Milford chronicle., 1923-04-06
DELAWARE ASPIRES TO THE MILLENNIUM
The Material Aid Of Pierre du POnt Facilitates Education And
Social Betterment.
By EDWARD N. vA11AND1eHAM in Vogue of March Issue

edward N. Vallandigham. writer of the
appended article, now of Chestnut Hill
Mass, and formerly of Newark, Del, is 6
nationally-known journalist. He was, al
one time, editor of Every Evening anG
also held the chair of English at Della
ware, College, now the University Of
Delaware.)
Had you millions more than would
serve your utmost personal needs
crafty your most luxurious tastes
permit the indulgence of your widest
fads and fancies, what would you dc
with the surplus? Edgar Allan Poe's
imaginary half-billionaire created
"The Domain of Arnheim." You may
read the tale of that vast and glorious
pleasance in what remains after more
than two generations the most dis
tinguished piece of sustained descrip-
ton in American literature. Poe sup
posed he had invented the impossible
in his half-billionaire. But since POe's
time, the impossible has been realized
in American industrial life, and many
a man of millions has sought to Gre
ate for himself an earthly paradise,
though perhaps none has himself pos
sessed or been able to hire construc-
tive imagination capable of conceiV-
ing another Utopian retreat such as
the Domain of Arnheim."
Pierre du Pont, of Delaware, al
though not a half-billionaire, might
have constructed something like Poe's
imagined pleasure place, but he has
chosen rather the more audacious and
difficult task of giving millions to the
idealistic attempt of placing the little
State of Delaware in the very fore
front of American cOmmOnwealths as
regards education, sanitation, public
safety, Americanization - in word,
civilization.
To grasp the audacity and difficulty
of this undertaking, one must know
something of the community thus
made the subject of an experiment
hitherto uninterrupted. Delaware has
rather less than quarter of a million
inhabitants, living upon about two
thousand square miles, half of them in
the sole considerable city, Wilmington.
No other place has quite five thousand
inhabitants. Delaware is ninety-siX
miles long, thirty-six miles at its
widest (along the southern boundary,
and nine miles at the narroWest. AL
most half the area of Delaware lies in
Sussex, the most southerly of the
three counties, which is nearly as
large as Rhode Island and has about
one-tenth of Rhode Islands popula-
tion. Kent county and rural New Cas-
tie county are also rather thinly peo-
pied, and, like Sussex, mainly agricul-
tural.
OF Delaware's whites, which COM
prise all but about thirty thousand of
the whole population, more than nine
tenths are natives of the soil, most of
them descended in one or more lines
from immigrants Of the mid-seven-
teenth or early eighteenth century.
Nearly all families in Delaware are
old families. The du Points, from the
Delaware point of view, are mere up
starts, having come from France bare
ly a century and quarter ago. Rural
Delaware is not so much a community,
as a large family. Folk of all sorts are
of the same mixed blood-English,
Welsh, Swedish, Finnish, French,
Dutch, from intermarriage through
generations and centuries. Such So
ciety is relatively static. All over the
state, townships are called hundreds
a name and thing older than the An
glO-saxon settlement of Engand more
than fifteen hundred years ago.
Such a community is naturally con-
servative, clinging tenaciously to its
customs and traditions. The pillory
has ceased to be a part of criminal
punitive apparatus, but the whipping
post survives. There are few villages
in Delaware which a negro may not
enter after sunset. Men, and more es-
pecially women, have long memories;
they are apt to know a neighbor's
pedigree back at least to the Colonial
period. They can guess a mans coun-
try, perhaps even his hundred" by
his family name. They boast that Del
aware is half a century older in Euro
pean civilization than Pennsylvania
and are proud that their militia marcn
Immediately behind the regulars" at
the Inauguration of President, be-
cause Delaware was the first state to
enter the Union, by being the first to
adopt the Constitution.