One corner, four hotel names — Second and Market since 1928

Written August 2026 · Sources last checked 2 August 2026 · Corrections: hello@lewestown.com

The building, 1928

The hotel was constructed in 1928, and its first name was the Caesar Rodney Hotel. That places it firmly in the interwar moment when small American towns built modest commercial hotels for motor traffic — the automobile had arrived, the road network was improving, and a town on a route to the shore could expect passing trade.

The site it stands on is much older than the building. Second and Market is one of the central intersections of the old town laid out in the eighteenth century, and a corner like that accumulates history whatever is standing on it at the time.

Four names, four ideas about Lewes

Caesar Rodney Hotel reaches for Delaware patriotism — Rodney being the state’s revolutionary hero, famous for his ride to Philadelphia to cast the deciding vote for independence. It is a 1920s civic-pride name, and it is not local: Rodney has no particular connection to this corner.

Valley of the Swans and Swans Inn reach in the opposite direction, translating Zwaanendael — the 1631 Dutch colony whose name means swan valley. These are heritage names, from the era when the town was learning that its Dutch origin was an asset. The Zwaanendael Museum had gone up in 1932, a few years after the hotel was built, and the town has been trading on that story ever since.

New Devon Inn reaches somewhere else again. “New Devon” is an old name associated with this part of the Delaware coast in the English colonial period, so the fourth name is an English-heritage name, following a Dutch one, following an American-revolutionary one.

Dutch colony, English county, American republic, and a modern inn trading on all three. That is the whole argument of this archive compressed into one hotel sign.

Why renaming is the interesting part

Buildings get renamed when their owners want to sell a different story. A hotel is unusually honest about this because the name is the product — it goes on the letterhead and the postcard and has to attract somebody.

The sequence here tracks the town’s own repositioning: from a place that wanted to look patriotic in the 1920s, to a place that discovered its Dutch founding was marketable, to a place comfortable enough with the whole layered story to reach for the English strand. Whatever the corner is called next will tell you what Lewes thinks it is selling then.

From the original page at this address

“Basking in recent newness, the old hotel at the corner of Second and Market streets in Lewes rests upon a history-laden site. The name of the New Devon Inn supplants the labels of Swans Inn, Valley of the Swans and Caesar Rodney Hotel, the latter being the first name for the venture into dispensing hospitality when the building was constructed in 1928.”

Hazel D. Brittingham, “Lewes Street Corner — Rich in Historic Lore”, Lewestown Publishers, 1997. © Copyright 1997 Hazel D. Brittingham. Short extract quoted for commentary; the full original is at the Internet Archive.