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 John Bishop House  This past weekend, I and my family had the pleasure of riding the Wilmington and Western Railroad -- something we try to do at least a couple times each year (our daughter, especially, loves the train). In addition to being a pleasant, quiet ride through the scenic Red Clay Valley, the whole trip oozes with history. You really never go more than a couple minutes without passing some historic house, the ruins of a mill, or the remnants of a mill race. To anyone who has ever taken this trip, the house to the right should look very familiar. This picturesque gem (one railroad volunteer told me this view was his screen saver) is the John Bishop House, and it sits just west of Barley Mill Road, near where the road crosses Red Clay Creek north of Wooddale. The Bishop House is one of those wonderful old homesteads that's tucked quietly away from all of the noise and hubbub that is much of New Castle County these days. If it weren't for the train, in fact, very f...

Not so very long ago, an interviewer asked me what I would change if I could go back and do my first book all over again. I laughed, not because it was a silly question, but because, bizarrely, I found myself in the position of doing just that. My publisher was reissuing my first book in mass market paperback and they had just offered me the opportunity to make any changes I felt necessary. How often does one get to go back and do it all over? I began writing The Secret History of the Pink Carnation in 2001 as a wee little twenty-four year old grad student (naturally, I thought I was old and wise and sophisticated), finished it in 2003, and saw its release as a hardcover in 2005 as an elderly and jaded law school 2L. It’s 2010 now. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge. I firmly believe that any work is the product of its circumstances, rooted in a specific place and time. I couldn’t write The Secret History of the Pink Carnation today, any more than the girl I was the...

I always try to involve music in my books: my heroes and heroines have theme songs, I listen to music while I write, and I try to weave music into each book’s scenes whenever possible. Okay, that’s easier in some books than others. Rodrigo, my medieval Spanish knight in BOND OF BLOOD , is an accomplished musician. But Morgan and Rosalind, THE SOUTHERN DEVIL 's hero and heroine, traveled through the high Rockies of 1870's Colorado, a beautiful place but hardly overflowing with orchestras, opera houses, and street musicians. This does give an extra zing! to the research. Tracking down sources of music or what historical music sounded like is both challenging and fun. I bounced for joy when Milladoiro , a band I already liked, recorded some 13th Spanish songs – which Rodrigo would have considered contemporary pop tunes. Nineteenth century Mississippi riverboats hired topnotch singers to perform Negro spirituals and work songs , especially as advertisements when they entered ...

I wrote at some length in my last hoyden post about Ann Herendeen's smart and original take on Pride and Prejudice , by way of summarizing my recent presentation at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance Conference . So enough with the Jane Austen, you'd think -- at least for a while. And yet here she is again, refusing to let me out of the clutches of her genius. Because I'm going to be speaking about her next month -- three times, as it happens, but most directly in the talk I'm giving at the assisted living community where my mother lives, in Media, Pennsylvania. With its population of energetic culture vultures (my mom runs the community's excellent lending library, so I know it'll be a readerly audience), community residents can choose from an ongoing festival of films and lectures, discussion groups and classes. Lifetimes of love and work deepen the quality of attention brought to the table, especially now that this (perforce larg...

 The "New Bridge" in Marshallton, c.1905  Most of the posts here involve coming up with an idea for a topic, doing some light research, and then passing along what we've been able to learn. Once in a while, though, something of the "Wow, I didn't know that!" variety will pop up out of the blue, or in the course of other research. When something like this happens, I want to pass it along. And as I'm sure you've figured, something like this did happen to me the other day. While doing some reading, I found out that the 110 year old bridge that spanned the Red Clay Creek in Marshallton is still around -- but not in Marshallton. In fact, it has moved twice! The bridge in question, just one in a string that have graced the site since the late 1700's, was built across the Red Clay Creek on what is now Newport Road at the base of Duncan Road right about 1900. It is what is known as a pin-connected Pratt pony truss bridge, and in its original configu...

Most writers would say, if pressed to discuss how they work, that they have a system. If they're feeling lofty at the moment they might refer to it as a "process." And all of us are avid readers as well as writers, or chances are, we wouldn't have ended up facing the business end of the computer in the first place. Since my career began a little over a decade ago I've written in three genres (four if you count the 1940s mystery in my desk drawer). I've been published in women's lit (some of the titles would fall under the "chick lit" category), historical fiction, and historical nonfiction. And I've tended to make it an unwritten policy not to read other people's titles from the same genre I'm writing in at the time. My rationale is that I don't want to be influenced, even subconsciously, by my colleagues' plotlines, characters, or twists. And when I'm working on a nonfiction title, it's always such a scramble to get ...

