On Sunday, May 26, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library will be temporarily closed to both members and the general public as we host a private event. We will resume regular hours on Tuesday, May 28, and we look forward to welcoming you back then. Thank you for your understanding and continued support! Plan Your Visit »
Henry Francis du Pont loved golf so much, he built his own course, and it’s still one of the best.
Famed golf course architect Dick Wilson had barely finished building a new course at Wilmington Country Club in 1964, when he got to work on his next project: expansion of the course right next door at Winterthur. Once called the most exclusive golf course in the country, its lone member for the prior 30-plus years was Henry Francis du Pont.
Though a renowned horticulturist who created a world-class naturalistic garden, as well as the country’s foremost authority on American decorative arts and founder of Winterthur Museum, du Pont also loved a good round of golf as much as the next guy. So in 1928, he asked New York golf architect Devereux Emmet to build him his very own 10-hole, 17-tee course on 160 acres of his vast property.
Completed in February 1929 at a cost of $59,000, the course opened with a family party in June 1929. From then on, du Pont played almost every other day while home at Winterthur. On weekends, he regularly hosted 18 to 20 golfing guests—Vanderbilts, Kelloggs, Auchinschlosses, and others. Estate employees worked as caddies. As he played on Sundays, du Pont often listened to live concerts from the Metropolitan Opera, blasted from a powerful tower in Azalea Woods.
Du Pont also hired his own personal pro, Percy Vickers. In the late 1920s, du Pont had taken lessons from Vickers at an indoor golf school in New York City. When Vickers later signaled that he was looking for a new gig, du Pont hired him right away. He so esteemed Vickers’s service as a coach and greenskeeper that he made him one of the highest-paid of the 250 employees at Winterthur. Their relationship lasted 40 years, until du Pont’s passing in 1969.
In 1964, he told a local sports reporter, “I still like to play. I’m not interested in scoring—I know my limitations. I’m happy to just finish a round and enjoy the exercise.” He even hit an ace once, earning him membership in the PGA Hole-In-One Club in 1941.
Du Pont claimed to have no idea what his best score was, though Vickers placed the 84-year-old at an average in the low 90s. “And he walks all the time,” Vickers told the newspaper. “No carts for him…I just try to keep him swinging right, and he amazes me. I’ll be glad if I’m swinging at all, at his age.”
In light of du Pont’s advancing age, a cousin, convinced there was a need for a private golf-only club, proposed building an 18-hole course that incorporated the Winterthur track. Another cousin provided some of her adjacent property for the project, making the total size 300 acres. Dick Wilson was hired to design the new course.
When completed, Vickers rated it “maybe six strokes harder than the Old Wilmington Country Club course” (now the club’s South Course, where the BMW Championship will be played). A player noted, “You need to hit every club in your bag to play here.”
Du Pont proposed naming the club after Antoine Bidermann, son-in-law of the DuPont Co. founder, a company executive, and the original owner of the Winterthur house and property. A farmhouse and barn on the estate were converted to a clubhouse and shop. Thus, Bidermann Golf Club was born.
Today, with about 200 members, Bidermann is still exclusive. It sees about 8,000 rounds a year on its par-72, 6,421 yards of play, according to top100golfcourses.com, and it is considered a design masterpiece.
“The Bidermann people are getting a lovely, exacting course,” Vickers told the paper in 1964—one that is slightly hillier than the course at Wilmington Country Club, which was once part of the Winterthur estate. A Bidermann club member once wrote, “By listening to the land, Wilson fashioned a design that would challenge, even inspire, the best players, yet one a 12-handicap could, indeed, still be charmed by.”
I find these objects amazingly relatable to today’s communications, a revolutionary sort of social media for the time (1778). These works on paper, known as rebuses, contain a combination of words and images that translate into words or phonetics—a fun form of an emoji. These portray the opposing views of Great Britain and the American colonies about the American Revolution. The accepted translations are:
Britannia to America
My dear daughter, I cannot behold without great pain your headstrong backwardness to return to your duty in not opposing all the good I long intended for your sole happiness, and being told that you have given your hand to a base and two-faced Frenchman, I have sent you over five wise men, the greatest of all my children, to put you to rights and hope you will listen to them and mind what they say to you. They have instructions to give you those things you formerly required. So be a good girl, discharge your soldiers and ships of war, and do not rebel against your mother. Rely upon me and do not trust to what that French rascal shall tell you. I see he wants to bring on an enmity to all unity between you and I, but listen not to him. All the world takes notice of his two faces. I’ll send him such messages from my great cannons as shall make his heart repent and know that one good or ill turn merits another. N.B. Let not hate take too much hold of your heart. I am your friend & mother.
