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The Winterthur Estate Museum
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11164 |
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LIFE
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| Issue
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3 / 1986 |
1,850 Words |
| Author
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Dick Gould
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One time warp actually exists.
As generations of fiction writers have fantasized, there really is one place in this world where it is quite possible to transcend, perceptually at least, the natural barriers of time and space, to "be in one place while actually in another," to move at will from one era to another.
Access to this time warp is hidden away in an old country estate in the valley of the Brandywine River where it flows from Pennsylvania into Delaware. There is a reception center from which jitney buses shuttle modern visitors to a neutral zone where a staff of specially trained guides greet them and escort them through all or any part of the first two centuries of American cultural development, describing, explaining, and answering visitor's questions as they go.
As easily as stepping over a series of doorsills, tourists, amateur and professional historians, connoisseurs of antique furnishings, builders interested in historic renovation or replication--virtually anyone--can stroll casually from the dwelling room of a Shaker home in New Hampshire in the early 1700s, to the common room of a Delaware tavern of the early 1800s, to the dining room of one of the mansions along Broad Street in Pre-Civil War Charleston, South Carolina.
And it's all real, the original items, in a near-perfect state of historic preservation. There is a free-hanging staircase of a North Carolina home said to have been built in 1822. The design is said to have been copied from a book published in London in 1792, but it still boggles the minds of woodjoiners both amateur and professional. There is interior woodwork ranging all the way form the wide-planked floors and exposed hand-hewn beams of seventeenth century Puritan New England to the ornate hand-carved moldings of the South's antebellum plantation mansions. There's furniture ranging in style from Shaker simplicity to Chinese Chippendale, curtains designed by Phillipe de La Salle, the famed French textile designer who was employed by Louis XVI, a matched set of silver tankards made by Paul Revere, a sixty-six-piece set of china dinnerware made for George Washington and bearing the emblem of the Order of the Cincinnati.
Though a bit off the beaten track, especially when compared to most other cultural institutions, it really isn't hard to find. It's clearly marked on almost every Delaware map and on most of the regional road maps. The only "secret" one needs to know is that it is popularly known as Winterhur (pronounced winter-toor).
For a time the ancestral home of three generations of one branch of Delaware's noted family of industrialists, the du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. is in its thirty-fifth year as a public institution and it is gradually acquiring an international reputation as the finest collection of American decorative arts of the periods between 1640 and 1840.
Doubtlessly, Winterthur is one of the two stellar attractions of the Brandywine Valley's consortium of nine museums and historic attractions which provide a more comprehensive overview of the American culture than can be found in any other place.
Winterthur, seen from the outside, is impressive in its size but otherwise
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