Photography By Ryan Hulvat
From its solid shipbuilding past and rambling Governors’ Walk to its trove of Victorian and colonial architecture, Milton, Delaware, tempts as Sussex County’s off-road treat, a warren of tranquility about 8 miles west of Lewes and 10 miles northwest of Rehoboth Beach.
“Milton’s typical of small-town America. It was a great town to grow up in,” says Tom King, owner of King’s Homemade Ice Cream on Union Street. “I remember Little League, parades, Boy Scouts, and church youth groups. Milton’s never had the atmosphere of Rehoboth Beach and Lewes and it’s still got old-town charm.
Mary Catherine Hopkins, another Miltonian and wife of former mayor Jack Hudson, agrees with King about Milton’s charm. Director since 1989 of the twenty-six thousand-volume Milton Public Library, she relishes her role as the town’s information gatekeeper.
“I’ve been hearing for twenty years that Milton’s going to become the next big place,” says King, now a Lewes resident whose late father, Earl, started King’s Homemade Ice Cream in 1972 with five flavors. (His mother, Wanda, still lives in Milton.) “It’s getting there but we’re definitely not booming. We’re seeing a lot more diversity in town and getting more and more second-home buyers from Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia.”
“We get lots of letters, phone calls, and visits from folks tracking down their ancestors and trying to find their old homesteads as well as from those just interested in learning about Milton and its history,” Hopkins says. This constant barrage resulted in a staff-compiled notebook of answers to the public’s most frequently asked questions about Milton.
“One person wanted to know the name of the first ship built in Milton,” remembers Hopkins. “It was the shallop, or open sailing vessel, Broad Kill, built in 1737, the first of 150 ships of various sizes built here through 1915. Another wanted to know the town’s elevation. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, Milton rises 25 to 30 feet from the river, which is at sea level.” Hopkins now is immersed in the library’s $2 million expansion that will add more than 10,000 square feet and an elevator to the original two-story structure, once a hardware store and pool hall.
“I’ve been promoting the town ever since I moved here in 1976,” says Don Post, a former vice president of the Milton Chamber of Commerce who owns Jailhouse Antiques. “I think the town has a lot of potential,” says this current president of the Milton Historical Society. “It’s pretty unscathed considering what’s happened in other Delaware towns. In some senses, we’ve been in a time warp.”
Slow Growth
That perception proved enormously appealing to Marcell and Karen Cheplicki, who four years ago packed up their lives in Pickney, Michigan, to follow their dream to Milton. “We deliberately opened a bed and breakfast here,” says Marcell. “We wanted a small, quiet town near the ocean and Milton was our answer. We liked the way people were friendly. It reminded us of Mayberry.”
Searching the Internet from Maine to Georgia, the Cheplickis first considered Rehoboth Beach. “It just didn’t have the character I was looking for, but it was close,” Marcell remembers. He and Karen arranged eight or nine scouting trips to the East before settling in Milton. “The last three or four times we were focusing on Sussex County,” recalls Marcell. “We fell in love with Milton. Pickney is similar to it in size and population but without the shipbuilding pastÑand we found just the right kind of house.”
“Milton’s coming alive,” says Chuck Wagner, a family practitioner whose voice is commonly heard in the mile-square hamlet of about 1,700. An avid balloonist, he got the town’s annual Hot Air Balloon Festival off the ground twelve years ago as a fund-raiser for the American Diabetes Association. This two-day June festival organized by Wagner, a former Army helicopter pilot, has raised big bucks for the Diabetes Association. “There are thirteen million people within 90 minutes of Milton, and the concept was to get the word out that we’re here. For the longest time, people would just drive by. Now they stop.”
As president of the nonprofit Milton Development Corporation, Wagner carries the torch to rekindle the screening of silent movies in town. The 1915 Milton Theatre, destroyed in a 1930s fire, was rebuilt in 1939 by the Milton Volunteer Fire Department and operated until a 1962 nor’easter blew the Broadkill into the building and lowered the curtain on the enterprise. The Elvis Presley hit Blue Hawaii was the last film shown in Milton.
“We want to bring this theater back to life and we want to preserve silent movies,” Wagner says. “We want to do something to get people downtown, but we can’t compete with the movieplex at the mall.”
Renovation of the two-story brick theater, purchased recently for $30,000 by the Milton Development Corporation, is expected to take two years and cost $1 million. According to Wagner, re-creation of a vintage malt shop in the building is the project’s first phase.
Future Glimpses
First settled in 1672 by English colonists, Milton was known by various names until 1807, when the educated community chose to honor the English poet John Milton. The town, with its advantageous location on the Broadkill River, was eastern Sussex County’s principal shipping center from 1740 until the late 1800s. Carpenters built nearly a dozen three-masted ships between 1850 and 1881. Many were so large they left Milton empty and only at high tide.
Economically, Milton shifted from its staple shipbuilding, lumber, and tannery industries of the nineteenth century to canneries and brick-, button-, and holly wreath-making businesses in the twentieth century. The advent of overland and rail transportation forced the town to drift away from water-based commerce and, in the process, watched its boat-building supremacy evaporate. More recently, a poultry plant, a cattle ranch, and a variety of small businesses have provided livelihoods.
Milton’s third-term mayor, John F. Bushey, past president of the local fire department, veteran of the Rehoboth Beach police department, and eighteen-year town councilman, moved to Milton from Kent County as a child. His outlook on Milton’s growth is pragmatic. “The town has a lot of potential to go places with proper planning,” he says. “We want to remain quiet yet grow. We want to have our cake and eat it, too.”
Businessman Tom Draper of Rehoboth Beach already has designs on Milton’s southeast corner. “Our plan,” he says, “is to transition the old Draper King Cole property, a cannery that closed in May 1998, from an industrial site to a neighborhood business and housing site.”
His proposed 147-acre “Cannery Village” will be Milton’s “first fully planned large development site,” says Draper. “It’s a multi-year project and will take five, ten, or more years to build.”
Last October, Draper, owner and president of Draper Communications, which owns and operates WBOC-TV in Salisbury, bought the soon-to-be-developed land from his father-in-law, Harry Bonk. “We didn’t want it to just sit there, like a big wart. There’s 600,000 square feet of existing buildings. We’ll take down a meaningful portion of that, retrofit some buildings, and wrap properly done housing around the area. Cannery Village will be historic town living. We want to tie in with the history and look of Milton.”
“Not everyone wants to live in an old house,” says Don Post, who favors housing developments like Draper’s. “They need to be planned and controlled and we need to consider signage and green space. We’ve got to have a good balance and blend of all elements here. It’s charming and historical, and it’s stayed that way. It’s small enough yet there’s room for everyone.”
Nancy E. Lynch, a Bethel, Delaware, native, is a frequent contributor to Delaware Today magazine and the News Journal. She also has worked with photographer Kevin Fleming on books about Delaware, and currently is working with him on a book on America.