One of the geekier things I do--and one of the few things that doesn't involve parking my butt in front of a computer--is volunteering as a docent at Riversdale House Museum . It is writing-related since the house dates from the federal era and was built by the Stier family, immigrants fleeing the French revolution, who wanted their home to reflect a grand European style and sensibility. I am lucky enough to be able to pick the brains of the museum staff on period food and clothes, since we have two experts in those fields working there. But last week I had the pleasure of attending a symposium for museum guides and ushers, and what I learned there relates so much to writing fiction that I thought I'd share it. First some odd stories came up: in one historic house, which shall remain anonymous, the visitors were led around by a strange-looking person, as darkness fell, who at one point opened a creaking door and pronounced, "This is a closet. Would you like to see inside?...

 Henry Whiteman House  Most of the time when I read a historical report, everything seems to make sense, and I have no reason to doubt its accuracy. Once in a while, though, I'll read something, maybe several times, and I just won't be able to get the facts as shown to jibe just right. Such was the case with this report about the Henry Whiteman House. In this instance, I'm not sure that it's necessarily wrong, so much as it's maybe just a bit unclear and misleading. In either case, I'll lay it all out and you can decide for yourself. The Henry Whiteman House is a two story, stuccoed fieldstone home that sits off of Smith Mill Road, on the east side of Paper Mill Road. The property is a little over a mile north of Milford Crossroads, and right in the middle of an area dominated by the Whiteman family for most of the 19th century. The first of them to settle in the area was Jacob Whiteman, who in 1799 purchased a large tract of land from Thomas Rice. As for the...

As a writer, I've had my share of rejections, but like most of us, I keep pitching. So here I am on a Friday night, waiting for my muse and surfing the net, procrastinating about writing those "next five pages", when I came across this list of rejection letters sent to some now very famous writers. I take solace in these biting, and sometimes hilariously off-base critiques of pre-published classics. I'm glad these authors never gave up. I have enjoyed so many of their stories. To writers everywhere, take heart, I've posted some of monumentally incorrect rejections ever made public: Madeleine L'Engle's A WRINKLE IN TIME was turned down 29 times. And THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT was turned down so many times, Beatrix Potter initially self-published it. (She was soooo ahead of her time!) "I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language." Editor of the San Francisco Examiner to Rudyard Kipling. Mystery writer Mary ...

My wonderful, innovative web designers and friends, Greg and jim, had the idea a couple of years back of filming an interview of me talking about the background to my books, which they then edited into clips that I could post on my website. The interview we filmed for Vienna Waltz , my April 2011 release, deals a great deal with the historical background. So it occurred to me that these clips might also be of interest to History Hoydens readers. Here's one where I talk about the Palm Palace, where two real historical women, Wilhelmine, Duchess of Sagan, and Princess Catherine Bagration, both had lodgings during the Congress of Vienna. In Vienna Waltz , my fictional Princess Tatiana Kirsanova (who was called Tatiana Volkonsky at the time we filmed the interview) also lodges in the Palm Palace. Like Wilhelmine and Catherine, Tatiana is also involved with both Tsar Alexander and Prince Metternich. I couldn't, unfortunately, figure out how to embed the video in Blogger the way I do...

 Aerial image of farm buildings at Delcastle  It's probably safe to say that anyone who is at all familiar with Mill Creek Hundred is at least aware of the Delcastle Recreation facility and Delcastle Golf Course on McKennans Church Road. What many enjoying a game of tennis, or softball, or a relaxing day on the course there might not be aware of is that for about half of the 20th century, the land beneath their feet was worked by scores of hardened criminals. OK, maybe not that hardened, but they were incarcerated. For starting in 1915, the land now occupied by Del Rec and the adjoining golf course was owned by the Board of Trustees of the New Castle County Workhouse, also known as the Greenbank Prison. The NCC Workhouse opened in 1901 on Greenbank Road, on land also currently used for athletic fields. It was the culmination of years of hard work and lobbying by groups looking to modernize Delaware's prison system. As its name would imply, the inmates at the Workhouse were...

Whenever I give a costume workshop, there is always one topic that catches fire and sets off almost endless questions. In Orlando, this topic was gloves. When were they worn? When were they taken off? What were the "rules"? This is the kind of minutia that writers obsess about. It's entirely possible that someone out there has an etiquette guide from the 18th or early 19th century. I've never encountered one, so what you'll find here is simply my understanding of "the rules". One tiny thing to clear up first: During the Georgian and Regency era, gloves do not have that tiny, pearl-buttoned opening at the wrist that we all associate with long opera gloves. That sexy little detail is Victorian (and late Victorian from what I understand). On to "the rules" . . . If a lady expected to be outside her own home, she wore gloves. So, if she's riding, traveling, visiting, shopping, going to a ball, or the the theatre, she's should be wearing glo...

