Here along the Brandywine River, you're at an early center of U.S. industrialization, in what is now Wilmington, Delaware. Imagine the river just north of town as it crosses the Fall Line, dropping from about 160 feet (49 m) up at Chadds Ford to just a few feet above sea level here — a fall that powered flour and even gunpowder manufacture in the days before the steam engine. That descent, and the river’s navigable channel to the Delaware River and Delaware Bay, let builders load oceangoing ships and spin machinery that changed industry.
By 1687 a Swedish colonist, Tyman Stidham, had opened the first mill near Wilmington, and about 1735 Brandywine Village was founded across the creek. Quakers Elizabeth Levis Shipley, her husband William Shipley, and Thomas Canby played key roles in establishing the village and its supporting flour mills; by 1743 Thomas’s son Oliver owned three mill sites and a dam and millrace had been built south of the creek. Prominent Quaker millers — the Canbys, Leas, and Tatnalls — built stone homes along Market Street and helped build the Brandywine Academy in 1798, to which a cupola was later added.
Picture the mills' waterwheels turning along Market Street, powering Wilmington's rise before the age of steam.