Henry Francis du Pont inherited the estate in 1927. He was much less interested in maintaining a working farm than his father and grandfather, and instead had an eye toward transforming the estate into a museum of American arts. To that end, he sold off pieces of the estate in 1951, reducing it from down to a core of . of the sold-off estate were purchased by du Pont's relative, Ellen Coleman du Pont Wheelwright (daughter of T. Coleman du Pont) and her husband Robert Wheelwright. Wheelwright was a prominent landscape architect who had in 1924 founded the University of Pennsylvania's landscape architecture school. The Wheelwrights maintained the estate until Robert's death in 1965.