The roadway with three names — and the renaming that failed in 1937

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

Three names for one road

The stretch in question follows the Lewes and Rehoboth Canal for about two-tenths of a mile, from the Little League park to the canal bridge. It is Front Street now. In an earlier era it was sometimes called First Street, and there are references to it as Water Street as well.

None of these are mistakes. They are three accurate descriptions of the same road by people prioritising different things: Front Street because it fronts the water, First Street because it is the first street in the numbered sequence running back from it, Water Street because that is what is on the other side. A town does not need a naming committee to end up with three names; it only needs three groups of people with three habits.

The 1937 attempt

In 1937 an effort was made to rename the road Canal Street. It failed.

The proposal was not unreasonable — by then the road really did run along a canal. The Lewes and Rehoboth Canal, first proposed in 1803, had finally been built by the Army Corps of Engineers between 1913 and 1916, connecting the Broadkill River and Delaware Bay through to Rehoboth Bay as part of the Intracoastal Waterway. A generation on, “Canal Street” would have described the place accurately.

It still failed, which tells you something durable about street names. They are not descriptions that get updated; they are habits, and habits outlast the reasoning behind them. The road kept the name it had when the water beside it was a different kind of water.

What is on it now

Front Street carries a good deal of what visitors come to Lewes for. The Cannonball House stands at 118, with the British cannonball still set in its foundation and the anchors outside the door. The 1812 Memorial Park is close by, and the canal and drawbridge are the reason the street bends the way it does.

It is a short walk, and the layering is the interest: an eighteenth-century house damaged in an 1813 bombardment, standing on a road named for a waterfront, beside a canal dug in the 1910s, which somebody tried and failed to name the street after in 1937.

From the original page at this address

“Front Street in Lewes, following the Lewes and Rehoboth Canal about two-tenths of a mile from the Little League Park to the canal bridge, was sometimes in an earlier era called First Street. There are references, also, to Water Street. An effort to rename it Canal Street in 1937 failed.”

Hazel D. Brittingham, “The Roadway With Three Names”, Lewestown Publishers, 1997. © Copyright 1997 Hazel D. Brittingham. Short extract quoted for commentary; the full original is at the Internet Archive.