Delaware Colony

The Lower Counties on the Delaware was a semi-autonomous region of the proprietary Province of Pennsylvania in North America. Although not royally sanctioned, Delaware consisted of the three counties on the west bank of the Delaware River Bay.

In the early 17th century, the area was inhabited by Lenape and possibly Assateague Indian tribes. The first European settlers were Swedes, who established the colony of New Sweden at Fort Christina in present-day Wilmington, Delaware, in 1638. The Dutch captured the colony in 1655 and annexed it to New Netherland to the north. England subsequently took control of it from the Dutch in 1664. In 1682, William Penn, the Quaker proprietor of the Province of Pennsylvania to the north, leased the three lower counties on the Delaware River from James, the Duke of York, who went on to become King James II.

The three lower counties on the Delaware River were governed as part of the Province of Pennsylvania from 1682 to 1701, when the lower counties petitioned for and were granted an independent colonial legislature; the two colonies shared the same governor until 1776. The English colonists who settled in Delaware were mainly Quakers. In the first half of the 18th century, New Castle and Philadelphia became the primary ports of entry to the new world for a quarter of a million Irish Protestant immigrants from Ulster, referred to as Scotch-Irish in America and Ulster Scots in Ireland. Delaware had no established religion at this time.