Newport, Delaware

The town of Newport sits where Christiana Creek meets the old Kings Road, the colonial highway that once connected Boston to Charleston. In seventeen thirty-five, a merchant named John Justis bought one hundred acres here and began laying out a town for trade, and a shipment of grain sent downriver to his new wharves could reach Philadelphia in a day. By the late seventeen hundreds, Newport was a busy grain and flour port.

It incorporated as a town in eighteen seventy-three and reinvented itself as a manufacturing center, with chemical works and iron foundries along the creek. One of those plants was eventually absorbed by the DuPont chemical empire. Newport sits just south of Wilmington in a stretch of the Delaware valley that Native peoples and then European colonists settled long before the town was laid out.