New Castle on the Cover of the Saturday Evening Post

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The Courthouse square of New Castle has changed remarkably little since the March 17, 1962 cover of the Post by John Falter: the cars have changed, and two buildings with three stores are gone. The mansard roof structure directly across from the artist at 5-7 2nd Street (three buildings to the left of the corner), were torn down. as was the shop 3 doors from the right side of the picture, to the left of the Terry House, One might quibble with some of the cover description shown below: Penn is thought to have spent the night in a back part of a house outside of the picture to the right, and while there was had long been a dispute as to the center of the twelve mile circle, it in no way was the cause of Mason & Dixon survey.

The Cover New Castle, Del., (pop. 4469), on the busy Delaware River, is six miles south of the state's largest city, Wilmington, and two miles off the main highway. Once it was Delaware's capital. Founded in 1651, it was Willliam Penn's landing place when he came to America in 1682. Penn is thought to have spent a night in the house at the extreme right of our cover. The spire atop the Court House (left foreground) was used as the center of a twelve- mile radius in part of the 1763-67 survey—to settle a boundary dispute—that resulted in the Mason-Dixon Line, which later played a key part in United States History.