FEBRUARY 19, THURSDAY

LEWES

This morning, when most of the group headed out on a 7 mile hike, Susie and I drove to Lewes, a town just up the coast from Rehoboth Beach. I had been to Rehoboth Beach for these Mahy family reunions at least five times but had never heard of Lewes. But Susie had been there on a thrift store expedition and wanted to show me the town.

The contrast with Rehoboth Beach and the the other beach towns, Dewey Beach and Ocean City, that I’ve driven through is enormous. The buildings in the historic center of Lewes are Victorian, often gingerbread, houses in pastel colors. And the shops we visited, including a bookstore, have beautiful things for sale. We toured the St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, founded 1681, nestled in a crowded cemetary with old crumbling gravestones and beautiful stained glass windows and the entered the Zwaanandael Museum, a Dutch building housing an exhibit of Lewes history. It turns out Lewes was the landing place and first settlement of the Dutch in North America. We learned from a guide in the museum that Lewes was protected from tourism by its smell. A major industry there was a fish oil business that crushed fish for their oil and caused the whole town to stink. So tourists avoided the place and the gingerbread Victorian houses were protected. When the fish oil factory closed down the town decided to protect the houses with a board that insists that every new building fit the 19th century aesthetic. We walked around the downtown and then has a marvelous meal at the The Station on Kings cafe and then drove home. My wife Kathe would have delighted in a visit to Lewes if we had known about it.