Before it was Lewes, it was the Whorekill

Written July 2026 · Sources last checked 10 July 2026 · Corrections: hello@lewestown.com

Where the name sat in the sequence

The place collected names the way the cape offshore did. The Dutch patroons' settlement of 1631 called its creek Blommaert's Kill, for Samuel Blommaert of the Dutch West India Company; the doomed colony beside it was Zwaanendael, the valley of swans. After the colony's destruction, the name that stuck to the creek in Dutch records — appearing as Hoeren-kil or Hoere-kil from about 1642 — is the one the English later rendered as Whorekill or Horekill. Kil is simply Dutch for creek. The name spread from the creek to the resettled village and then to the whole region: when the Dutch briefly retook the colony from the English in 1673, a court district was organized around the Whorekill, covering the territory from Bombay Hook south.

The district's later paper trail is tidy. In 1680 the Whorekill district was divided into Deale County, seated at the village (briefly New Deale), and St. Jones County to the north. In 1682 the Delaware territories passed to William Penn in settlement of a family debt, and Penn renamed Deale County as Sussex and the town as Lewes, after the county and town in England he knew — while St. Jones became Kent. Lewes remained the county seat until 1791, when it moved to the new, more central town of Georgetown. The village had also absorbed harder blows than renaming: on Christmas Eve 1673 it was raided and burned by Maryland soldiers acting for Lord Baltimore, one episode in the long boundary quarrel that runs through all of Lewes's early history.

So does the name come from Hoorn — or does it mean what it says?

There are two schools, and this page presents both because the evidence genuinely splits.

The polite school, long the standard account in county histories, derives the name from Hoorn, the prosperous Dutch port on the Zuiderzee — the city tied to the settlement's founders and the birthplace tradition assigns to David Pietersz de Vries, the patroon most associated with Zwaanendael. On this reading, Hoornkill was corrupted by English tongues into Horekill and then Whorekill, and the scandalous meaning is an accident of translation. Lewes's own tercentenary architecture endorses the connection: the Zwaanendael Museum of 1931 is modeled on Hoorn's old city hall.

The skeptical school, argued in detail by the Delmarva place-name researcher Chris Slavens, points out that the earliest Dutch spellings are consistently Hoeren and Hoere — the plain Dutch word for prostitutes — not Hoorn, and that Dutch mapmakers who spelled Kaap Hoorn correctly elsewhere would have been unlikely to misspell their own famous city here. On this reading the English name was an accurate translation, not a corruption, and the sanitized Hoorn derivation is later whitewash. Explanations for why the name would have been applied range from encounters between sailors and Native women to, more prosaically, a similar Middle Dutch word for mud.

Hazel Brittingham examined the question in her 1997 article “The Name of Whorekill” at this address — the piece Wikipedia's account of Delaware's counties cited for years. Her original, with her own reading of the record, is preserved at the Internet Archive and linked above; readers should weigh it alongside the sources below.