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New Castle By Nancy and Richard Woodworth In the state that proclaims itself "Small Wonder," surely New Castle is the smallest wonder of all. And perhaps its most choice wonder. This is the town where Peter Stuyvesant laid out the green in 1651, the town where William Penn set foot in the New World in 1682, the town that became the first state's first capital. But its early importance was eventually overshadowed by Wilmington and Dover. A plan to restore the old town into a second Colonial Williamsburg was aborted in the late 1940s. And so New Castle remains – the living example of a rare Dutch-English-American river town from the Colonial era. The population of this historic district roughly three blocks wide and five blocks deep numbers 1,500, about the same as in its heyday. The old town is often bypassed, hidden just off Interstate 95 south of the towering Delaware Memorial Bridge. The past is everywhere apparent along the cobblestoned, tree-lined streets clustered beside the Delaware River. Like the better-known historic district of Charleston, New Castle has a Battery park. It also has The Strand and The Green. There's a wonderful sense of access to a waterfront sheltered from the industrial disarray on all sides. Here you walk around the waterfront park, down Packet Alley, up the pedestrian path beside the Presbyterian Church to the green and the gravestones beside Immanuel Episcopal Church, and peer into the handful of stores along Delaware Street. Two centuries of architectural styles are displayed in more than 50 landmark structures. Five are open to the public as museums showing the Dutch and English Colonial periods. Others, where life continues today amid a patina of yesteryear, are revealed to the several thousand visitors who come here the third Saturday of every May for "A Day in Old New Castle," a local tradition since 1924. Still, only about 30,000 tourists visit New Castle annually, many of them on bus tours. It is not a visitor-friendly town. There is no information center for orientation purposes or brochures, and the fledgling New Castle Visitors Bureau operates impersonally through a post office box and a toll-free number, (800) 758-1550. Until the mid-1980s, there was only one guest house. Now there are five, but the lack of accommodations means that many visitors must head for motels along the Route 13 strip, the other New Castle more obvious to transients. For New Castle really has two identities. One is the modern-day sprawl away from the river, not really New Castle but bearing its address since the New Castle post office serves a wider area, a situation that "gets everybody confused," according to one local historian. The other is the easily defined old town, separate and apart – a small National Landmark Historic Area of Colonial and Federal vintage, likened to that of Charleston and the French Quarter but considered unique in the country. The old section of New Castle is one of those rare places where the hackneyed phrase "step back in time" truly means something. Material excerpted from Inn Spots & Special Places / Mid-Atlantic, by Nancy and Richard Woodworth. Copyright 2000. Wood Pond Press E-mail feedback to: Home
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