Four streets, and the 1722 survey that had to sort them out

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

What goes wrong with an unsurveyed town

Early colonial settlements were rarely laid out with precision, and Lewes had been settled, destroyed and resettled more than once before anyone got serious about the plan. Lots were granted, fences went up, buildings encroached, and the boundaries that mattered were whatever the neighbours had agreed to or fought over.

By 1704 the complaints were formal enough that a re-survey was recognised as necessary — irregularities in the boundaries of lots, of public places and of streets. The original plan had evidently ceased to describe the town that actually existed.

Nothing happened for eighteen years. That gap is the most human detail in the story: everybody agreed the survey was needed and nobody wanted to be the one who paid for it, or who told a neighbour his fence was in the road.

Shankland’s re-survey, 1722

In 1722 the court finally ordered the work, and the surveyor Robert Shankland carried it out. A re-survey of this kind is not a mapping exercise but an act of adjudication: the surveyor establishes where the lines are, and in doing so decides who has been encroaching and who has not.

The result fixed the pattern of the old town — the four principal streets and the lots between them — and that pattern has largely held for three centuries. When you walk from the Zwaanendael Museum down Second Street to the canal, the reason the blocks make sense is that somebody sorted them out in 1722.

The streets themselves

Lewes street names are a useful index to what the town did. Front Street ran along the water — and carried at least three names, which we cover on our page about the roadway with three names. Second and Third Streets run parallel behind it, in the plain numbering colonial towns favoured. Shipcarpenter Street names the trade that built the place. Pilottown Road names the men who took the ships up the bay. Kings Highway names an allegiance.

That is a working port town described in six words. There is no Church Street, no Market Square grandeur, no attempt at a ceremonial axis. The streets are numbered, or they are named for what happened on them.

Why the grid still matters

The practical consequence for a visitor is that historic Lewes is walkable in a way most American towns are not. It is flat, compact and rational, with the water at one edge and the whole of the old settlement inside a few blocks. Our historic walking guide covers the circuit.

The Lewes Historic District, added to the National Register in 1977, takes in 122 contributing buildings and six contributing sites across most of the seventeenth-century town and part of Pilot Town. The district exists as a coherent thing to protect largely because Shankland drew the lines that everything since has been built inside.

From the original page at this address

“A survey of the streets of Lewes was made by Surveyor Robert Shankland in 1722 at the request of the court. The need for such a survey had been recognized as early as 1704 when the city fathers were hearing complaints about irregularities in boundaries of lots, public places, and streets.”

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