Photography By Vince Lupo
Once the wooden rowboat is lashed atop her station wagon and the bicycles racked behind husband Craig’s sedan, Kathy Ulman is ready to caravan to Lewes, Delaware, for the family’s summer vacation. The couple’s children, Preston and Libby, each accompany a parent on the three-hour annual August pilgrimage from their home in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
“It’s not a pretty sight, but it’s our ritual. Two vehicles, the boat-that’s a must because Craig’s father made it for him-bikes, beach chairs, and bags of food. I even bring my own dishes.
We know the routine-this is our fifteenth summer,” Ulman says cheerfully. Undaunted, the Ulmans are perennial renters. “Lewes is a wonderful, friendly, family place. There’s no boardwalk, no honky-tonk,” says Craig Ulman. “I think the big sell in Lewes is its incredible beach. It’s safe and great for children.” Adds Kathy, “We’re on our fourth or fifth house and usually rent on Cedar Avenue or Bay Avenue near Lewes Beach. We stay three weeks, and it’s a very simple, pleasant life, a relief from the rat race in Washington.”
Howard and Elaine Fugate of Du Bois, Pennsylvania, reached the same conclusion about Lewes. “We’ve been going down there at least fifteen years,” says Howard, an internist and patriarch of a family of five children, seventeen grandchildren, and four great grandchildren. “Our children usually come in shifts, but this year we’re renting three houses because they’re all coming."Convenient access to Lewes Beach that laps Delaware Bay is a big draw for him. “I’m an old lifeguard from the New Jersey shore and this is a safe beach. We don’t worry about the grandchildren. And, during the week, if five or six people are on the beach, that’s a lot. It’s like having your own private beach.”
Beach Options
The Fugates and the Ulmans aren’t alone in choosing Lewes as their summer destination. About 300,000 people annually visit Delaware’s oldest city and deposit $14 million into the local economy. “We’re very, very family-oriented and people in this town are very friendly and very neighborly-like. Visitors feel relaxed when they come here,” says Lewes Mayor George H. P. Smith, a retired educator and life resident. “We don’t have night spots which makes us quieter, a certain amount of history remains, and Lewes is a nice walking town,” he says of the city’s approximately 6 square miles."Lewes is appealing because it’s a real town. It’s quaint and it’s not fabricated,” adds Betsy Reamer, executive director of the Lewes Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Center. “We don’t have a boardwalk but we have two waterfront options, the Delaware Bay beach without waves and Cape Henlopen State Park with ocean beaches.” With more than 4,000 acres, Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware’s largest park, offers public access to fishing, camping, hiking, birding, and swimming. The park’s Seaside Nature Center provides year-round marine displays, environmental education programs, and recreational activities. The 80-foot Great Dune and World War II observation towers, also within the park, are popular draws. Awash in history, Cape Henlopen’s spit of geography, strategically located between the Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, stands prominent in Lewes’s military and seafaring past. Native Americans inhabited the area centuries before Englishman Henry Hudson sailed there in 1609 and Cape Henlopen was on active duty during World War II as Fort Miles, an Army base charged with protecting the vital shipping lanes of the Delaware Bay and Delaware River.
Historic Lewes
“We play up the historic aspect of Lewes, known as the ‘First Town in the First State,’ settled by the Dutch in 1631,” Reamer says. “There’s a whole historic tourism linked to people retiring early who seek out places like Lewes.” The active 600-member Lewes Historical Society safeguards the city’s multi- national heritage and oversees the 3-acre historic complex at Third and Shipcarpenter streets."Our mission,” says Historical Society president George Elliott, “is to preserve and interpret our history through buildings and architecture for future generations.” The society administers ten sites, including the 1665 Ryves Holt House, said to be Delaware’s oldest. Reamer’s office is in the circa-1730 Fisher-Martin House behind the Zwaanendael Museum.
“In Lewes, everything’s so confined you can take a short walk and enjoy the historic spread in a small area. There’s so much history here,” says local historian and author Hazel Brittingham. Her popular book, Lantern on Lewes, published in 1998, is a compilation of articles she wrote for area newspapers and magazines. “I have an embarrassment of riches in terms of resources I’ve collected over the years,” she confides. “There’s a great deal of interest in information on Lewes but not that many resources. I have a very good library and average five calls a week on general topics and genealogy.” When visitors knock, Brittingham’s ready with material piled on a card table in her living room."In addition to our history,” Reamer continues, “our unique attractions include the Zwaanendael Museum, six art galleries, antique and boutique shops, and the Cape May-Lewes Ferry. We really are a year-round community with the Cape Henlopen School District, the University of Delaware’s College of Marine Studies, the Academy of Lifelong Learning, the Lewes Public Library, the Beebe Medical Center, and industries like Lewes Dairy, Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, and Nassau Valley Vineyards.”
