Sniffing Out Chester County's Sights

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 22, 2009

Hello tourists! Welcome to Chester County, land of rolling hills, historic battlefields, stone barns, and the fresh scents emanating from various mushroom composting houses! We’re glad to have you!

We know you’ve been aching to see the sights that the Chester County Conference and Visitors Bureau described in its most recent propagand..., er, brochure, and we trust that at some point in your life you’ll get to see Longwood Gardens, the Brandywine River Museum, the Chester County Historic Courthouse and the QVC studios. But in the meantime we thought we would take you on a little tour of some of the out of the way or little noticed spots that make up our fair county.

Now, don’t worry. We’re not going to lead you to some dark and dank spot that you’ll end up writing about in your travel journals as “the worst place I ever imagined they would serve actual food in.” Those would be the aforementioned mushroom composting houses, and we promise we won’t take you there, although you’ll likely get a whiff of them as we stop by the first spot on the tour, the White Clary Creek Preserve.

The White Clay is one of our county’s most scenic waterways, but it gets short shrift in the public relations department because of all the attention paid by the national media to the Brandywine Creek. The White Clay’s relationship to the Brandywine is sort of the aquatic version of that between the Chicago White Sox and the Chicago Cubs; you get the sense that one team is richer, fuller, more die hard and truer in spirit than the other, but the other squad gets all the pub from yuppie outsiders just because of the ballpark.

I mean, put all those Wyeths in an old composting house on London Tract Road along the White Clay instead of an old mill at the River Museum, and you’d see documentaries on National Geographic TV about William Penn buying the White Clay Creek land from Chief Kekelappen 24/7. Trust me on this.

While we’re on our way back north from the White Clay we thought you’d like to stop on top of the hills south of Coatesville, the city which you may have heard so much about in the national media of late. Try to ignore that. We’d like you to pay particular attention to the view from Hilltop Road across what used to be the King Ranch and which is now part of the stunningly beautiful Laurels Preserve, which you are not technically allowed to look at, or even think about, unless your annual income approaches the mid-seven figures, but go ahead anyway because we’re not going to drop a dime on you.

The folks from Texas will recognize the name of the King Ranch as the largest cattle operation in the world, but you probably didn’t know that the King family bought about 17,000 acres here in Chester County to fatten the cattle with grass feed. You might want to imagine the manure-based compost produced by those longhorns, but we don’t, so we’ll move on.

We’re stopping finally at the corner of Market and Church streets in downtown West Chester because it’s the site of the former Mansion House Hotel and Restaurant. The place was built in 1846 as a temperance house, which we feel is particularly ironic since it’s where a memorable meal took place in the early 1970s. Seems a lawyer acquaintance of ours had just secured the release from jail of a few well, shall we say, fallen women, by promising a judge they’d be out of the county before nightfall, when he decided that it might not be such a bad idea to celebrate their freedom with some spirits across the street at the Mansion House. Several hours and as many bottles of wine later he had to call his wife to come pick him up, and in the meantime wondered if she’d like to meet his new clients.

We’re still uncertain if she got the joke, but we appreciate the humor in the situation nonetheless. We hope you did, too. The Mansion House is now a bank, by the way. Which we suppose is better than a mushroom composting house, but not by much.