The most striking relic of the old Swedish days in Wilmington is the brick and stone church of good proportions and no small beauty, and today one of the very ancient relics of America.It was built by the Swedes in 1698 to replace their old wooden church, which was on the lower land, and the Swedish language was used in the services down to the year 1800, when the building was turned over to the Church of England.Old Peter Minuit, the first Swedish governor, may possibly have been buried there.The Swedes built another pretty chapel--Gloria Dei, as it was called--at the village of Wicaco, on the shore of the Delaware where Philadelphia afterwards was established.The original building was taken down in 1700, and the present one was erected on its site partly with materials from the church at Tinicum.It remained Swedish Lutheran until 1831, when, like all the Swedish chapels, it became the property of the Church of England, between which and the Swedish Lutheran body there was a close affinity, if not in doctrine, at least in episcopal organization.* The old brick church dating from 1740, on the main street of Wilmington, is an interesting relic of the colonial Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in Delaware, and is now carefully preserved as the home of the Historical Society.
* Clay's "Annals of the Swedes", pp.143, 153-4.
After Delaware had been eighteen years under the Duke of York, William Penn felt a need of the west side of the river all the way down to the sea to strengthen his ownership of Pennsylvania.
He also wanted to offset the ambitions of Lord Baltimore to extend Maryland northward.Penn accordingly persuaded his friend James, the Duke of York, to give him a grant of Delaware, which Penn thereupon annexed to Pennsylvania under the name of the Territories or Three Lower Counties.The three counties, New Castle, Kent, and Sussex,* are still the counties of Delaware, each one extending across the State and filling its whole length from the hills of the Brandywine on the Pennsylvania border to the sands of Sussex at Cape Henlopen.The term "Territory" has ever since been used in America to describe an outlying province not yet given the privileges of a State.Instead of townships, the three Delaware counties were divided into "hundreds," an old Anglo-Saxon county method of division going back beyond the times of Alfred the Great.Delaware is the only State in the Union that retains this name for county divisions.The Three Lower Counties were allowed to send representatives to the Pennsylvania Assembly; and the Quakers of Delaware have always been part of the Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia.
* The original names were New Castle, Jones's, and Hoerekill, as it was called by the Dutch, or Deal.
In 1703, after having been a part of Pennsylvania for twenty years, the Three Lower Counties were given home rule and a legislature of their own; but they remained under the Governor of Pennsylvania until the Revolution of 1776.They then became an entirely separate community and one of the thirteen original States.Delaware was the first State to adopt the National Constitution, and Rhode Island, its fellow small State, the last.
Having been first to adopt the Constitution, the people of Delaware claim that on all national occasions or ceremonies they are entitled to the privilege of precedence.They have every reason to be proud of the representative men they sent to the Continental Congress, and to the Senate in later times.
Agriculture has, of course, always been the principal occupation on the level fertile land of Delaware; and it is agriculture of a high class, for the soil, especially in certain localities, is particularly adapted to wheat, corn, and timothy grass, as well as small fruits.That section of land crossing the State in the region of Delaware City and Middleton is one of the show regions in America, for crops of wheat and corn.Farther south, grain growing is combined with small fruits and vegetables with a success seldom attained elsewhere.Agriculturally there is no division of land of similar size quite equal to Delaware in fertility.Its sand and gravel base with vegetable mold above is somewhat like the southern Jersey formation, but it is more productive from having a larger deposit of decayed vegetation.
The people of Delaware have, indeed, very little land that is not tillable.The problems of poverty, crowding, great cities, and excessive wealth in few hands are practically unknown among them.
The foreign commerce of Wilmington began in 1740 with the building of a brig named after the town, and was continued successfully for a hundred years.At Wilmington there has always been a strong manufacturing interest, beginning with the famous colonial flour mills at the falls of the Brandywine, and the breadstuffs industry at Newport on the Christina.With the Brandywine so admirably suited to the water-power machinery of those days and the Christina deep enough for the ships, Wilmington seemed in colonial times to possess an ideal combination of advantages for manufacturing and commerce.The flour mills were followed in 1802 by the Du Pont Powder Works, which are known all over the world, and which furnished powder for all American wars since the Revolution, for the Crimean War in Europe, and for the Allies in the Great War.
"From the hills of Brandywine to the sands of Sussex" is an expression the people of Delaware use to indicate the whole length of their little State.The beautiful cluster of hills at the northern end dropping into park-like pastures along the shores of the rippling Red Clay and White Clay creeks which form the deep Christina with its border of green reedy marshes, is in striking contrast to the wild waste of sands at Cape Henlopen.
Yet in one way the Brandywine Hills are closely connected with those sands, for from these very hills have been quarried the hard rocks for the great breakwater at the Cape, behind which the fleets of merchant vessels take refuge in storms.