America to her mistaken mother
America to her mistaken mother. You silly old woman, that you have sent a dove to us is very plain, to draw our attention from our real interests, but we are determined to abide by our own ways of thinking. Your five children you have sent to us shall be treated as visitors and safely sent home again. You may trust them and admire them, but you must not expect one of your puppets will come home to you as sweet as you sent him. ‘Twas cruel to send so pretty a man so many thousand miles and to have the fatigue of returning back after bobbing his coat and dirtying those red-heeled shoes. If you are wise, follow your own advice you gave to me. Take home your ships [and] soldiers. Guard well your own trifling and leave me to my self, as I am at age to know my own interests without your foolish advice, and know that I shall always regard you and my brothers as relations but not as friends. I am your greatly injured Daughter Amerik.
Winterthur’s Enchanted Woods is a fantastical place for kids to be kids. Their grownups love it, too.
At the time the Enchanted Woods children’s garden was created, not many visitors brought their children to Winterthur, so the garden staff set out to create a place especially for them. This was no easy task. The space would need to fit the history of the estate while meeting the high standards of Winterthur founder Henry Francis du Pont, whose garden designs are among the finest in the world.
More than two decades since it opened—and now hosting a second generation of visitors—Enchanted Woods stands as a masterwork of design and intent, a place where kids can be kids, but also a place where they and their grownups find great beauty.
“There are people there every day,” says Suzanne French, an interpretive horticulturist who manages Enchanted Woods.
When Enchanted Woods was conceived in the late 1990s, most children’s gardens were gardens in name only. They were essentially playgrounds, purpose-built places full of features decorated in primary colors.
The designers of Enchanted Woods wanted to create a true garden, a place that would delight and inspire, and they paid close attention to what children wanted: high spaces that offered a view, nooks to hide in, and water, water everywhere, all scaled to the size of a child.
The designers identified a site: three acres on Oak Hill that were flat and undeveloped, full of mature trees, an understory, azaleas, and some footpaths. The Quarry and Sundial gardens were near enough to encourage further exploration. There were restrooms in the vicinity, the area was served by the tram, and there was a tie to estate history: du Pont’s daughters played there as girls. Most important, French says, “We wouldn’t have been undoing any historical design that would have been important to H. F.”
The designers were also fortunate to have a store of objects and artifacts collected by four generations of preservationists. Old hairpin fencing and a feed trough from the Winterthur Farms, columns from a long-gone rose garden, stone benches, unused sculptures, urns, millstones, fenceposts, and stones from the original port cochère were all incorporated. “We had all these cool artifacts to use, and they tell a story,” French says.
As does the work and craftsmanship of Winterthur’s skilled arborists, carpenters, and painters, who maintain features such as a giant Bird’s Nest of large woven branches, which offers an elevated view of the garden and a labyrinth; the Tulip Tree House, fashioned from an upright hollow poplar trunk where kids can hide and seek; and the Faerie Cottage, a fantastical playhouse built with large wooden beams, a hearth and walls of stone, and a roof that was recently re-thatched in the traditional manner.
A small grove of tree stumps encourages athletic footwork. The mushrooms of the Forbidden Fairy Ring, also recently restored, spray cool vapor on hot days. Hidden among the azaleas, the giant face of the Green Man emerges from the earth. Story Stones, a fascinating assortment of stone architectural fragments, mimics nature with its spiral arrangement. A circle of columns forms the Acorn Tea Room, in keeping with the tradition of hospitality and entertaining at Winterthur. A small pond and footbridge hide dozens of green frogs, and the area teems with other small animals such as chipmunks and squirrels.
Free of references to such popular tales such as Snow White or Peter Rabbit, the garden feels timeless, a blank slate that children could paint with the full power of their imaginations. “We haven’t done the thinking for the kids,” French says. “They do all the make-believing on their own.”
“There is no other Enchanted Woods in the world,” French adds. “I visit children’s gardens everywhere. Ours is truly unique. It’s tied to the history of the estate, so it can’t be replicated. It is one of the best things we have done in the modern history of Winterthur.”