The joy of paper patte rns My current work in progress is a western set in 1870 Oregon. In that time, a dress was sewed by taking an old, worn-out garment apart at the seams, laying the pieces flat on the selected yard goods, and cutting around them! That might explain why styles in the Old West didn’t change much over time: the pattern template could have come from one of Grandma’s old dresses. In 1863, Ebeneezer Butterick changed all that by inventing the tissue-paper sewing pattern in various sizes. It all started when his wife, Ellen, spread out a piece of blue gingham on her dining room table and drew her design using wax chalk. If you couldn’t draw well, your clothes looked funny.... There were patterns that could be used, but they came in only one size; the maker had to enlarge or reduce as needed. Ebeneezer watched his wife struggle with the chalk and the blue gingham and a lightbulb flashed. He experimented, using heavy cardboard templates that turned out to be unsuitab...

Kenny House after the Feb. 10 Fire As was mentioned in the earlier post about Father Patrick Kenny and the Coffee Run Church, Kenny's 1812 home was destroyed in a fire on February 10, 2010. The blaze, determined to have been arson , began right at the outset of one of our major blizzards last year. Due to the conditions, by the time firefighters arrived and extinguished the flames, most of the three stories of the house and the roof were gutted. The structure was deemed to be unsafe, and although there was a stop-work order in place, property owners Harvey Hanna and Associates demolished what remained of the house on March 2. For their actions, the redevelopment firm was fined $1000 and prohibited from receiving county permits for the site for three years. Although the fire was immediately identified as arson, the case remained frustratingly unsolved -- until last week. Acting on a tip received from someone who reported hearing a teenage boy brag about setting the fire, police arr...

Hope Tarr is the award-winning author of thirteen historical and contemporary romances as well as a co-founder of Lady Jane’s Salon , New York City’s first and so far only monthly reading series for romance fiction. "Tomorrow's Destiny," Hope’s first novella, will release November 10th in a single title Christmas anthology, A HARLEQUIN CHRISTMAS CAROL, with Betina Krahn and Jacquie D'Alessandro. Here to join us today, without further preamble, the one, the only Hope Tarr! Second chances at love, don’t you just…love them? A ROGUE'S PLEASURE, my romance debut novel originally published in print with Berkley/Jove, is getting its own second chance at love as an e-book release with Carina Press, Harlequin’s digital-first imprint and like any proud mama I couldn’t be more pleased. The reissue, which sports gorgeous new cover art and an editing facelift, went live on August 16th, two weeks short of what would be the book’s tenth anniversary. How cool is that!?! A ROGUE...

Current FOBS Dig Site, the B&O Pavilion As a timely follow-up to the last post about Brandywine Springs Amusement Park , I'd like to mention a few more things about the Friends of Brandywine Springs (FOBS). As was mentioned in the Park post, FOBS has a very nice website , complete with pictures and information about the amusement park. The group also staffs the small museum on the grounds of the Wilmington and Western Railroad . The museum contains displays relating to Brandywine Springs, including a model of the park and a collection of artifacts excavated from the park. It's an interesting visit, and I've staffed the museum myself many times. (Yes, full disclosure: I am a member of the Friends of Brandywine Springs.) But where do those excavated artifacts come from, you ask? Good question. FOBS (with full approval from New Castle County) conducts archaeological digs at the park once a month (weather permitting) from April through December. It just so happens that the ...

Entrance Archway at Brandywine Springs From its earliest days, the residents of Mill Creek Hundred have always been an industrious, hard-working bunch. And for a brief, shining time in the late 1800's and early 1900's, local residents and guests from far afield had a beautiful place to unwind and enjoy a relaxing day out -- Brandywine Springs Amusement Park. Although the amusement park is usually dated to 1886, the history of the site on the southeast corner of Newport-Gap Pike and Faulkland Road goes back much further. The Yarnall, or Conestoga, Tavern had been in operation since the 1700's, and a large resort hotel was constructed on the site in the late 1820's. This first hotel burned to the ground in 1853, but the site was far from done. Immediately afterwards, a second hotel was created by combining three houses on the site that had been built 20 years earlier by a former hotel manager. This second hotel plugged along with limited success until 1886, when Philadelp...