The Brandywine Valley Scenic Byway is a short drive with an outsized concentration of things to see. It runs about 36 miles from downtown Wilmington, Delaware, north across the Pennsylvania line toward West Chester, tracing the Brandywine Creek through a landscape the du Pont family spent a century turning into private estates, gardens, and museums.
The road itself, Kennett Pike, started as a turnpike built in 1811. Pierre S. du Pont bought it in 1919, paved and widened it, then sold it to the state of Delaware for a dollar — a small piece of how thoroughly this family shaped the valley.
What’s left behind is now open to visitors: Winterthur’s decorative arts collection, Longwood Gardens’ conservatories and fountains, and the Brandywine Museum of Art‘s galleries of Wyeth family paintings. Layered underneath is Revolutionary War history, since the British and Continental armies fought the Battle of Brandywine here in 1777.
It’s a byway built for a slower pace than most road trips on this site — less about covering miles, more about picking two or three stops and spending real time at each one.
Route Details: Brandywine Valley Scenic Byway
Brandywine Valley Scenic Byway starts at Rodney Square in downtown Wilmington, a public square framed by the Hotel du Pont and the New Castle County Courthouse. From here the route heads north out of the city center on Route 52, passing late-19th-century churches — Holy Trinity Episcopal, Westminster Presbyterian, the Swedenborgian Church of the Holy City — and early planned neighborhoods including Wawaset Park and Kentmere Parkway, the latter designed by Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm.
Rockford Park and the Highlands (2 miles)
Just north of downtown, the route skirts Rockford Park and the Highlands neighborhood before the city gives way to open country estate land. The transition is fast: within a couple of miles, Wilmington’s rowhouse streets turn into the wooded, walled grounds that define the rest of the drive.
Winterthur (6 miles)
Winterthur was Henry Francis du Pont’s country estate before it became a museum. The house holds the largest collection of American decorative arts in the country, close to 90,000 objects spanning 1640 to 1860, and the surrounding 60-acre garden includes the Enchanted Woods, a children’s garden built around a fairy-tale theme with a hollow tree house. The museum sits right on Kennett Pike, making it the easiest stop on the byway to work into a short trip.
Montchanin and the Hagley Museum area (8 miles)
The parallel leg of the byway, Montchanin Road (Route 100), runs through the former du Pont company town of Montchanin, now a cluster of restored 19th-century worker housing converted into an inn and shops. This corridor sits close to the original du Pont black powder mills along the Brandywine, the industrial core that built the family’s fortune before Winterthur or Longwood existed.
Delaware–Pennsylvania state line (9.5 miles)
At the state line, Delaware’s Route 52 becomes Pennsylvania’s Route 52, and the byway designation continues north as the Brandywine Valley Scenic Byway (PA), which received its own National Scenic Byway status in 2021. The two segments together were planned as a single 36-mile bi-state route, though they were built and designated years apart.
Chadds Ford (17 miles)
Chadds Ford sits at the heart of the Pennsylvania side of the valley. The Brandywine Museum of Art, housed in a converted 19th-century gristmill on the Brandywine Creek, holds the country’s largest public collection of work by N.C., Andrew, and Jamie Wyeth, along with a broader collection of American illustration and landscape painting. A short detour off Route 1 leads to the Brandywine Battlefield, where Washington’s forces fought and lost to the British on September 11, 1777, in the largest single-day battle of the Revolutionary War.
Kennett Square and Longwood Gardens (22 miles)
Kennett Square, a small town built on the mushroom-farming industry, sits just south of Longwood Gardens, Pierre du Pont’s other legacy. He bought the original farm here in 1906; it’s now a 1,100-acre garden with a domed conservatory, an organ with over 10,000 pipes, and fountain displays that run into the evening during peak season. The town itself has a walkable main street with restaurants that draw a steady stream of garden visitors for lunch or dinner.
West Chester (36 miles)
The byway’s northern end runs into West Chester, the Chester County seat, known for a dense downtown of 19th-century architecture and a courthouse square built around the county’s Quaker and abolitionist history — several local meetinghouses split over anti-slavery activism in the 1850s and became early centers of the reform movement. It’s a natural place to end the drive, with enough restaurants and shops to close out a day trip on foot.
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