The effect of the design wasn’t lost on Olivia Kirkpatrick, even if she couldn’t articulate it at the time. Kirkpatrick was about five years old when started visiting the new Enchanted Woods. Playing there set her young imagination free and inspired her decision to major in landscape architecture at the University of Delaware. A Winterthur garden internship three years ago was the perfect way to learn more about garden maintenance and to think about design.
“We don’t think about it but every single space you enter is going to influence the way that you react to it,” says Kirkpatrick, a gardener for the historic Wister Rhododendron Collection at nearby Tyler Arboretum since 2019. “Whether you’re going in there as an adult or a child, it implores you to look at the world a little differently and interact with it a little differently. It encourages that playfulness and whimsy. Even now, I get so excited when I get to play around in the garden. It’s such a such a nice space. I still go there, and it has never stopped being exciting.”
In 1961, an unusual partnership was formed when one of the youngest First Ladies in American history, Jacqueline Kennedy, appointed a reserved octogenarian collector from Delaware, Henry Francis du Pont, to lead her project to restore the White House interiors. Du Pont brought credibility to Kennedy’s efforts and vision, and her enormous popularity lifted him onto the national stage and validated his life’s work. Together, they transformed the White House from a mere public residence into a museum, and along the way, they engaged with some of the most celebrated interior designers of the 20th century.
For the first time, the story of this historic partnership will be told at Winterthur, the inspiration for Mrs. Kennedy’s project. Through artifacts, archives, and images, this exhibition will invite visitors to experience the behind-the-scenes collaboration between the two during this captivating period in American history. Their partnership culminated in a televised tour of the White House, led by Jacqueline Kennedy, which became the most watched program in American history at that time. The former First Lady will forever be remembered as the person who restored history and beauty to the White House.
Their “restoration” of America’s most famous house became a history lesson for the country and awakened an interest in preservation and interior design that is still felt today.
Enhance Your Visit
Get the most of your visit to Winterthur with these activities, included with your General Admission ticket, which is good for two consecutive days!
Please note: Reservations are required for the guided and self-paced house tours. Guided exhibition tours take place in the exhibition in the galleries.
Take a guided exhibition tour and learn about the friendship between the First Lady and Henry Francis du Pont and their work to restore the White House. Available daily from 1:30-2:00 pm. Drop-in tour, reservations not required.
Take the house tour. Celebrate the Yuletide season with a one-of-a-kind holiday experience. Tour rooms in Henry Francis du Pont’s former home decorated in full holiday splendor. This year’s tour includes several trees inspired by Christmas trees seen at the White House, in conjunction with the exhibition. Many displays are inspired by the traditions and festivities of the season as enjoyed by du Pont and his family.
Enjoy Jackie-themed dining and shopping. Our exhibition pop-up store features items inspired by the White House restoration project and Jackie’s iconic sense of style. For even more unique home décor, gifts, jewelry, and more, visit the Museum Store in the Cottage. When you’re ready for lunch or a snack, get a taste of new items influenced by Jackie’s favorites in our Visitor Center Café.
Explore the galleries and garden. Take a stroll in the world-renowned 60-acre garden or explore one of our walking trails throughout the 1,000-acre estate. And, no visit is complete without our garden tram tour. Our guides share highlights of the garden and the history of Winterthur on this 30-minute narrated tour. Then, head inside to be inspired by the galleries, featuring two floors of the finest examples of American decorative arts.
At Winterthur, Jacqueline Kennedy found priceless treasures and a great deal of inspiration.
A True Tour de Force
Jacqueline Kennedy’s 1962 televised look inside the White House influenced a generation. It took some ...
Five Things You Never Knew About Jacqueline Kennedy
Here are a handful of fun facts about the First Lady.
This exhibition is supported, in part, by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. The Division promotes Delaware arts events on www.DelawareScene.com.
In its working days, Winterthur was large enough to field a baseball team—a team that, in its prime, dominated its league.
The 1920s birthed baseball legends. “Il Bambino” Babe Ruth consistently slammed 50 homers a season, Rube Foster organized the new Negro National League, and, during his career, Ty Cobb batted in runs at a rate that has never been matched.
America went crazy for the game, and Winterthur did too, fielding a team of gardeners, farmers, mechanics, carpenters, masons, painters, and others who worked on the vast estate. They played, according to guides Josh Horowitz and Tyler Johnson, purely out of love for the game.
