Historic Markers in Delaware

Bethany Beach, DE

Built around 1902-03, this was the third of five houses raised by John Addy along Ocean View Parkway in the early resort days of Bethany Beach. Donated to the town in 1999, it was moved to become part of the Bethany Beach Nature Center, preserving a piece of the seaside community's founding era.

New Castle County, DE · est. 1952

This marker traces the tactical crux of the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777, where General Anthony Wayne held the American center near Chadds Ford, facing west across the creek. While Washington's attention was fixed on Cornwallis's flanking march three miles to the north, General Knyphausen's British and Hessian division forced a crossing of the Brandywine and drove Wayne's men back. The double blow — a flanking column and a frontal assault — unhinged the whole American position.

Seaford, DE · est. 1995

On the eve of World War II, a DuPont laboratory in Seaford turned a decade of fundamental chemical research into the world's first fully synthetic fiber. Spun from materials drawn out of coal, air, and water, nylon promised strength and elasticity to rival silk, and its December 1939 debut opened an age of synthetics that reshaped clothing, industry, and everyday life.

Sussex County, DE

Many early settlers of this corner of what was then Maryland were Presbyterians who had fled religious persecution, long forced to travel great distances to worship. In 1763 the charismatic Reverend Charles Tennent — son of William Tennent, whose Log College seeded Princeton — organized a congregation here, and the church was built in 1767. Services faded by the late 19th century, and the congregation was formally dissolved in 1921.

Bethany Beach, DE

In the summer of 1930, Thomas Granville Walston and his wife Minnie Ann opened a bowling alley on the Bethany Beach boardwalk, between First and Second Streets, in what was then a quiet Methodist-founded seaside resort on Delaware's Atlantic coast. For decades it was a fixture of boardwalk life, later carried on by their daughter Zada and her husband Bill Wildus. Like so much of America's early-20th-century beach-resort culture, it eventually gave way to changing times, remembered now only by this marker's promise that it is "gone but not forgotten."

Bethany Beach, DE

Ensign Henry Clay Drexler, who grew up in Bethany Beach as the son of a Delaware state senator, died aboard the USS Trenton on October 24, 1924, when he tried to save shipmates during a gun turret explosion. For his sacrifice he was awarded the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. This marker honors a local son's peacetime heroism.

New Castle, DE

The Dutch raised Fort Casimir on this ground in 1651 to command the lower Delaware River and the trade that moved along it. Within a few years the little fort became the prize in a rivalry among three European powers: New Sweden forces seized it in 1654, the Dutch recaptured it in 1655, and the English took control of the whole valley in 1664. The settlement that grew up around it became New Castle.

Rehoboth Beach, DE

The Lewes-Rehoboth Canal was dreamed of as early as 1803 but sat unbuilt for generations, its ten-mile cut between Delaware Bay and Rehoboth Bay meant to speed farm goods toward the markets of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Real digging began only in 1866, and it took the backing of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a 1912 act of Congress to finally see it through, opening in 1916 and finishing in 1923. Much of it was carved by a suction dredge that worked the streambed like an underwater vacuum.

Sussex County, DE

As American shipping boomed after the Civil War, the treacherous Atlantic coast claimed vessels and crews at an alarming rate. In 1876 the United States Life-Saving Service built this Delaware station as part of a chain of outposts whose surfmen kept watch and rowed into the breakers to rescue the shipwrecked. Their motto held that regulations required them to go out — but said nothing about coming back.

New Castle County, DE

Between 1763 and 1767, the English astronomers Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon carried out one of the most precise surveys of the colonial era, settling a long and bitter boundary dispute between the Penn and Calvert families. This point served as a base reference from which their famous line was run westward. Guided by the stars and painstaking measurement, they drew the border that would forever bear their names.

Lewes, DE

The Blizzard of March 1888, remembered as the "Great White Hurricane," buried the northeastern United States under enormous drifts and paralyzed cities, railroads, and shipping for days. Along the Delaware coast at Lewes, the storm's fury drove vessels aground and battered the harbor. It stands among the most destructive weather events in the region's recorded history.

Ocean View, DE

This modest frame dwelling has stood in the small Sussex County town of Ocean View since about 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, when this stretch of coastal Delaware was still a quiet landscape of farms, timber, and small crossroads communities well before it became a beach-resort corridor. Homes like the Tunnell-West House anchored such towns, passing through local families across generations. Its listing on the National Register of Historic Places marks it as a recognized survivor of that antebellum era, worth preserving as the region around it transformed.

Seaford, DE · est. 2000

At the DuPont laboratories, chemist Wallace Carothers began pioneering studies here in 1928 into 'giant molecules,' confirming that long chains of repeating units — polymers — could be built by design. His research led swiftly to neoprene, the first American synthetic rubber, in 1932, and in 1939 to nylon, the world's first fully synthetic textile fiber. Carothers laid the scientific groundwork for the age of plastics before his death in 1937.