Kennett Pike is one of Delaware’s most interesting roads.

Its history can be traced with dramatic accuracy, including its birth and death as a toll road (Jan. 21, 1811-April 30, 1919) and its birth as a modern highway (June 12, 1920).

Its history also led to its beauty. “Between 1918 and 1920, du Pont family members and their respective business interests owned 48% of the road’s Delaware frontage, by default halting the suburbanization experienced by many other areas of northern New Castle County,” Andrew D. Engel wrote in “Along Route 52: Delaware’s Historic Kennett Pike.”

Much of its beauty and its modernization comes Pierre S. du Pont, who gave elms, sycamores and oaks to landowners along Route 52. He also converted it from a narrow turnpike to a wide highway, incorporating restrictions on billboards and the like.

That history and beauty are a big part of the Brandywine Valley National Scenic Byway, which also includes Route 100, from its intersection with Kennett Pike to the Pennsylvania line, plus parts of Pennsylvania Avenue, Delaware Avenue and West 11th Street that take Route 52 to Rodney Square.

Forbes magazine in 2013 named the byway “one of the top national 10 scenic byways in America,” said John R. Danzeisen, a Centreville resident, president of the Kennett Pike Association and co-chair of the Brandywine Valley National Scenic Byway Partnership. “It is indeed a treasure.”

Trail, turnpike, highway

Kennett Pike follows a ridge between Red Clay Creek and the Brandywine. “Generations followed the footpath between the water and the hills,” Carla Lucas wrote in Kennett Today in 2010. “As Europeans settled the region, a single-track dirt road roughly followed the well-worn footpath.”

In 1811, the Delaware Legislature chartered three toll rolls from Wilmington into Pennsylvania: the Kennett Turnpike; the Wilmington, Concordville and West Chester Turnpike; and the Newport, Gap and Lancaster Pike, the Kennett Pike Association wrote on kennettpike.com/History.shtml.

State leaders realized the importance of Kennett Pike in setting a 100-foot right of way, even though only 20 feet was initially developed, wrote Engel, a former staff member at Hagley. The road took several years and $30,000 to build. Tolls varied by type of vehicle and cargo, with free travel to houses of worship and funerals. The locations of the tollbooths varied, too.

The Kennett Turnpike was favored over the other two, “partly because its grades were gentler and there were no significant creeks to ford, partly because the thriving village of Centreville (established in 1750) provided overnight hotel, tavern and post office facilities an easy day’s drive to tidewater at Wilmington, and finally because a tavern was always in sight between Centreville and Wilmington,” the association wrote.

The early part of the 19th century was prime time for toll roads, William Francis wrote in “Along the Kirkwood Highway.” From 1808 to 1821, privately run turnpikes also opened from the Wilmington area to Philadelphia and Frenchtown, Maryland. “Tollgates were originally a long pole or ‘pike’ that crossed the road and blocked the traveler from proceeding,” he wrote. “When the toll was paid, the gatekeeper ‘turned’ the pike upwards, thus the name turnpike.’ ”

The Kennett Turnpike lost its tolls because either toll roads had lost out to railroads (the association) or Pierre S. du Pont, a regular traveler between the Wilmington headquarters of the DuPont Co. and his estate at Longwood, decided it should be modernized (Engel). Or both.

What Pierre S. du Pont wrought

Du Pont bought out the turnpike’s shareholders (paying them double par value), “assumed $10,000 accumulated debt, widened the pike fully to its chartered 100 feet by obtaining necessary deeds from adjacent land holders, paved its two lanes at his own expense and in 1920 transferred it, in toto, to the State for a token consideration of one dollar,” the association wrote. The construction cost $764,000.

He had help. Relatives relatively quickly sold their shares in the turnpike (his cousin, Henry A., owned half of them) and agreed to the right of way. DuPont Co. engineers designed the road.

