Delmarva Peninsula

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Lore & Background

In older sources, the peninsula between Delaware Bay and Chesapeake Bay was variously known as the Delaware and Chesapeake Peninsula or simply the Chesapeake Peninsula. This term derives from the Chesapeake people, Native Americans who called their home K'che-sepi-ack, which translates as 'country on a great river.' The Chesapeake were victims of a genocide carried out by the Powhatan sometime before the arrival of the English at Jamestown in 1607. The toponym Delmarva is a clipped compound of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia (abbreviated Va.), which in turn was modeled after Delmar, a border town named after Delaware and Maryland. The earliest uses of the name Delmarva occurred several years after Delmar was founded in 1859; for example on February 10, 1877, in The Middletown Transcript newspaper in Middletown, Delaware. General use of the term did not occur until the 1920s.

Reader's Guide

The Delmarva Peninsula holds significance as a geographic and historical region bridging three states. Its pre-Columbian history includes evidence of human habitation from about 10,000 BC to 8000 BC – since the last ice age. Recent research indicates that Paleo-Indians inhabited Maryland during the pre-Clovis period (before 13,000 BP). Archaeological sites such as Miles Point, Oyster Cove, and Cator's Cove on the coastal plain of the Delmarva Peninsula help to document a pre-Clovis presence in the Middle Atlantic region. In 1970 a stone tool (a biface) said to resemble Solutrean stone tools was dredged up by the trawler Cinmar off the east coast of Virginia in an area that would have been dry land prior to the rising sea levels of the Pleistocene Epoch. The tool was allegedly found in the same dredge load that contained a mastodon's remains; the mastodon tusks were later determined to be 22,000 years old. The peninsula was contested among European powers: in 1566, an expedition sent from Spanish Florida by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés reached the Delmarva Peninsula, but a storm thwarted their attempts at establishing a colony. The land that is currently Delaware was first colonized by the Dutch West India Company in 1631 as Zwaanendael. That colony lasted one year before a dispute with local Indians led to its destruction. In 1638, New Sweden was established which colonized the northern part of the state, together with the Delaware Valley. Eventually, the Dutch recaptured Delaware and incorporated the colony into the Colony of New Netherland. Delaware came under British control in 1664. In the 1632 Charter of Maryland, King Charles I of England granted the peninsula to Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, as the colony of Maryland; however, a clause in the charter granted only that part of the peninsula that had not already been colonized by Europeans by 1632. Over a century later, it was decided in the case of Penn v Lord Baltimore that, because the Dutch had colonized Zwaanendael in 1631, the portion of Maryland's charter granting Delaware to Maryland was void. The primary Indigenous peoples of the ocean side of the lower peninsula prior to the arrival of Europeans were the Assateague, including the Assateague, Transquakin, Choptico, Moteawaughkin, Quequashkecaquick, Hatsawap, Wachetak, Marauqhquaick, and Manaskson. The upper peninsula and the Chesapeake shore was the home of Nanticoke-speaking people such as the Nentigo and Choptank. The Assateague and Nentigo made a number of treaties with the colony of Maryland, but the land was gradually taken and those treaties dissolved for the use of the colonists, and the native peoples of the peninsula assimilated into other Algonquian tribes as far north as Ontario. Currently, the peninsula is within the traditional territory of the Piscataway, Nentego, and Lenape peoples. Dover, Delaware, is the peninsula's largest city by population. The main commercial areas are Dover in the north and Salisbury, Maryland, near its center. Including all offshore islands, the largest of which is Kent Island in Maryland, the total land area south of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal is 5,454 sq mi (14,130 km2). At the 2020 census the total population was 818,000, giving an average population density of 149.43 inhabitants per square mile (57.70/km2).

Did You Know?

• The toponym Delmarva is a clipped compound of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia (abbreviated Va.), modeled after the border town Delmar, which was founded and named in 1859.
• The earliest known use of the name Delmarva appeared on February 10, 1877, in The Middletown Transcript newspaper in Middletown, Delaware.
• In 1566, an expedition sent from Spanish Florida by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés reached the Delmarva Peninsula, but a storm thwarted their attempts at establishing a colony.
• A stone tool (a biface) dredged up by the trawler Cinmar off the east coast of Virginia in 1970 was allegedly found in the same dredge load that contained a mastodon's remains; the mastodon tusks were later determined to be 22,000 years old.
• The Chesapeake people, from whom the peninsula's older name derives, were victims of a genocide carried out by the Powhatan sometime before the arrival of the English at Jamestown in 1607.