East Marlborough Township

West of here US I traverses East Marlboro Township, which, with Kennett, was the locale of Bayard Taylor's novel, The Story of Kennett. At 60.1 m. is a junction with an unmarked road.

Right (straight ahead) on this road to LONGWOOD GARDENS (open 11-5 Mon.-Fri.; free, except for organ recitals 1st and 3rd Sun.: adm. 50 cents), 1 m., on the 1,000-acre estate of Pierre S. duPont. Mainly devoted to farming, but having a nine-hole golf course, the estate is a community in itself; workers' families occupy 80 tenant houses on or near the tract.

The land was conveyed to George Pierce by William Penn in 1701; the Pierce family built a brick house here in 1730, in what was then known as Pierce's Park. The original structure is now part of the duPont residence. Two grandsons of Pierce assembled the trees and plants for the first gardens. Longwood received its present name from 'Long Woods,' as the section was known before the Civil War, when Negro slaves fleeing from the South found shelter in this station on the Underground Railroad (see Tour 8), which was supported by Quakers of Kennett Square, Hamorton, and Wilmington, Delaware.

In the gardens is the CIRCULAR CLOCK TOWER, surrounded by evergreens and flanked by fountains, with a lake in front; the clock chimes melodiously every IS minutes. A $1,500,000 conservatory (L), with 105,000 square feet under glass, houses a magnificent display of plants and flowers from every part of the world. In the AZALEA HOUSE are many varieties, ranging from pure white through shades of pink to crimson; many kinds of rhododendron and acacia are displayed. In a spacious lawn, spotted with huge clumps of boxwood, and bordered front and back with boxwood hedges, and on the sides with double rows of maple trees, is an ELECTRIC FOUNTAIN. Water from this flows down a flight of stone steps and divides to encircle a single boxwood bush, 35 feet in diameter and 12 feet high, one of the largest in the United States; more than two centuries old, it is valued at $2,000.

The OPEN AIR THEATER, which seats 2,200, makes use of a vine-covered stone wall as a backdrop; hemlocks, with two sides trimmed flat, serve as wings; closely spaced jets of water, rising six feet and rendered opaque by strong white lights from the wings, provide a curtain.

The WATER GARDEN, some distance beyond the theater, is patterned on the garden at the Villa Gamberaia, near Florence, Italy. Laid out on Pierre S. duPont's return from a visit to Italy in 1925, it consists of six pools, each with a fountain, in a rectangular lawn, bordered with fountains and trees; an observation platform occupies the position of the villa in the original garden. Four of the pools are rectangular except on the inner corners where they follow the curve of the central circular pool. The sixth pool lies at the farther end of the garden.

West of Longwood, US 1 traverses the most important mushroom-growing section in the United States. Within a to-mile radius some 700 growers raise more than 70 per cent of the Nation's 'snow apples,' as mushrooms are called in the trade. Commercial cultivation of mushrooms began in 1904 when Edward Jacob started growing them near West Chester. Success in mushroom production depends on proper lighting and heating; horse manure is heated to a temperature of 140 degrees to destroy germs, and is then bottled with mycelium cultures developed from spores. The resulting fertilizer is planted in beds of fresh manure.

Mushroom nurseries, many visible from the highway, are usually one-story buildings crowded with long rows of framework in several tiers, each supporting a growing-bed. The interior is dark, a requisite of mushroom cultivation; harvesters wear special head lamps. Much of the local crop is cooked, canned, and thus shipped to all parts of the United States.

The countryside along this stretch of the route glistens with hothouses in which tomatoes are grown.

Federal Writers Project, Works Progress Administration, 1940