Why Delaware? Small Wonder!

Day Zero

The idea of spending a month in Delaware started as joke, in June 2002, when Tex and I drove through the “First State” and marveled at its smallness, its obscurity and its lack of distinctiveness.

Think about it. Delaware is tiny, yet it does not have the distinction of being the smallest state. Its largest city is essentially a suburb of a city in another state. Its best-known politician is the vice-president. Delaware is the only state with no national parks and the primary reason most of us have even heard of the place is because Wilmington is the return address on 92 percent of our junk mail.

“We should spend an entire vacation touring Delaware,” I joked back in 2002. “If we stayed for a week we could spend one full day in each county…(punch line)…but then, what we would we do for the other four days?”

We laughed. Ha, ha, ha. However, as sometimes happens in the Pasley family, the “joke” took on a life of its own and, over time, the idea of a long vacation in the First State became ever more appealing.

Fast forward to 2010 and Betsy’s decision to retire in 2011 – when Tex will graduate from college in Maryland (a state that conveniently borders Delaware and once made a dubious claim to the colony; see footnote below).

I could prattle on, but I think you get the idea.

We leave on April 18. We will drive east and north via the Natchez Trace Parkway and the Blue Ridge Parkway. We will arrive at our beachfront condo in Lewes, DE on April 23 and will stay there until May 21. We will return via New York, Cleveland and Detroit (where unvisited baseball parks await). We should be home by June 1.

During our stay in Lewes there will be three side trips to Annapolis; for croquet, Tex's defense of his senior essay and, of course, the graduation ceremony. Those important side trips notwithstanding, our focus will be on Delaware.

I plan to write a daily account of our activities, but I may not get them all posted each day.

For more information on the Delaware Blue Hen, St. John's College, Croquet and Tex's senior essay you can navigate to the separate pages for those topics from the tabs at the top of this home page.

We invite you to bookmark this blog site and check in every now and then to see how we are doing and (hopefully) learn a little something (pun intended) about Delaware.

If you sign up for a Google account you can comment directly on this blog. It's not all that difficult but I have noted that most of the people that have posted comments on one of my blogs in the past have post-graduate degrees.

Of course if you feel compelled to opine or otherwise communicate more directly you can send me an e-mail any time. I'll likely check my e-mail once a day.

Finally, as Texans accustomed to looking at Texas highway maps, we are quite amused by the scale of the official Delaware highway map. Check out the photos of the map below.

Warning: Objects may be smaller than they appear.

Mileage chart with no three-digit numbers!

Footnote: The Delaware Colony was initially claimed by both Maryland and Pennsylvania. Following is some information about this claim from Wikipedia:

The Dutch were the first Europeans to settle in present-day Delaware in the Middle region by establishing a trading post at Zwaanendael, near the site of Lewes in 1631. Within a year all the settlers were killed in a dispute with area Indian tribes. In 1638 New Sweden, a Swedish trading post and colony, was established at Fort Christina (now in Wilmington) by Peter Minuit at the head of a group of Swedes, Finns and Dutch. The colony of New Sweden lasted for 17 years. In 1651, the Dutch, reinvigorated by the leadership of Peter Stuyvesant, established a fort at present-day New Castle, and in 1655 they conquered the New Sweden colony, annexing it into the Dutch New Netherland. Only nine years later, in 1664, the Dutch were conquered by a fleet of English ships led by Sir Robert Carr under the direction of James, the Duke of York. Fighting off a prior claim by Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, Proprietor of Maryland, the Duke passed his somewhat dubious ownership on to William Penn in 1682. Penn strongly desired access to the sea for his Pennsylvania province and leased what then came to be known as the "Lower Counties on the Delaware" from the Duke.

Penn established representative government and briefly combined his two possessions under one General Assembly in 1682. However, by 1704 the Province of Pennsylvania had grown so large that their representatives wanted to make decisions without the assent of the Lower Counties and the two groups of representatives began meeting on their own, one at Philadelphia, and the other at New Castle. Penn and his heirs remained proprietors of both and always appointed the same person Governor for their Province of Pennsylvania and their territory of the Lower Counties. The fact that Delaware and Pennsylvania shared the same governor was not unique. From 1703-1738, New York and New Jersey shared a governor. Massachusetts and New Hampshire also shared a governor for some time.

Dependent in early years on indentured labor, Delaware imported more slaves as the number of English immigrants decreased with better economic conditions in England. The colony became a slave society and cultivated tobacco as a cash crop, although English immigrants continued to arrive. Before the Revolution, it had begun to shift to mixed agriculture.