New Castle's Cobblestones: A Colonial Town Frozen in Time

Just a short drive from Wilmington's glass office towers, the town of New Castle offers a startling change of scale and century. Its cobblestone streets, brick sidewalks, and colonial-era houses have survived largely intact, giving the town the feel of a place that history simply forgot to modernize.

The preservation was partly luck. When the railroads and industry that transformed other towns bypassed New Castle, the neglect that followed inadvertently spared its historic core, freezing a colonial streetscape that development would otherwise have swept away.

Today that accident of history is the town's greatest asset. The Green, laid out in the seventeenth century, still anchors the town, and the surrounding houses — many still private homes — form one of the most complete colonial ensembles on the East Coast.

For visitors, New Castle is a reminder of how much of the past can survive when a place is left alone long enough. A few miles from a modern financial center, an eighteenth-century town goes quietly about its business, its cobblestones intact.