Battle of Cooch's Bridge: Delaware's Only Land Battle
Near Wilmington, Delaware
Delaware is not a state you associate with Revolutionary War battles. But on September third, seventeen seventy-seven, on a country road leading to a small stone bridge over Christina Creek, the only significant land battle ever fought on Delaware soil took place, and it came wrapped in one of the war's most debated legends.
British General William Howe was marching north toward Philadelphia with more than fifteen thousand men. American Brigadier General William Maxwell selected seven hundred of the Continental Army's best light infantry, supplemented by a thousand Pennsylvania and Delaware militiamen, and placed them in ambush along the tree-lined road approaching Cooch's Bridge. When the British column entered the killing zone, the Americans opened fire from both sides.
The ambush inflicted real casualties but could not hold against thousands of trained soldiers. Maxwell's men fought a fighting withdrawal, delaying the British advance for several hours before retreating north. A week later, the larger Battle of Brandywine would be fought in Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia would fall to the British in September.
The legend attached to Cooch's Bridge has never been definitively resolved. According to a long-standing tradition, Brigadier General Maxwell ordered the new Stars and Stripes flag, authorized by Congress only three months earlier in June, to be raised during the battle, making this the first time the American flag was flown in combat. The story has circulated since the nineteenth century, and Delaware celebrates it as part of state heritage.
Historians, however, are cautious. The evidence is circumstantial, drawn from later recollections rather than contemporary accounts, and no document from seventeen seventy-seven confirms the claim. Whether the flag flew or not, the bridge and the farm beyond it, the Cooch family's land that gave the battle its name, still stand today in rural Newark, Delaware. The farm is preserved, the bridge rebuilt, and the state still honors the memory of its single afternoon of Revolutionary War combat.
