The De Vries monument, and where to actually see Zwaanendael

Written July 2026 · Sources last checked 10 July 2026 · Corrections: hello@lewestown.com

What happened here in 1631?

The venture was commercial from the first line of its charter. Amsterdam patroons of the Dutch West India Company — Samuel Godyn, Samuel Blommaert, and David Pietersz de Vries among them — organized a colony on land purchased from the local Native people. The ship Walvis (the Whale, aptly) left Holland on 12 December 1630 under Captain Peter Heyes, carrying roughly twenty-eight men and supplies, with company agent Gillis Hossitt in charge on the ground. The settlers landed in the spring of 1631 — Lewes keeps 3 June as the date — on the creek then called Blommaert's Kill, and built a palisaded compound with a brick house, dormitory, and cookhouse. The purpose, in the words of de Vries's journal, was whale fishery and the cultivation of grain and tobacco. They called the place Zwaanendael: the valley of the swans.

Within about a year the colony was destroyed. The account de Vries himself recorded traces the catastrophe to a spiraling misunderstanding: a tin plate bearing the arms of Holland was taken from a post by a local man — to make a tobacco pipe, in the traditional telling — the Dutch complained, the man was killed by his own people to placate them, and his kin took vengeance on the settlement, killing the colonists as they worked outside the palisade. When de Vries arrived in December 1632 he found the buildings burned and the remains of the settlers. Brief as it was, Zwaanendael anchored the Dutch claim to the whole lower Delaware, shaping everything that followed — the resettlement of the 1650s, the Plockhoy Mennonite colony of 1663, and ultimately the town whose oldest surviving building is treated elsewhere in this archive.

What is the monument itself?

The De Vries monument was erected at the site by the state of Delaware and dedicated on 22 September 1909, in the era when the Delmarva states were fixing their founding stories in granite. The National Register listing of 23 February 1972 covers the palisade site under the name De Vries Palisade; the modern interpretive marker beside it was placed by the Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs. The 1930s added the site's grander companion a short walk away: the Zwaanendael Museum on Kings Highway, dedicated 7 May 1932 for the settlement's 300th anniversary, modeled on the old city hall of Hoorn in Holland, with a statue of de Vries standing on its gable.

Where the pictures are — a finding guide

Since this address was originally a page of images, here is where the visual record of Zwaanendael and the monument actually lives. The Zwaanendael Museum, run by the Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs, holds and displays artwork of the settlement, including Stanley M. Arthurs's painting of the landing of the de Vries colony. The Delaware Public Archives holds the state's photographic record of Lewes and the monument. The Historical Marker Database has free contemporary photographs of the monument and its markers. The National Register nomination file for De Vries Palisade — reference 72000290, retrievable through the National Park Service's NRHP database — contains the site documentation. And the photographs Hazel Brittingham herself took and collected are in the Hazel Brittingham Collections Center at the Lewes Historical Society, which is where a researcher wanting the deep record should start.