Looking back during a year when a player lockout threatened the 2022 Major League Baseball season, it seems almost quaint.
“They played after work, five nights a week sometimes,” Tyler says. “It was a passion for them.”
Let’s go back.
In its heyday as a working dairy farm, Winterthur employed hundreds of people. Many of the families lived on the property, so there were easily enough men to form a team. Because some families lived here for two or three generations, sons often followed their brothers and fathers onto the team.
“Baseball was almost like a bonding experience because this was a company. It was a workforce. It was a community,” Josh says. “It’s almost like a local college team, I would say. It’s something that they could all do.”
There were two iterations of the Winterthur Tossers. “World War II is a nice way to cut them into part one and part two,” Tyler says. “Part one, they’re not truly in a league. However, they play teams from the Industrial League. We’re starting from 1926. Winterthur had baseball teams before this, but this is when they officially get uniforms and stuff.”
Part one is when Winterthur founder Henry Francis du Pont gave the Tossers the first of their three fields on the estate. The site of the first has never been identified, but it is known that it was “a little two wet for them,” Josh notes. The field then moved to a meadow on nearby Adams Dam Road, which cut across part of the property. That area is a golf course today.
The third location was on Thompson’s Bridge Road, then part of Winterthur, now part of Brandywine Creek State Park. That baseball diamond was protected by an electric cattle fence to keep members of Winterthur’s famed dairy herd from depositing cow pies on the field.
In addition to hosting teams from the Industrialist League, the Tossers also traveled to play on their competitors’ home fields in nearby Chadds Ford, Longwood, and Kennett Square in Pennsylvania, St. Barnabas Church and Kentmere in Wilmington, and Elk Mills in Maryland. The Tossers even had a clubhouse, where they held card games and bingo contests to raise money for their pin-striped uniforms.
World War II ended competition as players went off to fight overseas, but by 1948, the Tossers reformed and joined the Diamond State League, which included teams from Elsmere, Rockland, Hockessin, Yorklyn, and the public workhouse, or prison, at Prices Corner, where only a guard tower stands today over modern Little League fields.
“When they’re in the Diamond State Leagues, they’re darn good,” Tyler says. “In the first year, the men won 30 games and lost only two. And for two years in a row, outfielders Walter Heckman, Leonard Foulsham, and Ernie McCann were all chosen to play on the all-star team.”
The Tossers disbanded in the early 1950s, but in its prime, the team fielded players from at least two generations of three families: Lattomus, McCann, and Cash. Some of their recollections are recorded in oral histories made in the 1970s. Though they talked about the work life of the estate, they also spoke enthusiastically about baseball.
“It was a fairly good team for a group of ordinary guys working on a farm,” estate superintendent Howard Lattomus recalled in 1978. “They were crazy about baseball.”
At Winterthur, Jacqueline Kennedy found priceless treasures and a great deal of inspiration.
First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy had already invited Winterthur founder Henry Francis du Pont to chair her Fine Arts Committee for her historic restoration of the White House when she visited Winterthur in May 1961. What did she see here? Many of the same iconic objects and spaces visitors see today, and they are all worthy of a president’s home. Here’s a short list.
Silver Tankards by Paul Revere
The only known set of six matching silver tankards made by patriot Paul Revere Jr. has rested on a sideboard in the du Pont Dining Room since Winterthur became a museum in 1951. They are a special treasure even among Winterthur’s treasured silver collection. About 2,900 pieces are on view in the museum. Another 9,000 objects, mostly spoons, make up a reference collection of American silversmiths’ marks, an important resource for scholars and collectors. Other highlights of the collection include the first coins minted in Boston, the largest extant collection of British fused-plate lighting devices, and the Campbell’s collection of British, European and American soup tureens—though Mrs. Kennedy visited 35 years before the tureens entered the collection.
American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Negotiations with Great Britain
This painting by famed artist Benjamin West commemorates the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolution. It hangs near Revere’s tankards. Dated 1783-1819, it depicts American patriots John Jay (standing), John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Laurens (standing), and William Templeton Franklin, but not the British delegates. West, appointed historical painter to the king of England in 1772 and surveyor of the royal pictures in 1790, never completed the painting. It was sold as part of his estate in 1819. Du Pont purchased the painting from the J.P. Morgan collection in 1948. A second version, presumably finished by West’s studio, is in the collections of the U.S. Department of State.
