Lewes: Delaware's First Town

Lewes, Delaware calls itself the First Town in the First State, and it has reasonable grounds for both claims. The settlement here predates the Mayflower colony in some ways, and its history runs from Dutch swan valleys to a War of Eighteen Twelve naval bombardment that gave the world a phrase it still sings today.

In sixteen thirty-one, a small group of Dutch colonists sent by the West India Company landed at the mouth of Delaware Bay and established a settlement they called Zwaanendael, which translates from medieval Dutch as swan valley. They built a palisaded fort, planted crops, and began trading for whale oil. There were roughly thirty of them. Within months, a dispute with the local Lenape people over a misunderstanding about a tin coat of arms escalated into violence, and the entire colony was destroyed. When a Dutch captain named David De Vries arrived the following year to check on his investment, he found only bones and ruin.

The site was resettled, slowly, and became the town of Lewes. By the time of the American Revolution it was a modest port, a waypoint for ships moving up and down Delaware Bay toward Philadelphia. Then came the War of eighteen twelve.

In April of eighteen thirteen, a British naval squadron anchored in Delaware Bay demanded supplies from the town. When Lewes refused, the British opened fire. For roughly twenty-two hours, an estimated eight hundred projectiles, cannonballs and a new weapon called Congreve rockets, rained down on the town. The American defenders, a militia under Colonel Samuel Boyer Davis, held their ground. No British landing succeeded.

Those rockets matter. The British use of Congreve rockets in eighteen thirteen at Lewes and later at Baltimore's Fort McHenry is what Francis Scott Key was watching when he wrote the line that became the national anthem. The rockets' red glare in the song refers to the same weapon that arced over this small Delaware town eighteen months earlier.

Lewes today is a beach town and ferry terminus. But the ground underfoot carries four hundred years of American beginnings.