Popular but Peaceful
Reamer points out that Parenting magazine ranked Lewes “one of 10 great places to raise a family” in its May, 1997 issue. Lewes also has received media attention from The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. Year-round population is about twenty-five hundred Reamer says, but swells to a daily average of seven thousand to ten thousand from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day, the city’s peak visiting season.The chamber’s publication of twenty-five thousand promotional brochures also widens the net about Lewes. Inquiries from the chamber’s Internet Web site are up 100 percent, Reamer says. “We’re getting more interest from New England because we’re sort of undiscovered."According to the Delaware Tourism Office, however, Lewes is the state’s third most-visited resort, tallying a total of 299,000 tourists annually and providing a big boost to tourism, widely regarded as Delaware’s second largest industry.
Bounded by four bays and the Atlantic Ocean, the state’s Sussex County beaches each year attract more than 2.3 million vacationers who slather a tasty $300 million on the First State’s economic pie. Flexing 20 miles, from Lewes to Fenwick Island, and including Rehoboth Beach, Dewey Beach, Bethany Beach, and South Bethany, Delaware beaches are big business-preferred places in the sun that showcase pristine oceanfront, inland bays, state parks, and tax-free shopping. And next to beaches and tax-free shopping, accessibility ranks high with visitors. Delaware beaches are within driving distance of Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, which are home to approximately 18 percent of the country’s population. “Lewes still remains a fishing village with a number of people making their living from operating charter boats, head boats, and whale- and dolphin-watching cruises,” Reamer adds. “In the late afternoon when the boats come in, people go to the docks and watch the fish being unloaded.” Lewes honors its fishing industry the first Sunday in May with the Blessing of the Fleet at Fisherman’s Wharf.
Rehoboth and Bethany Beach
Of the six resorts, Rehoboth Beach is the top destination, with more than 1.2 million visitors annually. Bethany Beach is second with about 400,000. Shoulder-season events-those hugging the prime summer months-are an increasing draw according to Keia Benefield, Delaware Tourism Office director. The Sea Witch Fall Festival, Rehoboth Film Festival, and Autumn Jazz Festival in Rehoboth Beach; Boast the Coast and Coast Day in Lewes; and the Boardwalk Arts Festival in Bethany Beach top the list."We’re all different,” Reamer says of Delaware’s resorts. “Each of the beaches has its own distinct characteristics and each in their marketing plays to their strengths. Rehoboth has the boardwalk and Bethany and Fenwick are the ‘Quiet Resorts.’ We all have such close proximity that most people who come down in the summer don’t stay in one place.” Fugate agrees: “One night out of each week we’re in Lewes we’ll go to Rehoboth with the grandchildren. They like the boardwalk and the games at Funland and they have to eat Grotto Pizza. We used to go to Rehoboth with our children when they were little but it became more and more crowded. So we tried Lewes.”
Retiring Atmosphere
“Another aspect of Lewes, Reamer says, “is people come here as visitors, fall in love with the town, and then move down as retirees.” Or entrepreneurs. Or both.
When Hope Tyler’s husband Mike took early retirement from the DuPont Co. in 1992, the couple sold their northern Delaware home, moved to Lewes, and opened the Wild Swan Inn on Kings Highway early the next year. They never looked back.
“Lewes offers the best to both of us,” Hope Tyler says. “We’re close enough to the beach but we’re not a beach house.” From their turn-of-the-century Queen Anne Victorian, they let three rooms with private baths. “Lewes was originally ‘Zwaanendael’ or ‘Valley of the Swans.’ We saw a picture of the H.M.S.Wild Swan in a book of British warships and decided the name was appropriate.” Today, all manner of swans accent the Tylers’ two-story pink painted lady, one of nearly a dozen bed and breakfasts in Lewes. A crystal swan chandelier graces the parlor; Mike carves a honeydew-melon swan centerpiece for their guests’ breakfast table. “We like historic things and we like old. Lewes is a folksy kind of place and a very nice community to be part of,” says Tyler, who encourages guests to patronize nearby restaurants-the Buttery, the Rose & Crown, La Rosa Negra, Second Street Grille, Gilligan’s, the Lighthouse, the Aurora Grill, and Irish Eyes-catering to all palates and purses.
Other Lewes relocaters include Baltimore professionals Sally Packard and Dinah Reath who had vacationed in Lewes since 1993. “We’d been coming over every weekend and found it harder and harder to leave Monday mornings. We were burned out with our work back in Baltimore and decided we wanted a fresh start. We also wanted to be part of a small community so now we live here and love it here,” Packard says.
Place to Create
Packard, a former social worker and psychotherapist, and Reath, who worked with cancer patients, moved to Lewes permanently in 1998 and opened the upscale Edward Carter Gallery at the Inn at Canal Square last November. Devoted solely to selling fine art photography, the gallery has been well-received."Opening this gallery was a dream come true,” says Packard. “The challenge for most of us in our 50s is to find a direction for our lives. We wanted to keep our minds busy and meet people. For us right now, this is a wonderful thing to be doing.” To promote Lewes as the “Art Capital of Southern Delaware,” Packard and Reath organized the first Lewes Art Loop in May and plan an encore event on September 16 featuring the city’s diverse galleries: the Saxon Swan, the Stepping Stone, Cape Artists, Animation Art Gallery, and Peninsula Art Gallery, as well as the Edward Carter Gallery.
