The Presbyterian church — and the Bicentennial idea that made people ask

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

A very good small idea

When American towns cast about for projects to mark the Bicentennial of 1976, the results were usually a plaque, a parade or a pageant — things that happen once. Lewes lit a building, every night, indefinitely.

It is worth appreciating how well that works. A floodlit church on a main approach road does something no plaque can: it makes strangers ask a question. Mrs. Brittingham’s original page opens on exactly that scene — an overnight visitor asking a resident what the lit church is, and being told. The lighting is a permanent conversation starter about the town’s history, installed for the price of some fittings and a standing electricity bill.

Most Bicentennial projects have long since been forgotten by the towns that staged them. This one is still working every night.

Presbyterians in Lewes

A Presbyterian congregation in a Delaware bay town is unsurprising. The middle colonies drew heavily on Scots-Irish settlement, and Presbyterianism travelled with it down the peninsula; Delaware and the surrounding country carried a mix of Anglican establishment, Presbyterian settlement, Quaker influence from Pennsylvania and, from the later eighteenth century, the rapid Methodist expansion described on our page about faith in Lewes.

The church stands on Kings Highway, the road running north-west out of the old town toward the ferry terminal and the highway — which is precisely why the lighting is effective. It is on the route most visitors arrive by.

Reading a town by its churches

The three religious buildings covered in this archive make a legible pattern. St. Peter’s is tall, central and old-established: the church of the colonial settlement, built to be seen from the water. The Methodist meeting house of 1790 is small, plain and survives only as somebody’s house: the church of a movement that arrived later, poorer and hungrier. The Presbyterian church sits on the approach road, and the town chose to floodlight it.

Between them they map roughly two hundred years of who was here, in what numbers, with what money, and what they wanted a stranger to notice first.

From the original page at this address

“It would not be unusual for an overnight visitor in coastal Lewes, Delaware, to inquire about the identity of the church on Kings Highway that is bathed in light each evening. A resident would reply, ‘Oh, that’s the Lewes Presbyterian Church.’”

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