Delaware Colony - New Castle, Kent and Sussex Counties, Pennsylvania

New Castle, Kent and Sussex Counties, Pennsylvania

The area now known as Delaware became owned by William Penn, the Quaker owner of Pennsylvania. In contemporary documents from the early Revolutionary period, the area is generally referred to as "The Three Lower Counties on the Delaware River" (Lower Counties on Delaware) or by the names of the three counties, all of which retained linguistic and cultural connections to those of Maryland; New Castle, which related well to North East England's Newcastle as the defunct Durham County, Maryland (both Newcastle and Durham were relatively close to the Calvert regional identity as that of Northern England--and as landlords in County Longford, of the Irish Midlands, their barony shared some characteristics with the earlier English Catholic plantation by Mary I of England and Philip II of Spain in Queen's and King's counties), while Kent was contiguous with neighboring Kent County, Maryland and Sussex generally held a similar origin to Sussex County, Virginia, being the furthest removed from Penn's colony. The term "Lower Counties" refers to the fact that they were below the fall line, or farther downstream, on the Delaware River than the counties constituting and integrally within Pennsylvania proper, such as Philadelphia, Chester and Bucks counties.

After William Penn was granted the province of Pennsylvania by King Charles II in 1681, he asked for and later received the lands of Delaware from the Duke of York. Penn had a very hard time governing Delaware because the economy and geology was largely the same as that of the Chesapeake. He attempted to merge the governments of Pennsylvania and the lower counties of Delaware. Representatives from both areas clashed heavily and in 1701 Penn agreed in having two separate assemblies. Delawareans would meet in New Castle and Pennsylvanians would gather in Philadelphia. Delaware, like Philadelphia and unlike Maryland, continued to be a melting pot of sorts and was home to Swedes, Finns, Dutch, French, in addition to the English who constituted the dominant culture.