Vacation - New Castle, Delaware

When I was planning the trip I had a stop in Wilmington, Delaware listed because of a web page on the waterfront there. But then the more I looked at it the more it looked like a contrived tourist attraction. I started Google "street viewing" down the coast of the bay and discovered New Castle. The existing old town there dates from around 1800 and lots of things are original to the period. I put Jessops Tavern on the itinerary as a place to have lunch and it proved to be a really good choice. It was a wonderful old place with great food and a good local beer and some really nice music. It made us feel our tiredness and we decided to postpone our visit to Longwood Gardens until the next day which turned out to be a fortunate decision!.




So we walked around a bit and were admiring an old house when a guy older than me asked us where we were from. That ended up in an invitation! He owned the old house and asked us if we'd like to see his garden and house. Too much to go in detail but his garden was a wonderful space. The house is a three story plus basement, 189 year old structure, filled with amazing antique furniture. Calvin Elliot Marshall lives there by himself. He was a WWII pilot - bombers, has a fascinating family history and antique family art to go with it. He took us on a tour of the whole place and shared lots of things with us. It was when I started to take the first picture inside that I found out my memory card was full - so I just enjoyed the tour. The basement use to be a "speakeasy" in the 20's and still had some bottles from then (with liquor in them) . That was a fascinating experience. (If you feel like you've read this before it's because it's a copy of an earlier post then didn't have any pictures with it.)

The house is known as the Van Dyke House and it's on the National Register of Historic Places. It's also For Sale - marked down to $850,000. This site has some pictures of the interior.