Two Towns in Delaware
Charles Kuralt

Two things – in this case, towns – started out the same way at the same time. Over the years they developed vast differences. What are the differences? How did they came about? What do they mean in our lives? In this look at Wilmington and New Castle, Delaware, Charles Kuralt tries to answer these questions.

New Castle, Delaware: During the first half of the seventeenth century, when the nations of Europe were squabbling over who owned the New World, the Dutch and the Swedes founded competing villages ten miles apart on the Delaware River. Not long afterward, the English took over both places and gave them new names, New Castle and Wilmington.

For a century and a half the two villages grew apace, but gradually Wilmington gained all the advantages. It was a little closer to Philadelphia, so when new textile mills opened, they opened in Wilmington, not in New Castle. There was plenty of water power from rivers and creeks at Wilmington, so when young Irénée DuPont chose a place for his gunpowder mill, it was Wilmington he chose, not New Castle. Wilmington became a town and then a city – a rather important city, much the largest in Delaware. And New Castle, bypassed by the highways and waterways that made Wilmington prosperous? New Castle slumbered, ten miles south on the Delaware River. No two villages with such similar past could have gone such separate ways. And today no two places could be more different.

Wilmington, with its expressways and parking lots and all its other concrete ribbons and badges, is a tired old veteran of the industrial wars and wears a vacant stare. Block after city block where people used to live and shop is broken and empty.

New Castle never had to make way for progress and therefore never had any reason to tear down its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses. So they are still here, standing in tasteful rows under ancient elms around the original town green. New Castle is still an agreeable place to live. The pretty buildings of its quiet past make a serene setting for the lives of 4,800 people. New Castle may be America's loveliest town, but it is not an important town at all. Progress passed it by.

Poor New Castle.

Lucky Wilmington.

(Source unknown.)

© 1998 Ervin Nemeth. All rights reserved.