Exploring Early 20th Century Milton
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 did during