Wilmington, DE

Wilmington is the du Ponts' city. The French émigré family founded its gunpowder mills on the Brandywine in 1802, and the chemical empire that followed made Delaware's largest city a company capital and ringed it with the "chateau country" of their estates — now an unmatched museum district: Winterthur's 175 rooms of American decorative arts, Nemours' Versailles-in-miniature, Hagley's mills on the river, and Longwood's fountain gardens just over the Pennsylvania line. The Brandywine School of illustrators — Howard Pyle and the Wyeths — worked here, and the Delaware Art Museum keeps their pirates and heroines.

The city's musical addresses are precise: the Grand Opera House of 1871, the cast-iron-fronted Masonic hall on Market Street — "The Grand" — is Delaware's concert hall and the home of the Delaware Symphony Orchestra, which the source records list as a venue beside it (an ensemble note for the registry). Wilmington also claims an unexpected resident: the young Bob Marley lived here in the mid-1960s with his mother, working local jobs between Kingston recording sessions — a reggae footnote the city cherishes. Corporate Delaware fills the office towers; the Riverfront's converted shipyards fill the evenings. Powder mills to Prokofiev at The Grand: Wilmington compounds well.