One night before Christmas — 1673, and forty armed horsemen

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

A settlement with a habit of being destroyed

By Christmas 1673 this shore had already been wiped out twice. The Dutch colony of Zwaanendael, founded in 1631, ended in 1632 with all thirty-two settlers killed. Pieter Plockhoy’s Mennonite settlement of 1663 was razed by the English in 1664, with reports afterwards that not even a nail was left. Our page on early Lewes sets out both.

What regrew afterwards was a small, poor, mixed community at the place the Dutch called the Hoernkill and the English the Whorekill — the subject of its own page in this archive. It was this settlement that the horsemen rode into.

The raid

The riders came under the command of Captain Thomas Howell, and the timing — Christmas Eve, in winter, on horseback — was not accidental. A raid at that season on a settlement of that size is not a battle; it is an eviction backed by force.

The underlying quarrel was jurisdictional. The Delaware shore was claimed by more than one colonial authority in this period, and Maryland’s claim against the Dutch and then the English holders of the Delaware was pressed repeatedly through the seventeenth century, sometimes on paper and sometimes with armed men. The boundary disputes that produced this raid ran on for the better part of a century afterwards, and are related to the mapmaker’s confusion described on our page about the naming of Cape Henlopen.

Mrs. Brittingham’s telling frames the night as a tragedy from which a miracle arose. We have not been able to verify the specific events of the night from independent records, and so this page records the raid and its context rather than retelling her account of what followed.

Why it is worth remembering

Three destructions in forty-two years — 1632, 1664, 1673 — is a remarkable record for a settlement that now advertises itself as the First Town in the First State. The slogan implies continuity. The record shows a place that was repeatedly ended and repeatedly restarted because the geography at the mouth of the bay was too valuable for anyone to leave alone.

The 1673 raid is the least commemorated of the three. There is no marker for it comparable to the cannonball in the wall, and no annual observance. It is the sort of event that survives in local history writing and nowhere else, which is a reasonable argument for keeping local history writing.

From the original page at this address

“It was Christmas Eve in the year 1673 when about 40 armed horsemen thundered into the area which, a decade later, would be named Sussex County. Under the command of Captain Thomas Howell…”

Hazel D. Brittingham, “One Night Before Christmas”, Lewestown Publishers, 1997. © Copyright 1997 Hazel D. Brittingham. Short extract quoted for commentary; the full original is at the Internet Archive.