Wilmington, Delaware
Dad and I cross the New Jersey Pine Barrens to Delaware, stopping in Wilmington for lunch and a visit to the Delaware History Museum.
We began our morning with a very pleasant drive through the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the largest remaining temperate coniferous forest on the Atlantic coast. The Pinelands have poor, sandy soil for growing crops, which has allowed more than 850 species of plants to thrive in the region, ranging from dwarf pines to pitch pines, oak trees, 20 species of berry plants, and several species of orchids.
After another stint on the soulless I-95 through south Philadelphia and into Delaware, we arrived for lunch at the Big Fish Grill in Wilmington. The restaurant sits on the banks of the Delaware River, the longest free-flowing river in the eastern United States. The river’s source begins in the Catskill Mountains and other mountains nearby before flowing south through New York and Pennsylvania, past Philadelphia and Wilmington on its way to the Atlantic Ocean at Delaware Bay. The Delaware supplies drinking water to 17 million people in the region, including half of New York City.
After lunch, we drove into downtown Wilmington, parking near a stately brick building that turned out to be a pawn shop run by the same family for more than 100 years.
Delaware History Museum
We walked up the street a bit to the Delaware History Museum and Mitchell Center for African American Heritage, located inside the Old Town Hall. Built in 1798, the Old Town Hall is a Federal-style building modeled after Philadelphia’s Congress Hall. It was a public gathering spot for elections, town meetings, and civil and criminal trials — with notoriously spartan jail cells in its basement — until 1916. The Old Town Hall also hosted receptions and dinners for luminaries like the Marquis de Lafayette and President Andrew Jackson.We stepped inside the museum, which recounts Delaware’s history from many perspectives. The museum’s theme is “Delaware: One State, Many Stories,” with one section covering Delaware’s timeline from the 1600s to the present; and the other, “Journey to Freedom,” focusing on the history of African Americans in the state, from the first African brought to Delaware by the Swedes to modern figures like Nnamdi Chukwuocha, a state representative and Delaware Poet Laureate.
The first Europeans to settle in Delaware were the Dutch in 1631. The Swedes arrived seven years later and established a trading post at Fort Christina in present-day Wilmington. The Dutch conquered the Swedes from their outpost in New Castle in 1655, and were in turn defeated by a fleet of English ships in 1664. The colony came under the control of William Penn, who, along with his heirs, acted as governor of both Delaware and Pennsylvania.
The state’s largest employers today are banks, chemical and pharmaceutical industries, healthcare, education, and retail. But it also retains a significant vestige of its agrarian past in chicken farming. In 2022 alone, Delaware produced nearly 600 million chickens — a $5 billion industry for a state that has more than 1,000 backyard poultry farmers in addition to large industrial farms such as Purdue and Mountaire.
The museum also showcases Delaware’s role as a corporate tax haven. More than half of all U.S. publicly traded companies, and 63 percent of the Fortune 500, are incorporated in Delaware due to its business-friendly corporate laws. In fact, there are more than a million registered corporations in Delaware — slightly more than the number of residents in the state.
With this satisfying bit of history under our belt, we headed off to our hotel to rest up for Game 11 of our ballpark journey.