The transfer prohibited advertising signs “without receiving the consent of each and every property owner along its entire length,” the association wrote. Sycamores he planted were nicknamed “Alice’s string of pearls” because they represented the pearl necklace he didn’t give his wife, Alice.

The association was founded in 1957 to “preserve, protect and beautify” Route 52 and Route 100/Montchanin Road, Danzeisen said. Its membership includes 300 families, 50 businesses and 13 sponsors for the median landscaping in Greenville.

One big emphasis for the association is working with developers – “We’re not anti-development,” he said – so that new buildings “don’t interfere with the intrinsic qualities of the byway, which are historic, scenic, architectural and cultural.” One big way that occurs is by encouraging development setbacks of 50 to 100 feet from the roadway.

County ordinance extends protection

After seven years of work, the association and its allies convinced New Castle County in 2022 to adopt an ordinance to perpetuate the beauty for a 660-foot setback along the sides of the Brandywine byway and the three other byways others recognized the by county.

The law does many things in its 23 pages, including reducing parking requirements, limiting building height and signage, enhancing landscaping requirements, encouraging underground utility lines, recommending setbacks and requiring “a Viewshed Plan for all development subject to the scenic corridor standards,” according to a summary of the law.

Following some overly zealous tree-trimming by Delmarva Power, the association has also established an agreement that the association will sign off on future tree-trimming by the utility.

Kennett Pike and Route 100 were designated the Brandywine Valley Scenic Byway in 2005, with the Pennsylvania section following in 2021.

The byway guide highlights attractions in seven areas – history, horticulture, art, Americana, antiques, pristine estates and scientific discovery – and it’s important to realize all seven are part of the legacy of du Pont family members and the DuPont Co. Of course, these legacies go beyond the road to nearby institutions like Hagley, Winterthur and the Delaware Museum and Nature and Science out in the county and more spots in Wilmington city limits, plus Pennsylvania icons like Longwood Gardens, the Brandywine River Museum and the Brandywine Conservancy.

Also in 2005, 28 scenic secondary roads to the west of Centreville, some touching Kennett Pike, were designated the Red Clay Valley Scenic Byway.

And in 2010, Kennett Pike was designated part of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway, showcasing how she and abolitionists like Thomas Garrett favored the route to lead “more than 3,000 Freedom Seekers through Delaware,” Delaware Greenways writes.

Adjusting to change

“The work of the byway is to understand that change will happen,” said Mary Roth, executive director of Delaware Greenways, a nonprofit providing leadership to the Brandywine Valley National Scenic Byway Partnership. “We work alongside landowners and agencies to preserve those intrinsic qualities.” The byway’s 2019 corridor management plan calls them the “roadside character left to us by the du Ponts.” For example, it worked the Delaware Department of Transportation for a “context-sensitive” reconstruction of the intersection with Route 82.

That management plan calls for encouraging pedestrian and bicycle use of the byway (common, but not as safe as Roth would like) through “context-sensitive” pathways, not sidewalks.

Also a concern: encouraging adoptive reuse of old houses whose size – living rooms that are 30 by 40 feet are not uncommon in Chateau Country – are uneconomical to maintain.

Some ideas have remained just that. A 2016 Greenville Village Special Area plan calls for transforming “five suburban style shopping centers” into a “village center design with a central gathering place.”

The 2019 plan cites average daily traffic on Kennett Pike of 12,000 to 17,000, the heaviest between Hillside Road and Route 141. And if traffic continues to increase at the rate it was increasing between 2006 and 2015, “the carrying capacity of Kennett Pike will be exceeded in Centreville by 2035.”

So would there be a suggestion to widen to accommodate growth? Considering its history, the road is likely to remain essentially the way it is. “I wish Pierre had widened it to 150 feet, because it’s a single lane in each direction,” Danzeisen said. “It gets backed up during rush hour, but there will be a lot of resistance to widening it. There’s too much community support to leaving it just the way it is.”