Where the past is present — how a dead main street came back

Written August 2026 · Sources last checked 2 August 2026 · Corrections: hello@lewestown.com

The quiet decade

Mrs. Brittingham’s account of the 1970s is unsentimental: the business district went to bed with the chickens and slept soundly through the night, with Closed signs up by six even on Friday and Saturday evenings. She contrasts it with earlier years when the same streets supported several grocery and butcher businesses and stayed open into the evening.

This was not a Lewes problem. It is the standard American main-street story of the mid-twentieth century: cars, highways, supermarkets and shopping centres pulled retail out of small downtowns, and the shops that remained served a shrinking daytime trade. What was unusual about Lewes was what it still had while the decline was happening — an almost intact colonial and Victorian streetscape that nobody had had the money to demolish.

The asset nobody had noticed

Poverty is an excellent preservative. Towns that boomed in the 1950s and 1960s knocked their old buildings down; towns that stagnated kept them by default. When the Lewes Historical Society began assembling buildings on its Shipcarpenter Street site from 1962, and when the Lewes Historic District was added to the National Register in 1977 with 122 contributing buildings, they were formalising something that had survived largely by neglect.

The 1970s therefore sit at a hinge. The commercial decline was at its worst at almost exactly the moment the historic fabric was being recognised as valuable — and the recognition is what made the second act possible.

What came back, and what it cost

What followed in Lewes is what followed in a hundred other well-preserved small American towns: heritage tourism, restaurants, galleries, second homes, and a main street that is busy again in the evening. The Cape Region — Lewes with neighbouring Rehoboth Beach — is now one of the faster-growing parts of Delaware.

The honest part of the story is the trade-off. A revived main street in a historic town is rarely revived for the people who lived through the quiet decade. Grocers and butchers do not come back; what comes back is retail aimed at visitors and at newcomers with money, and house prices follow. The population of Lewes today is a little over three thousand.

This is not an argument against the revival, which saved buildings and livelihoods. It is a reason to be precise about what “the past is present” means. The buildings are the past. The uses are almost entirely new.

From the original page at this address

“In the 1970s the business district in Lewes, the Delaware coastal town, went to bed with the chickens and routinely slept soundly all through the night. The stores wore ‘Closed’ signs by 6 o’clock even on Friday and Saturday evenings.”

Hazel D. Brittingham, “Where The Past is Present”, Lewestown Publishers, 1997. © Copyright 1997 Hazel D. Brittingham. Short extract quoted for commentary; the full original is at the Internet Archive.