Belltown: Delaware's Free Black Township

Near Lewes, along U.S. Route Nine, the community of Belltown stands as one of the oldest intentionally established free Black communities in Delaware. A free Black man named Jacob Bell founded the settlement around eighteen forty and began drawing in other families who wanted to live apart from the segregated and hostile neighborhoods of nearby towns.

By nineteen thirty the community had twenty-seven houses, a church, and a school. It was a mixed community in more than one sense: African Americans, people of racially mixed ancestry, and members of the state-recognized Nanticoke Indian community all made their homes here. After emancipation, many Nanticoke people had partially submerged their identity into the broader African American community as a survival strategy. Belltown became a place where those overlapping identities could coexist. The community today is recognized as a landmark of African American and Native American history along the Delaware Route Nine corridor.