The Lewes History Archive
Long before it was anything else, lewestown.com was a local-history site. From 1997 it carried articles about Lewes, Delaware written by Hazel D. Brittingham (1927–2024), the town's foremost historian, under her imprint Lewestown Publishers. Those pages were cited by Wikipedia, genealogy sites, and local-history researchers — and then, for years, the links led nowhere. This archive restores the original page addresses.
What is at each address
Two things, kept strictly apart. First, a link to Mrs. Brittingham's original page as preserved by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine — her text, her photographs, her layout. Her work remains under the copyright of her estate, so it is not republished here. Second, a newly written article on the same subject, researched independently from primary sources: National Register of Historic Places nominations, U.S. Coast Guard records, the Delaware Public Archives, and the published record. Every claim in the new articles is sourced, and every page says when its sources were last checked.
The pages
| Address | Subject | Original |
|---|---|---|
| Ryves_Holt.html | The Ryves Holt House, by tradition Delaware's oldest standing house — and the honest debate over its true date | captures |
| lighthou.html | The Cape Henlopen Lighthouse, 1767–1926: built by Philadelphia lottery, lost to a moving dune | capture |
| name_of_henlopen.html | How Cape Henlopen got its name — and how a mapmaker's confusion helped draw Delaware's southern border | capture |
| whorekill.html | The Whorekill: the name Lewes carried before it was Lewes, and the two competing explanations for it | captures |
| Images.html | The De Vries monument and the visual record of Zwaanendael, the 1631 Dutch settlement | captures |
| gilbert.html | Gilbert Byron, the “Chesapeake Thoreau,” and the years he taught and wrote in Lewes | captures |
| hazel-brittingham.html | Hazel D. Brittingham (1927–2024), the historian behind these pages | — |
Why restore dead addresses
Because other people's citations point at them. The Wikipedia articles on the De Vries Palisade and Gilbert Byron, the county-history record, and a scatter of genealogy and local-history sites all reference these exact URLs. A citation that resolves to a page — one that acknowledges the original, links to it, and stands up its own sourced account — is more useful to a reader than a 404. Lewes has traded on its history since it started calling itself the First Town in the First State; the least its namesake domain can do is keep the town's own historian findable.
Readers exploring the places these pages describe — the Ryves Holt House, the Zwaanendael Museum, the Cannonball House — may also find our practical historic Lewes walking guide useful. That page, like the rest of the site, is part of our travel guide and is commercially supported; this archive is not.
Support the real archive. Hazel Brittingham's papers and photographs — more than fifty boxes of them — are held at the Hazel Brittingham Collections Center at the Lewes Historical Society. If these pages were useful to you, support the institution that preserves her actual work.
A note on independence and copyright
The new articles in this archive are original works; Mrs. Brittingham's writing and photographs are quoted only briefly and with attribution, or not at all, and her originals are always linked at the Internet Archive. We are seeking permission from the Lewes Historical Society and from Mrs. Brittingham's family to restore her original texts at these addresses. If permission is granted, her words will replace ours, clearly credited. If you are a member of her family, or connected to the Society, and would like these pages changed, corrected, removed, or replaced with her originals, write to hello@lewestown.com.