Aaron A. Wallace

Nemours Mansion and Garden is the largest french formal garden in America. It is located in New Castle County, Delaware. It is a former estate of the Duponts, and was built over 1909 -1910 for Alfred Dupont's Second wife Alicia. The estate is done in the Rococo Style of Louis XVI. If you like grand estates and the excesses of the original American Gilded age (which sadly I feel like we are entering into again) this is an amazing example of the gaudy excess of robber barons and Rail Tycoons. The Duponts made their fortune in the production of gunpowder I am glad that they plowed so much back into the community in the form of grand estates, many of the local cultural amenities are housed on their former homes. Nemours is pleasant since it is still so rarely visited almost all of the locals I have met have never been there, I want to get a season pass so I can go jogging on the nearly two mile paved path that follows the perimeter, in the spring and summer.

As one of the oldest industrialized parts of America the rivers of wilmington need to be freed from literally centuries of dam construction. I can think of at least 5 partially ruined dams along the various creeks that feed into the brandywine, some of these dams are effective barriers to the various fish populations. I believe that without the dams that the quality of the riparian recreation will increase throughout New Castle County. 

This is a photo of the Washington Street bridge and the Brandywine Creek in downtown Wilmington Delaware. I went down to the creek to shoot a youtube video, and I was successful in that but I did realize that I cannot just go and wing these walk and talks. I need to come up with a plan and then execute it I only managed to get a 2:45 video out of a hour long walk and at least 20 mins of raw footage. I am starting to get better at the filming portion of the skill but I still need to pause more between expressed ideas I talk at about the right speed maybe I could get a hair faster, but I need to figure out how to have a coherent topic and perhaps even a structure to the discussion. Hopefully, by this time next year an hour long walk will make at least a ten minute video.

Delaware is blessed with quite a bit of revolutionary history that is still largely intact and if you look in certain directions you can be transported back to the days of General Washington and Lafayette and the American Revolution. Sadly much of the riparian wilderness is deeply impacted by suburbanization and industrial development, directly behind the tree lined riverbank to the left are office buildings and industrial sites ranging from a lumbar yard to car repair. The house itself is hard to take a good photo of since it is maybe 10 feet from this section of the old capitol trail road and is about half a mile from an abandoned bridge and what looks like on google maps to be either some pretty built up squats or old houses without street access any longer, which is a shame this place could make the start of a very nice park. This region of Delaware, Stanton, seems to be one of the more interesting places, with lots of little out of the way corners, old houses, blue and brown ro...