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Packet Alley
A Children's Book about New Castle (and history)

Packet Alley is both the name of a childrens book once part of the fourth grade curriculum in Delaware public schools, and of a one block long street in New Castle between The Strand and the Delaware River. When New Castle was a transportation hub up to about 1840, the alley was a thorofare for many people seeking to go between Philadelphia, New York and Boston to the north, and Baltimore and Washington to the south.


The book is copyrighted, but Maximilian Goepp, the owner of the copyright has given permission to nc-chap.org to make it a portion available on the web.

As described in John Reid's web page about the book, it was written in 1951 by Elisabeth Wenning Goepp and Margaret Webb Sanders under the pseudonym Elisabeth Meg.

The book centers around events near Packet Alley and the fictional 12 The Strand where twins Cathie and Ted live. He hates history. They meet a "little Dutchman" who loans them magic glasses which let them see into the past and discover that history can be interesting.

A taped interview with Mrs. Sanders (mp3, 2.6 mb) tells the story of how the book came to be written, and what it was like to write the book. She says that she was the writer and Mrs. Goepp the researcher. Margaret Sanders' son William kindly provided a picture of his mother, and recollections of the days "when the Goepps lived on The Strand and how horrified my dad was when they lit real candles on their Christmas tree. He could just imagine the whole block going up in flames ... but that was the German custom."

Actually, the Goepps (Elisabeth Wenning Goepp and Rudolph Maximilian Goepp, Jr.) bought bought and lived in 28 The Strand in 1936 shown here as it looked just after they bought it. The character Cathie is modeled after daughter Carla Elisabeth Goepp (b 1939, who grew up to be a physician and dean of students at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. The other children (Rudolph Maximilian Goepp III, and Hildegarde Wenning Goepp Meech) do not appear in the book.