Woodburn (Delaware Governor’s Mansion)

Woodburn is a handsome two-storey brick house in Flemish bond on the King’s Highway in Dover, built around 1798 by Charles Hillyard III on land his family had held since a grant from William Penn. Considered one of the finest Middle Period Georgian houses in Delaware, it passed to Hillyard’s daughter Mary and her husband, Dr. Martin W. Bates, later a US senator, and in 1825 to Daniel Cowgill, a Quaker abolitionist. Later owners included Senator Daniel O. Hastings and a retired Philadelphia dentist, Frank Hall. The state bought it in 1965, and it has been the official residence of Delaware’s governors ever since.

Its ghost story is one of the oldest on record in the state. The official Woodburn history tells how, around 1815, Dr. and Mrs. Bates had the celebrated itinerant Methodist preacher Lorenzo Dow to stay. At breakfast, asked to say grace, Dow hesitated and asked whether they should wait for the other guest – the gentleman in a powdered wig, knee breeches and ruffled shirt he had passed on the stairs. There was no other guest. Mrs. Bates was shaken: the description matched her late father, Charles Hillyard.

The figure has been reported intermittently since. Frank Hall said he sometimes passed Hillyard on the stairs. Local tradition holds that Hillyard was fond of strong drink, and Jeanne Tribbitt, wife of Governor Sherman Tribbitt in the 1970s, left wine out for him several times without result – keeping it from her husband, she said, because he would have drunk it just to tease her. A second figure, a small girl in a gingham dress and bonnet carrying a candle, is said to walk the grounds by the reflecting pool, and some guests reported seeing her in the Great Hall during an inaugural party for Governor Mike Castle.

Woodburn’s other legend concerns slavery. A plaque and long tradition tie the house to the Underground Railroad and to a raid by Patty Cannon, the notorious Delmarva gang leader who kidnapped free Black people and fugitives to sell them south. The state’s own history notes that both stories probably owe much to George Alfred Townsend’s 1884 novel The Entailed Hat, which set such a raid at a “Cowgill House” closely resembling Woodburn, then owned by the Cowgill family.

A gentleman in eighteenth-century dress – powdered wig, knee breeches, ruffled shirt – met on the staircase and identified as builder Charles Hillyard III; wine left out overnight said by tradition to be drunk by him; and a little girl in a gingham dress and bonnet carrying a candle near the reflecting pool and in the Great Hall.

The main staircase and Great Hall of the house, and the gardens around the reflecting pool. Woodburn is the governor’s home, open to the public only at scheduled events.

The Woodburn ghost is a staple of Dover’s history and Halloween lore, highlighted on the state’s own Woodburn website and at public events such as the residence’s fall festival. Patty Cannon’s story, told in Townsend’s The Entailed Hat, remains part of Delmarva’s difficult history of slavery and kidnapping.