Washington at Verplanck’s Point
Like “American Commissioners” the full name of this famous painting by John Trumbull is a mouthful: Washington at Verplanck’s Point New York, 1782 Reviewing the French Troops after the Victory at Yorktown. Made in 1790, it is perhaps the most famous of the many paintings of Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. Washington gave the fortunate Trumbull 14 sittings, perhaps because Trumbull’s father was a wartime governor and trusted friend of the general, perhaps because the painting was a gift from Trumbull to Martha Washington. It originally hung in the dining room of the Washingtons’ Mount Vernon home.
Chionodoxa “Glory-of-the-snow”-photo by Lois Mauro
Check these out:
Heavenly Hellebores: The Lenten roses (Helleborus species & hybrids) are blooming in white, pink spotted, pink, & wine red in the Greenhouse sunken garden, in front of The Cottage, along Winterhazel Walk, at the edge of the Pinetum and in the raised bed in the Museum East courtyard.
A blizzard of snowflakes: Spring snowflakes (Leucojum vernum) are carpeting the sices of the walkway to Icewell Terrace. They are blooming in less dramatic numbers in other parts of the gardens.
The blue carpet is rolling out: The Museum Upper Terrace lawn is carpeted with lavender blue glory-of-the-snow (Chionoodoxa forbesii) which are also found throughout the gardens. The royal blue of Siberian squill (Scilla siberica) is carpeting the lawn adjacent to the walk from Winterhazel Walk to Icewell Terrace and areas of Azalea Woods and the sunken garden in the Greenhouse area. They dot the lawn sloping from Garden Lane to the Museum & are found in many other areas of the garden.
Magnificent Magnolias: The southern magnolias (Magnolia grandiflora) along the Library wall are in full bloom this week. Stand nearby to enjoy their fragrance.
Hydrangeas: Hydrangeas are starting to bloom throughout the gardens with the greatest variety of species in Enchanted Woods.
Everywhere: But, listed only here:
The tiny white-to-pale-pink daisies of fleabane (Erigeron annuus) are blooming throughout the Estate.
White clover (Trifolium repens) in the fields and lawns is providing nectar and pollen for the pollinators and nitrogen for the soil.
Magnificent Magnolias: The southern magnolias (Magnolia grandiflora) along the Library wall are in full bloom this week. Stand nearby to enjoy their fragrance.
Hydrangeas: Hydrangeas – with both mophead/hortensia and lacecap flowers, including bigleaf (Hydrangea macrophylla), smooth (Hydrangea arborescens), oakleaf (Hydrangea quercifolia) and mountain (Hydrangea serrata) – are blooming throughout the gardens with the greatest variety of species in Enchanted Woods.
Everywhere: But, listed only here:
The tiny white-to-pale-pink daisies of fleabane (Erigeron annuus) are blooming throughout the Estate.
White clover (Trifolium repens) in the fields and lawns is providing nectar and pollen for the pollinators and nitrogen for the soil.
ENTRANCE DRIVE AND PARKING AREA
fb Asclepias syriaca (Common milkweed – lavender)
fb Catalpa bignonioides (Common catalpa – white)
fb Galium mollugo (Wild madder – white ‘clouds’ of tiny flowers)
Lovely Lilies: This week the martagon lilies (Lilium martagon) are at their peak in Azalea Woods, Enchanted Woods, and, lesser numbers, in other areas of the garden. Catch them now. Their bloom is brief but beautiful.
Sycamore Hill Roses: The white Meidiland rose (Rosa MEIvahn) is in full bloom at the Brick Overlook Folly, and, along the fence, palest pink ‘New Dawn’ rose (Rosa ‘New Dawn’, white ‘White Dawn’ rose (Rosa ‘White Dawn’) and bright red Winner’s Circle rose (Rosa ‘Radwin’) are also in full bloom. Along the fence, red large flowered climber rose (Rosa ‘Bess Lovett’) still has some flowers as does the damask rose hybrid Rosa ‘Pink Leda’ at the Bristol Folly.
Everywhere: But, listed only here:
The tiny white-to-pale-pink daisies of fleabane (Erigeron annuus) are blooming throughout the Estate.
White clover (Trifolium repens) in the fields and lawns is providing nectar and pollen for the pollinators and nitrogen for the soil.
