Brandywine Valley: Longwood Gardens, Wyeth & Delaware River Countryside

Pierre S. du Pont purchased the 1700-acre Peirce farm in 1906 and spent forty years creating what became North America's preeminent horticultural display. The estate now encompasses more than 40 indoor and outdoor gardens across 1,077 acres, anchored by the rebuilt 4-acre Conservatory (completed 2024) — one of the largest glass conservatory complexes in the Western Hemisphere, housing spectacular winter displays and year-round tropical collections. The 600-jet Main Fountain Garden stages choreographed water theater modeled on the grand European fountains du Pont admired on his travels; the Italian Water Garden was designed after the Villa Gamberaia near Florence, with its long lily pools and clipped yew hedges; the Topiary Garden sculpts century-old trees into architectural forms. More than 11,000 plant types representing virtually every climate on earth grow somewhere on the grounds. The Open Air Theatre, a sunken grass amphitheater, runs fountain shows on summer evenings — the jets illuminated after dark in synchronized color sequences.

A small, quietly historic village at the confluence of the Brandywine Creek's East and West Branches, where the road from Philadelphia to the Chesapeake crossed the creek at John Chad's ford. The 1777 Battle of Brandywine — the largest single-day land battle of the American Revolution, involving some 30,000 troops — was fought on the surrounding hills and creek crossings on September 11, 1777. The village's tavern, grist mill, and stone farmhouses date from the 18th century, and the surrounding landscape retains a remarkable agricultural continuity: the same stone fences, wooded hillsides, and creek-bottom meadows that Andrew Wyeth painted obsessively for five decades remain largely unchanged.

A converted 1864 grist mill on the west bank of the Brandywine Creek, preserved and expanded by the Brandywine Conservancy with a sensitive 1971 addition that left the original mill structure intact — the original millrace is still visible through glass floor panels in the lower gallery. The permanent collection concentrates on three generations of Wyeth family painting: N.C. Wyeth's original illustrations for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robin Hood, and other classic adventure novels, executed with a dramatic compositional force that shaped how Americans imagined adventure stories; Andrew Wyeth's Chadds Ford watercolors and egg tempera panels, including preparatory studies for Christina's World and a deep collection of the quietly unsettling domestic interiors and winter landscapes that made him the most famous American painter of the 20th century; and Jamie Wyeth's portraiture, including his study of Rudolf Nureyev. The museum's location on the Brandywine — the very stream visible through the gallery windows — gives the collection an unusual sense of place and context.

The Brandywine Valley's oldest winery operates in a converted 1736 stone barn perched above the Brandywine Creek, surrounded by estate vineyards that produce estate-grown Vidal Blanc, Chambourcin, and Chardonnay. The tasting room inside the original stone building retains the low-beamed character of a colonial-era agricultural structure, and the terrace beyond overlooks the wooded creek valley — a view that would have been recognizable to the Continental soldiers who crossed the Brandywine nearby in September 1777. The Chambourcin, grown on the estate's red-clay hillsides, is the wine to seek out.

Fifty-two acres preserving two of the most significant structures from the largest land battle of the American Revolution: Washington's Headquarters at the Gideon Gilpin farmhouse, a modest Pennsylvania stone dwelling where the commanding general made his dispositions on the morning of September 11, 1777, and the Marquis de Lafayette's Command Post at the Benjamin Ring House, where the nineteen-year-old French volunteer established his position before the British flanking movement struck. An interpretive trail through the oak woodlands and farm fields explains the strategic logic of the British maneuver — a twelve-mile flanking march through the morning fog that caught Washington's right flank unguarded — and the retreat that followed. Nine days after the battle, British forces under General Howe occupied Philadelphia, the American capital, forcing the Continental Congress to flee.