Monday Daily Delawhere [2.27.12]

February 27th, 2012 • Related • Filed Under
By Delaware Dem

There Are 4 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by mediawatch on 27 February 2012 at 7:47 am:

    Courthouse, Old New Castle

  2. Comment by Jason330 on 27 February 2012 at 8:18 am:

    Did you know the 12 mile arc that forms Delaware’s northern boundary line is measured from that copula? It is the only nominally circular state boundary line in the United States. So suck it Texas!!

  3. Comment by mediawatch on 27 February 2012 at 8:21 am:

    Damn right. And if someone could have found a longer string, we might have been able to stretch that boundary all the way north and west to Route 1.

  4. Comment by Nancy Willing on 27 February 2012 at 11:24 am:

    A curiosity:

    From Wiki – the 12-mile arc was first described in a 1682 deed to William Penn from the Duke of York. The 12-mile range extended just up to the still-very-much “no-man’s-land” of that time: territory of the dangerous, aggressive, Iroguois-speaking indians. Coastal tribes were friendly but 17th Century Iroquios, not so much.

    The mid-Atlantic coastal territories between the Delaware and the Hudson rivers were claimed, mostly for Iroquios indian fur trade, by Dutch 1615, Swedes 1638, Dutch again 1650 and finally by the English in 1667 [I am currently reading Russell Shorto's "The Island in the Center of the World" about the Swedish colonization of America].

    Check the link below – the New Castle arc coincides roughly with the southeastern boundary of the Iroquois at the curve of the peidmont.

    http://www.pencaderheritage.org/main/historymaps/phhistmap4.html

    Pencader’s unattributed image is from a pictoral history book I distributed back when I was trying to save the La Grange farm.

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