Early Lewes — the first town in the first state, on its fourth attempt

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

Zwaanendael, 1631: whale oil and a very short year

On 3 June 1631 Dutch settlers established a whaling and trading post on this shore and named it Zwaanendael — archaic Dutch for “swan valley”. The backers were investors associated with the Dutch West India Company, several of them from Hoorn in North Holland, and the commercial plan was whale oil, with agriculture to fill the off-season.

It was the first European settlement in what is now Delaware, and it lasted about a year. In 1632 a local band of Lenape killed all thirty-two settlers. The accounts of why differ and are transmitted almost entirely through Dutch sources with an obvious interest in how the story was told; what is not in dispute is the outcome.

So the foundational date Lewes claims is real, and the settlement it refers to was annihilated. The town’s continuity with 1631 is a continuity of place, not of people.

The second failure: Plockhoy’s Mennonites, 1663

The Dutch were slow to come back. It took the threat of annexation by the Colony of Maryland to prompt action: in 1662 the city of Amsterdam granted land at the Hoernkills — the area around Cape Henlopen — to a group of Mennonites, funded by a substantial civic loan to get them established.

The party was led by Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy of Zierikzee, a social reformer with something close to a utopian programme. Forty-one people crossed on the Dutch ship Sint Jacob, among them Otto Wolgast from Wolgast in Pomerania. The settlement was established in 1663.

It lasted a year. In 1664 the English captured New Netherland from the Dutch and ordered the place razed, with reports afterwards that “not even a nail” was left. Two settlements, two total losses, inside thirty-three years.

The name changes, and the town finally sticks

What regrew around the Hoernkill afterwards did so slowly and under a different flag. The place was known as the Whorekill — an English rendering of the Dutch — long before it was Lewes, and that name carried its own argument about origins, which we set out separately in our page on the Whorekill.

The town was eventually named Lewes after the county town of Sussex in England, part of the same wholesale transfer of English names that gave Delaware its Sussex and Kent counties. The English naming is the reason this site exists in the shape it does: there are two Leweses, and people looking for one keep finding the other.

By the eighteenth century the settlement was a working port with pilots, shipwrights and an economy tied to the bay. That is the Lewes that survives in fabric — the Ryves Holt House, the Maull House, the streets surveyed in 1722 — rather than anything Dutch. Almost nothing above ground is older than the English town.

What “First Town in the First State” actually claims

The slogan bundles two separate facts. Lewes was the site of the first European settlement in Delaware, in 1631. Delaware was the first state to ratify the United States Constitution, in 1787. The two have nothing to do with each other beyond both being firsts, and the phrase does not assert continuous occupation from 1631 — though it is often read that way.

The honest version is more interesting than the slogan. This is a place people kept trying to settle, in the face of massacre, razing and a shifting cape, because the geography at the mouth of the bay was too valuable to leave alone. Lewes today has a population of a little over three thousand. It has been starting again for four hundred years.

From the original page at this address

“Present-day Lewes traces its history back to 1631 when a settlement was established by Dutch investors from Hoorn, Holland, under the Dutch West India Company. Swanendael (Valley of the Swans) was the name given to the site chosen by the entrepreneurs for an anticipated whale-oil industry.”

Hazel D. Brittingham, “Early Lewes History”, Lewestown Publishers, 1997. © Copyright 1997 Hazel D. Brittingham. Short extract quoted for commentary; the full original is at the Internet Archive.