Odessa: How Did This River Town Become a Gem?
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| Rear of Wilson-Warner House |
Odessa’s history is similar to those of most other towns along the Delaware Bayshore Byway. In the 1700s and 1800s it was a prosperous shipping port (primarily for wheat) on the Appoquinimink River. Then the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal and railroads bypassed Odessa and, like many other Delaware towns with water-based economies, Odessa became a sleepy residential community.
Why, then, does Odessa look so different today from other towns along the Byway? Why do the historic buildings in Odessa look stunning while so many of those in other towns along the Byway are either vacant or in desperate need of rehabilitation?
The answer is five pieces of luck that other towns along the Delaware Bayshore Byway simply didn’t have.
The first piece of luck
was the commitment of Daniel Corbit, a son of the man who built what is now
Corbit-Sharp House, to preserving his family history and the house’s
architecture and furnishings. One of the items he preserved was a detailed list
of the work done by the house’s builder, making Corbit-Sharp House one of the
best documented historic houses in America.
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| Corbit-Sharp House |
Odessa’s second piece of luck was the 1900 arrival of Rodney Sharp, who had just graduated from Delaware College (now the University of Delaware) and was hired to teach at a local school. He lodged in Odessa and fell in love with the town, especially what’s now known as Corbit-Sharp House.
Odessa’s third piece of luck was what happened to Rodney Sharp after he left Odessa for Wilmington in 1903. He got a job at Dupont in the unit headed by Pierre S. Dupont. Sharp became friends with Pierre (and eventually his personal secretary) and met Pierre’s sister Isabella. He married Isabella in 1908, and almost immediately Sharp and his wife began using the substantial income from her trust to become major philanthropists.
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| Photos of Rodney and Isabella Sharp from the University of Delaware (as of 8/1/2021, the web page is apparently removed) |
In 1938, when Sharp heard that the Corbit family was planning to convert their house into apartments, he and his wife bought it and restored it.
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| Corbit-Sharp House doorway |
Over the next 30 years, Sharp went on to restore 18 other Odessa houses and even moved some historic structures into and around Odessa. He may have been hoping to make Odessa into a living history museum like Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. Rodney Sharp’s vision, his wife Isabella’s money, and their commitment to philanthropy are the major reasons that Odessa is the gem it is today.
Odessa’s fourth piece of luck was in 1950s and 1960s, when Winterthur accepted donations of several historic Odessa buildings and an endowment to support them. Winterthur is a 175-room mansion filled with American decorative arts near Greenville, Delaware. Winterthur operated the donated Odessa buildings until 2003—over half a century—until they became too expensive for Winterthur to maintain.
Odessa’s
final piece of luck is that the Sharps not only restored many of Odessa’s
historic buildings but inspired their descendants to continue their commitment.
When Winterthur closed its Odessa properties in 2003, the Sharps’ descendants
stepped back in, retook control of the properties, and established the Historic Odessa Foundation to maintain and operate them.
Today there are two Odessas to visit. The first is the properties owned by the Historic Odessa Foundation, which are often referred to as the “Historic Houses of Odessa.” The second is all the other privately-owned historic homes and buildings in and around Odessa’s National Historic District. When we visited in mid-December, we focused on the Foundation’s Historic Houses of Odessa. Because of the pandemic we only saw the exteriors.
The jewel in
Odessa’s historical crown is Corbit-Sharp House,
on the south side of Main Street across from 2nd Street.
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| Corbit-Sharp House |
From Main Street you might miss it. It sits perpendicular to Main Street because it was built to face a long-gone extension of 2nd Street, and its side is obscured by a huge evergreen tree.
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| View of Corbit-Sharp House from Main Street |
Corbit-Sharp House is named for William Corbit, who built it in the early 1770s, and Rodney Sharp, who restored it. Corbit was the town’s leading citizen and owner of an (obviously very prosperous) tannery on the Appoquinimink River.
Corbit-Sharp House has been called Delaware’s finest pre-Revolutionary house. Its notable exterior details include the elaborate cornice (the wide trim under the roofline), the wide stone “stringcourse” between the first and second floors, and the beautiful front entry. The kitchen wing was added in 1790.
