- published: 11 Apr 2015
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Delaware Colony in the North American Middle Colonies was a region of the Province of Pennsylvania although never legally a separate colony. From 1682 until 1776 it was part of the Penn proprietorship and was known as the lower counties. In 1701 it gained a separate Assembly from the three upper counties but had the same Governor as the rest of Pennsylvania.
The first European exploration of what would become known as the Delaware Valley was made by the Dutch ship Halve Maen under the command of Henry Hudson in 1609. Follow-up expeditions by Cornelius May in 1613, and Cornelius Hendricksen in 1614 mapped the shoreline of what would become Delaware for inclusion in the New Netherland colony. Initial Dutch settlement was centered up river at Fort Nassau at Big Timber Creek south of what is Gloucester City, New Jersey.
The first attempt to settle Europeans in the territories that would become the State of Delaware was not made until 1629 when agents of the Dutch West India Company Gillis Hossitt and Jacob Jansz arrived to negotiate with the Native Americans to "purchase" land for a colony. (It was a rule among the Dutch that Native American land must always be purchased and never seized by force, but as the concept of land ownership was alien to the Americans, there was a great deal of cultural confusion attached to the transactions with the Dutch "payments" taken for gifts in keeping with Native custom.) Hossitt and Jansz secured a treaty granting the Dutch a parcel of land running along the shore eight Dutch miles long and half a Dutch mile deep (roughly 29 by just under 2 US miles), nearly coincidental with the coast of modern Sussex and Kent counties in Delaware.
Delaware (i/ˈdɛləwɛər/ DEL-ə-wair) is a U.S. state located on the Atlantic Coast in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It is bordered to the south and west by Maryland, to the northeast by New Jersey, and to the north by Pennsylvania. The state takes its name from Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, an English nobleman and Virginia's first colonial governor, after whom what is now called Cape Henlopen was originally named.
Delaware is located in the northeastern portion of the Delmarva Peninsula and is the second least extensive, the sixth least populous, but the sixth most densely populated of the 50 United States. Delaware is divided into three counties. From north to south, these three counties are New Castle, Kent, and Sussex. While the southern two counties have historically been predominantly agricultural, New Castle County has been more industrialized.
The history of the state's economic and industrial development is closely tied to the impact of the Du Pont family, founders and scions of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, one of the world’s largest chemical companies.