So Where is Brandywine Hundred Anyway? And By The Way, What IS A Hundred?

Brandywine Hundred is an area of New Castle County, Delaware, which is defined as the area West of the Delaware River, South of the State line with Pennsylvania, East of the Brandywine River, and North of I-95 and the City of Wilmington. The area contains the Zip codes of 19803 and 19809. The only incorporated area within Brandywine Hundred is the town of Bellefonte, which is in the 19809 Zip code. To confuse you further, Claymont has another Zip code 19703, but is not an incorporated area. So the folks in 19803 and most of 19809 (except for Bellefonte), list their address as "Wilmington."

So much of New Castle County is not incorporated that when newcomers are transferred here and they buy a house in "Wilmington," they think they live in the City of Wilmington. But no! Unless you live in the city limits, you DO NOT get to vote for the Mayor and City Council, but you DO get to vote for the County Executive and County Council.

Confused yet? I took the above table of statistics from a market report for the first half of the year from our local listing service, TREND. To find Brandywine Hundred, you need to look at 19803 and 19809 in the first table, and 19703 for Bellefonte in the second table.

From these statistics, you can see that the 3 Zip code areas came out with very different numbers. All areas were down in the number of solds, 19703 by the least, followed by 19803 and bottomed out by 19809 at almost 31%. Prices were another story, with 19803 prices down less than 3%, followed by 19809 at over 11%, and 19703 down by almost 28%.

So it depends where you sit, as to how you interpret the scene. Today, I am choosing to sit (not literally) on the shore of the Delaware River at Fox Point Park, in winter, looking south toward the Delaware Memorial Bridges (they are twins) and New Jersey on the other side, and the sky reflected in a puddle. And just to catch you up on "Localspeak," the State was divided into Hundreds in Colonial times, supposedly on an English custom of dividing areas which could raise 100 soldiers for the King (or something like that, since no one remembers the reason).