On this day in 1682, the fifth Duke of York (1633-1701), the son of England’s Charles I, awarded William Penn (1644-1718) a deed to the three counties that now make up the state of Delaware. Penn, a Quaker leader and an advocate of religious freedom, oversaw the founding of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers and other religious minorities.
Penn successfully sought to acquire the tract — which had been transferred from Dutch to British authority — to ensure access to the Atlantic Ocean for the new colony. (In 1610, explorer Samuel Argall had named the Delaware River and Bay for the governor of Virginia, Thomas West, also known as Lord De La Warr.)
While Delaware established its own assembly in 1704, it was not until shortly after July, 1776, that Delaware became a separate colony, joining in the rebellion against George III.
On Dec. 7, 1787, Delaware became the first state to ratify the newly drafted U.S. Constitution, thereby earning "the First State" nickname that appears on its license plates.
The boundary that separates Delaware from Pennsylvania (and a portion of Maryland) consists of the arc of a circle, defined by a 12-mile radius centered on the courthouse in New Castle, a town on the Delaware River that served as the state’s capital in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution.
The resolution of a dispute between Penn and Maryland’s Lord Baltimore about the extent of each territory led to the setting of the semi-circular boundary. The same dispute spurred the creation of the Mason-Dixon Line in 1763, when British surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon established the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. (That line also came to mark the de facto North-South dividing line in the years before the Civil War.)
Swedes, the region’s first permanent European settlers, arrived in the 1630s, establishing themselves in what is now known as Wilmington. With its accessibility to other ports, especially Philadelphia, 25 miles northeast, and its abundance of natural resources, the Wilmington area flourished as a center for saw, paper and flour mills, aided by excavation of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal.
In 1802, Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours, a French immigrant, founded DuPont, one of the world’s oldest continuously operating industrial enterprises, as a gunpowder mill outside of Wilmington.
While it has transformed itself, the company remains an influential force in the state’s economic life.
When slave-owning, Delaware cast its fortunes with the Union during the Civil War, a three-point defense perimeter was set up to protect its river route: Fort DuPont on the Delaware shore, Fort Mott on the New Jersey shore and Fort Delaware in the center of the river. Fort Delaware housed Confederate prisoners of war, some of whom published their own newspaper. After the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, the fort held some 12,500 prisoners.
SOURCE: U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS