The Three Bridges

Recent posts took us to two of the three 24 x 18 watercolor paintings I did for Nick Vouras in 2004.  Nick left the choice of three Wilmington scenes up to me.  The original Kozy Korner location at Delaware Ave and Washington St and Holy Trinity church were obvious choices. For the third painting I went to a more widely known Wilmington scene, the three bridges crossing the Brandywine at the north end of Brandywine Park.

The rear bridge, the Augustine Bridge, was built in 1883-85 by the Baltimore And Ohio railroad.  It eventually became inadequate for the heavier trains that the B&O had moved to, so the stone arch bridge in the center of our painting was built, opening in 1910.  In 1920 the abandoned B&O metal truss bridge was converted to a vehicular bridge.  The former B&O railroad has since become a component of the CSX rail line.

In the foreground is the pedestrian Swinging Bridge.  This bridge was built in 1910 by the Wilmington Parks Commission.  But there was an earlier Swinging Bridge where the stone arch railroad bridge now stands.  It was razed to make room for the new rail bridge   The older bridge, built in 1879 before there was a Brandywine Park, was constructed with private funding to accommodate workers walking to work at mills along the river. In the painting I inserted a small personal conceit, with my family transported back to about 1969 on the Swinging Bridge.

Researching this painting lead me to an interest in the other bridges on the Delaware section of the Brandywine.  In 2006 I painted small watercolors of all of them, including historic structures since replaced.  I digitally assembled these in a pictorial map of the Brandywine which I had printed as a poster.  (We'll visit the Bridges of the Brandywine in a future post.)  For that project I painted the three bridges using the same layout.

 Still later, in 2017, I shamelessly reused the same scene again for our Christmas card, changing the season to winter.