Amy du Pont. The stop at Winterthur, Henry Francis du Pont’s famous 1,000+ acre estate and museum, will skip the grand house and decorative arts museum, instead focusing on an extensive 1930s dairy farm complex on the property, as well as the du Pont’s mid-20th century “Cottage.” This stop also includes lunch at the Winterthur Visitor Center Café.

Both buses will then travel together to explore suburban developments in the “borderlands” north of Wilmington, which offered scaled-down versions of “country houses” to DuPont Company executives and other white-collar professionals–including a drive through the exclusive Westover Hills neighborhood (developed 1926-35), and a brief stop to view house exteriors at Wawaset Park (1918-19), a DuPont Company subdivision inside the city limits. The final stop, Mauchline (Wilson Eyre, 1914-17), is an “urban country house” built by a DuPont executive, later subdivided for use as a convent, and now being carefully restored by its current owners. A reception with drinks and light refreshments will be held here before returning to the hotel for dinner on your own.

Stone, Brick, & Concrete: Along the Delaware River 

This tour is loosely themed around different modes of masonry construction in Delaware, while visiting sites spanning four different centuries of history along the Delaware River. The buildings we’ll see represent several building approaches in masonry over time in northern Delaware: fieldstone construction in the Delaware piedmont, variations of brick construction as an architectural signal of gentility, and the proliferation of concrete construction during the twentieth century, which transformed vernacular architecture nationwide. 

Before leaving the City of Wilmington, we’ll stop first at Old Swedes Church (Holy Trinity Church), constructed in stone in 1698, and the first of several National Historic Landmarks on this tour. Also open on the grounds will be the Hendrickson House, a stone gambrel-roofed house built between 1722 and 1746 by a Swedish American family near Chester, PA and reconstructed on this site in 1961. Next, this tour will spend a large portion of the day in Historic New Castle, where a National Historic Landmark historic district offers the opportunity to tour at least 15 Georgian and Federal period buildings, most built of brick, dispersed in a historic town overlooking the Delaware River. This stop also includes lunch at the historic Arsenal building on the town green.

Next, buses will travel back towards Wilmington, stopping in Dunleith, a post-World War II subdivision for Black families, the first in New Castle County. The houses are constructed of cast concrete formed to mimic wood siding. The focal point here will be Coleman Memorial United Methodist Church, where VAFers will meet with members of the community to hear about the history of the neighborhood. The final stop will be just up the road at the Joseph Rizzo Construction Company, located at the end of a block of brick houses built for members of the Rizzo family by patriarch and Italian mason Joseph Rizzo. The construction headquarters and original shops include the family wine cellars, where grandson Marc Rizzo is poised to host VAF for wine and refreshments. Dinner will be on your own.

Friday Field Bus Tours 

Lunch and Dinner included on Friday Tours      

Black and White Landscapes in Central Delaware 

This tour heads south into historically rural central Delaware, exploring a variety of sites that tell the stories of both Black and White residents during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. You will explore an assortment of fine early buildings and interesting vernacular structures, situated within both rural and village settings, while also considering the themes of enslavement, freedom seeking, and agricultural labor at each stop.

The first stop will be Poplar Hall (c. 1780/c. 1810), which features a brick and stone dwelling and associated outbuildings, including a very early corn-crib granary. Quarters for enslaved persons have been identified on the second floor of the house’s stone addition. Next, we’ll stop at Old Drawyers Church (c. 1773), a Presbyterian house of worship overlooking Drawyer Creek and featuring a Georgian design with original floor plan and pews intact. From here, it is a short distance to the historic town of Odessa, where VAFers will have lunch and spend a couple hours exploring several open buildings, including the former First National Bank of Odessa (c. 1855, Samuel Sloan), the Corbit-Sharp House (c. 1774), and the Wilson-Warner House (c. 1769), and an early house of plank construction. In addition to fine Georgian architecture and unique vernacular structures (including a muskrat shed), several sites in Odessa connect to Black stories and the Underground Railroad in Delaware. To that end, we’ll also stop on the outskirts of town to visit Zoar AME Church and Appoquinimink Friends Meeting. A 30-minute drive south will take us to the John Dickinson Plantation, which includes a c. 1740 county house of a signer of the U.S. Constitution, the recently rediscovered cemetery for persons he enslaved, and several agricultural outbuildings reconstructed based on vernacular architectural studies. Lastly, the tour will end with dinner at the Delaware Agricultural Museum and Village in Dover, where VAFers will be able to stroll the grounds and check out the exteriors of the museum’s collection of historic buildings moved here from all over the state.

Early Houses of Sussex County

This tour will explore the rich architectural traditions of Sussex County, traveling to the southwest corner of Delaware, where tourgoers will discover a strong architectural and cultural orientation to Maryland’s Eastern Shore and to the Chesapeake Bay. Highlighting a fascinating array of early domestic buildings ranging from the early 18th century to the mid-19th century, the stops on this tour reflect the diversity of aspirational house building in Sussex County–aspirations  that are sometimes obvious, and at other times quite subtle. Participants will explore contrasts between grand mansions and smaller, one-room-plan houses that, while seemingly modest, sometimes communicated wealth and social status through nuanced design elements. 

The Parson-Thorne Mansion in Milford will be our first stop, where we’ll explore an evolved dwelling that was built around 1735 as a single-room dwelling, then expanded between 1787-1793, before receiving a Gothic Revival makeover during the 1860s. The single-cell Stayton House is also on site. The tour will next visit Old Christ Church (c. 1772) near Laurel, a wood-framed Anglican “chapel of ease” that is remarkably original and unmodernized. We’ll then proceed into Laurel to have lunch at a local restaurant, Abbott’s on Broad Creek, before walking to the nearby Hitchens Homestead (c. 1878), a Gothic Revival house built by a local mill owner and recently restored on its exterior. This site includes a summer kitchen and the “Mill Hand’s House,” a workers cottage comprised of two single cell dwellings joined together. Next, we’ll stop at the Robert Houston House (c. 1780), which was preserved by being moved to a post-World War II subdivision on the edge of Laurel. The renovations included moving and attaching another historic dwelling, the single cell Lowe House, which now serves as the house’s kitchen. From here the tour travels northwest, stopping close to the Maryland/Delaware border, in Seaford, at the Cannon-Maston House (c. 1727, 1733), a rare Delaware example of an early Chesapeake hall and parlor dwelling with pattern brick in the gable ends. VAFers will have an opportunity to examine a work in progress restoration by the owner, Sussex County Land Trust.

Finally, the tour will end at the Governor H.H. Ross Mansion, a historic house museum and agricultural complex that will also host the tour for dinner at its modern on-site event venue. VAFers will have free reign to explore the main house, an impressive Italianate design completed in 1860 as an addition to a 1820s brick house, agricultural buildings, and a rare surviving (although heavily restored) enslaved persons quarters. This property provides a thought-provoking case study regarding what gets preserved and how interpretation is slowly changing. 

Saturday Paper Sessions and Banquet

Paper and Poster Sessions will be held on Saturday at the Wilmington Doubletree Downtown Hotel.

Closing Banquet and Annual Meeting will also be held at the WDDH.