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New Castle Secrets

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  Amstel House garden at 2 East 4th Street In my first two blog posts on New Castle ( here and here ), I covered much of what visitors see when they visit. In this post, I’m sharing what I’m calling secret New Castle—not exactly secrets, but sights, legends, and bits of history that visitors often miss. New Castle began with the construction of Fort Casimir in 1651. The Dutch were the first Europeans to settle in the New Castle area, building  Fort Casimir in 1651—mostly to annoy the Swedes, who had just built Fort Christina upriver at what’s now Wilmington. Fort Casimir is long gone, but you can see the site and a wayfinding sign in the park at the river end of Chestnut Street. Towns often crop up next to forts, because forts provide jobs and protection. That’s what happened in New Castle. One of New Castle’s legends is that the town was laid out by Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General of the Dutch colonies.   Fort Casimir marker at the corner of E 2nd Street and Ch...
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Exploring Early 20th Century Milton

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  Rear view of William Betts Building, now Milton Public Library A big part of what makes Milton a delightful stop on the Delaware Bayshore Byway is the diversity of his historic architecture. I have other blog posts on Milton’s oldest buildings  and its Victorian architecture . In this post, I share some of the buildings from the early 1900s that we saw during our visit, plus some recent improvements that impressed us. Like many other towns along the Delaware Bayshore Byway, Milton’s economy in the 1800s was largely water-based: shipbuilding, milling, and shipping ports. By the early 1900s, ships were made of steel instead of wood, and railroads and highways were used for shipping more than ports. So Milton’s shipping and shipbuilding industries closed, and today little trace remains of them. In the first half of the 20 th century, some of the mills persisted, and there were peach canning, scrapple, and button industries, but Milton never again prospered as much as it di...
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