Thomas Lea House

In 1770, a decade after the first overshot mills were begun on the south bank of the Brandywine, James Marshall excavated a millrace on the north. With the granite thus made available he built this five-bay, two-story Georgian house, which Thomas Lea, prominent miller and banker, bought in 1785. It survives as the oldest dwelling in the vicinity, emblematic of the prosperity that water-powered industrialization brought. Old Brandywine Village, Inc., was organized to buy the threatened structure in 1963. The group undertook a restoration in which nineteenth-century accretions—fully half of the building—were demolished and interiors were returned to a colonial appearance. Original partition walls were identified by ghost-marks on the floors. The old exterior doorframe was discovered beneath one from 1830. In a then-pioneering preservation strategy, adaptive reuse, the house was turned over to the Junior League of Wilmington in 1965 as a headquarters. The house has variously been known as the Lea-Derickson House and the Harvey-Derickson-Bringhurst House.