Two visual images — a Dutch gable and an English coat of arms

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

The Dutch building that is younger than the cars parked outside it

The Zwaanendael Museum looks like the oldest building in Lewes and is one of the newer ones. It was completed in 1932, to mark the three hundredth anniversary of the 1631 colony, and designed by the Wilmington architect E. William Martin.

It is a deliberate copy. The design was adapted from the Statenlogement in Hoorn, in North Holland — the town several of the Zwaanendael investors came from — and it carries the full seventeenth-century Dutch vocabulary: a stepped facade gable, terra cotta roof tiles, carved stonework and decorated shutters. Above the front stands a statue of David Pietersen de Vries, one of the patroons of the colony.

So the most Dutch-looking thing in Delaware is a twentieth-century commemoration of a settlement that lasted about a year, built in the style of a town three and a half thousand miles away. That does not make it fake; it makes it a monument, and it is a very good one.

What is inside, including the mermaid

The museum interprets the history of Sussex County and Delaware’s southeastern coast: the shipwreck of HMS DeBraak, the lighthouses including the lost Cape Henlopen light, the 1813 British bombardment of the town, the pilots of the Delaware River and Bay, and the restless coastline itself.

It also holds the object people most often come back asking about: a Feejee mermaid. These were nineteenth-century curiosities — the torso of a monkey stitched to the tail of a fish and dried — made in Asia and sold to Western collectors and showmen, the most famous example having been exhibited by P. T. Barnum. The museum’s specimen originated in China and came to Lewes through a local family, donated on loan.

It is worth being clear that it is not a mermaid and was never intended to fool anyone for long. It is a genuine artefact of a real nineteenth-century trade in fabricated wonders, which makes it a better exhibit than an actual mermaid would be.

The English shields

The other image is heraldic. Around the town you will see shields displaying a coat of arms — the arms of Lewes in East Sussex, England, the town this one was named after. They are a nineteenth- and twentieth-century civic gesture rather than a colonial survival, asserting a link to the English namesake in the same way the museum asserts the Dutch one.

Between them, the gable and the shields tell you what Lewes decided to remember. A town that was Dutch for about a year and English for three centuries commemorates both, in architecture and heraldry, and does so mostly in the twentieth century. It is a small lesson in how heritage gets built: not handed down intact, but chosen, and then constructed.

If you are curious about the English Lewes on the other side of the shield, that is the other half of this site — the flint-and-castle town in the South Downs, with its own guides.

From the original page at this address

“Visitors in the coastal town of Lewes in Sussex County, Delaware, if just riding through or passing time while awaiting the next ferry to Cape May, will probably retain two visual images. One is the unusual architecture of the Zwaanendael Museum and the other, the colorful shields displaying the Coat of Arms of Lewes, England.”

Hazel D. Brittingham, “Visual Images — Dutch and English”, Lewestown Publishers, 1997. © Copyright 1997 Hazel D. Brittingham. Short extract quoted for commentary; the full original is at the Internet Archive.