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| Corbit-Sharp House cornice |
The Corbit-Sharp House design was heavily influenced by Georgian homes being built in Philadelphia at the time. The stone was imported from Chester and the lumber from Philadelphia. Half the house’s budget went to interior woodwork, which we’re looking forward to seeing on a post-pandemic visit. The house is furnished according to an 1818 inventory. This house was a stop on the Underground Railroad; the Corbits hid an escaped slave in a miniscule storage space while the sheriff searched the house.
When Rodney Sharp restored the house in the 1930s, he installed a Colonial Revival garden in the rear.
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| Corbit-Sharp House Colonial Revival garden, looking south from the house |
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| Corbit-Sharp House Colonial Revival garden, looking toward the house |
The garden was designed by Marian Cruger Coffin, one of America’s first female landscape architects and one of the first women to study architecture at MIT. A favorite of the Dupont family, she was the University of Delaware’s landscape architect and designed the gardens of Gibraltar (the Sharp home in Wilmington), many of the features of Winterthur’s gardens, and some of the formal gardens at Mt. Cuba.
Even during our December visit, when much of the garden was asleep for the winter, we could see some of the hallmarks of Colonial Revival gardens here: a formal, symmetrical design, straight brick walks, boxwood hedges, and romantic structures—in this case a delightful octagonal stone building.
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| Ice house (?) in the garden of Corbit-Sharp House |
I’ve read that it’s an ice house, but that doesn’t make sense, because an ice house wouldn’t have windows (which would let in sun and melt the ice!).
In 1958, Corbit-Sharp House became the first Odessa building that Rodney Sharp donated to Winterthur.
Next door to Corbit-Sharp House, just west of it on Main Street, is Wilson-Warner House, another Georgian house built between 1720 and 1769 (sources give varying dates).
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| Wilson-Warner House |
David Wilson, who built the house, was the town’s most prosperous merchant. But in 1829 his son, also named David, went bankrupt, sold the house, and moved to Indiana. His daughter Mary Wilson grew up in this house before it was sold at the 1829 bankruptcy auction when she was 18 years old. She married her next door neighbor Daniel Corbit—the man who kept such great records of the Corbit-Sharp House. They were cousins; Daniel’s father and Mary’s grandmother were siblings.
Behind the Wilson-Warner and Corbit-Sharp Houses are some interesting outbuildings. The stable, built in 1812, is unusual because it is built of imported stone (there is little natural stone in much of Delaware). It seems a bit extravagant to use imported stone for a stable!
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| Stable behind Wilson-Warner House |
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| This stone under the stable eave says "Built 1812, Rebuilt 1877." |
A brick smoke house from the 1700s straddles the two properties. It’s unusual simply because it still exists. Most early smoke houses have long been torn down.
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| Smokehouse behind Corbit-Sharp and Wilson-Warner Houses |
There’s also a muskrat-skinning shed that’s been moved to the rear of the Wilson-Warner House as an exhibit. I wonder if it's the one now missing from Port Penn.
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| Muskrat skinning shed behind Wilson-Warner House |
Just east of Corbit-Sharp House on Main Street is the Pump House, which William Corbit built around 1780 as housing for his tannery employees.
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| Pump House, complete with pump! |
Across Main Street from Wilson-Warner House is the New Castle National Bank of Odessa, one of the few historic commercial buildings in Odessa.
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| New Castle National Bank of Odessa, now the Visitors Center |
The bank was designed by Philadelphia architect Samuel Sloan in Italianate style and built around 1853-1855. As late as 1945, the bank's cashier slept upstairs above the bank vault with a shotgun that he could point through a hole in the floor! The bank is now a visitors center operated by Historic Odessa Foundation.
On the other side of 2nd Street is Cantwell’s Tavern.
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| Cantwell's Tavern, formerly the Brick Hotel |
Built around 1822, this building was Cantwell’s Bridge Hotel and then the Brick Hotel into the early 20th century. Rodney Sharp restored it in the 1950s, and his family donated it to Winterthur after his death in 1968. Winterthur converted it into an exhibition gallery in 1981, and in 2012 the Historic Odessa Foundation converted it into a restaurant.
Attached to the back of Cantwell’s is Janvier Stable, which was moved here from across town. I read that one of its bricks is engraved with the date 1791.
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| Janvier Stable |
Behind Janvier Stable, at the corner of 2nd and High Streets, is Collins-Sharp House.