“People don’t have to go back to the big cities for art. It’s right here at the beach. We have the Cape Henlopen Theater Project, Coastal Concerts, and the galleries. We just have to work a little harder to promote Lewes as an art destination,” Packard says.
“We initially found Lewes because we kept going to Rehoboth Beach,” she recalls. “But Lewes has a very different feel from Rehoboth and has the sense of a stable, year-round community. We have a great lifestyle here. We walk or ride our bicycles to work. Don’t tell too many people. We’re very lucky.” Model ship builder Steve Rogers seconds Packard: “My wife Patricia, a fiber artist, and I had a golden opportunity to rent a house on Second Street, a block back from the [Lewes & Rehoboth] canal. We woke up at 8:00 a.m. and watched the head boats go out,” remembers the former Milford resident. “We kept our eyes open. We knew we loved Lewes and wanted to live here.”
In 1994, they bought a derelict grocery store at the corner of Market and Church streets and rehabbed it as their home, studios, and gallery. “I love what I do,” he says. “Building model ships has been my hobby all my life. About ten years ago I started doing it full-time with Chesapeake Bay models, like skipjacks and patent-tong rigs. Now I do lobster and menhaden boats-boats common to both the bay and Lewes.” His pine models command up to $10,000.
“Lewes is a small town and everybody knows everybody. It’s an eclectic mix of very interesting people-we have a professor of philosophy at Bryn Mawr [College], the retired secretary of the U.S. Senate, and golden-parachute DuPonters,” says Rogers.
Lifetime resident Hazel Brittingham has her own take. “I was born here, and I’m an oddity for sure,” she says. “We look at all our new residents as ‘come-heres.’ I have a small-town soul and Lewes has been a wonderful place to grow up in but it certainly has changed.”
Howard Fugate once considered moving his medical practice from Du Bois, a former lumber town of 15,000 in western Pennsylvania, to Lewes permanently. “We decided there was too much to leave behind,” he says. “We love small towns and in Lewes we’re away from the hustle and bustle. As soon as I get on Savannah Road, all my troubles are behind me.”
“For us, the bad news is my husband never bought a house in Lewes,” laments Ulman, who summered in Bethany Beach as a child. “We’ve introduced friends to Lewes and lured them away from Rehoboth. Lewes is quieter, friendly, and a town in its own right. And every face you see isn’t from Washington. Yet.” Nancy E. Lynch, who lives in Bethel Delaware, is a freelance writer who contributes frequently to Delaware Today magazine. Nancy recently completed a trilogy on Delaware’s counties with photographer Kevin Fleming; The Beaches of Delaware and Historic Sussex County, The Colors of Kent, and Town and Country New Castle.
Lewes Galleries
Animation Art Gallery
142 Second Street
Lewes, DE
302-645-8097
http://www.animationartlewes.com
Cape Artists
110 West Third Street
Lewes, DE
302-644-7733
Edward Carter Gallery
Inn at Canal Square
122 Market Street
Lewes, DE
302-644-7513
http://www.edwardcartergallery.com
Peninsula Art Gallery
520 Savannah Road
Lewes, DE
302-645-0551
The Saxon Swan
101 Second Street
Lewes, DE
302-645-7488
The Stepping Stone
107 West Market Street
Lewes, DE
302-645-1254
Delaware Shore Data
Beebe Medical Center
424 Savannah Rd.
Lewes, DE
302 645-3300
http://www.beebemed.org
Bethany-Fenwick Area Chamber of Commerce
P.O. Box 1450
Bethany Beach, DE
800-962-7873
http://www.bethany-fenwick.org
Cape Henlopen State Park
42 Henlopen Dr.
Lewes, DE
302-645-8983
http://www.destateparks.com
Delaware Tourism Office
99 Kings Highway
Dover, DE
302-739-4271
http://www.state.de.us
Lewes Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Center
120 Kings Hwy.
Lewes, DE
302-645-8073
http://www.leweschamber.com
Lewes Historical Society
110 Shipcarpenter Street
Lewes, DE
302-645-7670
Lewes Public Library
111 Adams Avenue
Lewes, DE
302-645-2733
Rehoboth/Dewey Beach Area Chamber of Commerce
P.O. Box 216
501 Rehoboth Ave.
Rehoboth Beach, DE
302-227-2233
http://www.beach-fun.com
Steve Rogers
Model Ship Builder
302-645-9030
Wild Swan Inn
Kings Highway
Lewes, DE
302-645-8550
Zwaanendael Museum
Savannah Road & Kings Highway
Lewes, DE
302-645-1148
