People who made a difference — three sisters, a colonel and a poet

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

The Rodney sisters and the school of 1869

In the spring of 1869 a two-building complex at the corner of South Street — now Savannah Road — and Second Street became the site of a school run by three sisters: Mary, Clementine and Lydia Rodney.

The date matters. Four years after the end of the Civil War, in a former slave state, three unmarried women opened and ran an educational establishment. For women of their class in 1869 teaching was one of very few respectable routes to independent work, and running a school — rather than being employed in one — put them in charge of premises, fees and curriculum.

They carried a name that in Delaware means something. Caesar Rodney is the state’s revolutionary hero, and the Rodney name attaches to families across the state; the sisters’ own relationship to that line is not established by the sources available to us and we are not going to assert a descent we cannot document.

Nor can we say from these sources who the school taught, on what terms, or how long it lasted. That is a genuine gap, and it is the kind of gap that swallows women’s institutional history routinely.

Colonel Samuel Boyer Davis

Davis belongs to the military strand of the town’s memory, associated with the defence of Lewes in the War of 1812 — the period covered in detail on our pages about the bombardment and the Cannonball House.

That was a defence conducted largely by local men. The militia companies that held the town included Delaware Bay and river pilots — Gilbert McCracken and his son Henry among them, whose house took the cannonball that gives the museum its name. A colonel commanding such a force is commanding his neighbours.

The detail of Davis’s career is not something we can document from the sources to hand, and we have not padded this section to disguise that.

Gilbert Byron

Gilbert Valliant Byron (12 July 1903 – 25 June 1991) is the best-documented of the three subjects. Born in Chestertown, Maryland, he became the pre-eminent literary chronicler of the Chesapeake Bay, publishing fourteen books and more than seventy short stories, poems and articles — probably the largest body of written work on the Chesapeake region by any single author.

He is called “the Chesapeake Thoreau” partly for the solitary, closely observed nature writing and partly for a coincidence he enjoyed: he shared a birthday with Henry David Thoreau. He spent forty-five years in a log cabin on the Eastern Shore, which was saved from demolition and moved to the Pickering Creek Audubon Center in Easton, Maryland in the early 1990s.

His Lewes connection is the years he taught and wrote here, which is the subject of the separate page at gilbert.html in this archive — an address Wikipedia still cites.

What the selection tells you

A schoolteacher, a soldier and a writer. No shipowners, no merchants, no politicians of note. For a local historian choosing who “made a difference” in a small town, the criteria were evidently teaching, defending and describing — not wealth.

It is a characteristic choice, and consistent with the rest of her work: Mrs. Brittingham was interested in the people who left a mark on the town rather than the people who extracted a living from it.

From the original page at this address

“Activities in the spring of 1869 at the two-building complex at the corner of South Street (now Savannah Road) and Second Street in coastal Lewes, Delaware, must have been awesome.”

Hazel D. Brittingham, “People Who Made A Difference”, Lewestown Publishers, 1997. © Copyright 1997 Hazel D. Brittingham. Short extract quoted for commentary; the full original is at the Internet Archive.