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| Collins-Sharp House |
Collins-Sharp House is one of Delaware’s oldest structures, built around 1700 near Taylors Bridge, about 16 miles away. Rodney Sharp moved it here in 1962. He donated it to Winterthur in 1968, the year he died.
When you visit Odessa, be careful to cross Main Street at the pedestrian sidewalks. It’s a major highway (DE 299) and traffic can be heavy. (UPDATE 3/20/2021: I've added a second blog post on Odessa on some of the other historic gems in and around this town.)
I would love to know more about Rodney Sharp, the person who’s most responsible for making Odessa what it is today. There’s surprisingly little online information on him. He has no Wikipedia listing, for example, even though his son and grandson do. The Hagley Museum has an extensive online collection of Dupont family photographs, but he’s only in some grainy family snapshots. A booklet on him was published decades ago but is long out of print. Here’s the little I could glean about him:
· He was born in
1880 in Seaford. The family later moved to Lewes, where his father was deputy
collector of customs for the port.
· At 16 he entered
Delaware College (now the University of Delaware). He earned a degree in
liberal arts as one of a class of 18 students in 1900. He loved his years at
the college and later became a trustee and major benefactor.
· Sharp and Pierre S. Dupont shared a strong interest in supporting education. Both supported the University of Delaware. When Dupont learned that white taxpayer dollars could not be used to support schools for Blacks in Delaware, he built dozens of schools for Blacks himself, some of which survive to this day.
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| Booker T Washington School in New Castle, one of the schools Pierre S. Dupont built for Black children, and now part of New Castle Senior Center |
· Sharp and his
wife Isabella had four children, but only two survived to adulthood.
· In 1909, a year
after they married and the year their first son was born, they bought Gibraltar, an estate in Wilmington built in 1844 by a
grandnephew of Caesar Rodney. They renovated it in Colonial Revival style and
added Colonial Revival gardens. Their descendants were not interested in Gibraltar,
and the house has been vacant for several decades.
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| Gibraltar (from Loopnet.com) |
Sharp built a home in Boca Grande, Florida, in the 1920s called the Hacienda and may have built others. His son Bayard called him a frustrated architect.
· He loved to
travel and made dozens of trips to Europe, Asia, and around the world. He died
in 1968 on a luxury ocean liner returning to the United States from Italy.
· When his wife Isabella died in 1946 at the age of 64, Sharp had access to the income from her trust until his death in 1968, when the trust passed to their children. He donated this income to several non-profits, including over $32 million to the University of Delaware. It was during this period that he donated some of Odessa’s buildings to Winterthur along with an endowment to maintain them.
Fabulous! These articles are incredibly fantastic!
ReplyDeleteThank you, Claudia! This has been a great pandemic project, when we've been largely isolated at home and want to avoid crowds when we venture out. It's really interesting and I'm learning so much!
DeleteYou say there is little natural stone in Delaware. That is incorrect. In the City of Wilmington and to the north, there is much granite or gneiss under everything. The early millers' houses at 18th and Market are of this stone. The semi-pro baseball team is called the Blue Rocks. Hagley museum has an exhibit outdoors showing how the stone was cut by the Irish workers at the powder works in Wilmington.
ReplyDeleteThank you for pointing this out! What I said is there is little natural stone in much of Delaware. My impression from what I've read so far is that there's little natural stone in central and southern Delaware. But you're right--there is natural stone in northern Delaware. In New Castle the town is full of granite blocks that once supported the rails of the old Frenchtown railway. I've wondered where that granite came from.
DeleteGrain from the Brandywine Valley was hauled to boats on the Delaware along Naaman's Rd. The boats took the grain to Odessa and then by horse and cart over to the head of the Bohemia River to be placed on boats to take the grain to the Baltimore market. The horses would pause halfway to the Bohemia to be watered and that spot was midway between Odessa and the Bohrmia and became Middletown.
ReplyDeleteThat is so interesting! Iknew the road was used to ship wheat, but I didn't know which direction! The C&D Canal would probably have ended all that.
DeleteMy family on my mother's side hailed from Odessa(she was born there). My grandfather had a store there for some years. I grew up just outside Odessa and most of my family is buried at Old Drawers. Thanks for the pictures.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing! I need to do another blog post on Odessa focusing on all the treasures outside the Foundation's properties, including Old Drawyers. That cemetery is beautiful!
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