Wilmington, Delaware

• 1. Introduction

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  Wilmington, Delaware sits at a point where two rivers meet the sea, and that geography has shaped nearly everything about it. The Christina River and Brandywine Creek converge here before the Christina empties into the Delaware River, and for nearly four centuries this confluence has drawn settlers, industrialists, soldiers, and bankers to a city that outsiders frequently overlook.

  In March 1638, two ships called the Fogel Grip and the Kalmar Nyckel sailed into these waters carrying settlers from the Swedish South Company. Their commander, Peter Minuit, purchased the land from a Lenape chief named Mattahorn and built a fortification he called Fort Christina, named after the queen of Sweden. That fort became the first permanent Swedish settlement in North America, and the ground beneath it is still the heart of the city today.

  With a population of 70,898 at the 2020 census, Wilmington is Delaware's largest city. It is also the corporate home of more than half of all publicly traded companies in the United States, and over 60 percent of the Fortune 500. How a small river city became one of the most legally and financially consequential addresses in America is a story that runs from colonial forts through Civil War shipyards to a single piece of legislation passed in 1981.

• 2. Lenape Roots and Swedish Ambition

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  Before the Swedish ships arrived, the area carried a different name. The Lenape band led by Sachem Mattahorn called the place "Maax-waas Unk," meaning Bear Place, after the Maax-waas Hanna, or Bear River, which flowed nearby. Henry Hudson had sailed up the Delaware River in 1609, but European settlement did not follow immediately.

  When Peter Minuit's expedition purchased Maax-waas Unk in 1638, they renamed the Bear River the Christina, after their queen, and built their fort at its mouth near what is now the foot of Seventh Street. The Swedes called the area "The Rocks." Fort Christina served as headquarters for the colony of New Sweden, which stretched across parts of present-day Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

  The colony produced a notable first in North American medicine. Dr. Timothy Stidham, born in 1610 in what was probably Hammel, Denmark, and raised in Gothenburg, Sweden, arrived in New Sweden in 1654 and is recorded as the first physician in Delaware. The colony's most powerful governor was Colonel Johan Printz, who ruled under Swedish law from 1643 to 1653. His successor Johan Rising arrived in 1654 and immediately seized the Dutch post Fort Casimir at the site of present-day New Castle.

  That act of aggression had consequences. In the autumn of 1655, a Dutch fleet commanded by Peter Stuyvesant overpowered the Swedish forts, ending Swedish rule in North America entirely. The settlement the Swedes had built around Fort Christina, however, did not disappear. It survived, changed hands again to the British in 1664, and continued growing under Quaker influence connected to Proprietor William Penn.

• 3. Naming, Chartering, and the Grid

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  The settlement that became Wilmington passed through two different names before receiving the one it keeps today. The first developer of the land, Thomas Willing, organized the area in a grid pattern modeled on its northern neighbor Philadelphia, and the settlement was incorporated as the Village of Willingtown in 1731.

  In 1739, King George II granted a borough charter within the Delaware Colony that changed the name to Wilmington. The new name almost certainly honored Spencer Compton, Earl of Wilmington, who had served as British Prime Minister and taken his title from Wilmington in East Sussex, in southern England.

  Wilming­ton's grid streets survive today, running north-south by name and east-west by number north of Lancaster Avenue, while streets south of that divider carry names instead of numbers. Market Street divides east from west. This orderly layout goes back directly to Thomas Willing's original plan, and the street pattern that visitors walk through now is essentially the one he drew nearly three centuries ago.

  The British military arrived uninvited during the American Revolution. Shortly after the Battle of Brandywine on the 11th of September 1777, British troops occupied Wilmington and remained until they vacated Philadelphia in 1778. That occupation left no permanent mark on the city's structure, but the next wave of outside arrivals would transform it entirely.

• 4. Industry and the DuPont Stamp

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  In 1800, Eleuthère Irénée du Pont emigrated from France to the United States. Du Pont brought with him a precise knowledge of gunpowder manufacture, and by 1802 he had established a mill on the Brandywine River just north of Brandywine Village and just outside the Wilmington town limits. The DuPont company grew into a major supplier to the U.S. military, and the mill village along the Brandywine was eventually annexed by the city.

  The Civil War accelerated Wilmington's industrial expansion more dramatically than any other event in its history. Delaware remained in the Union but was a border state divided in its loyalties, and the war generated enormous demand for goods that Wilmington's factories could provide: ships, railroad cars, gunpowder, shoes, and other war materials. By 1868, the city was producing more iron ships than the rest of the country combined. It ranked first nationally in gunpowder production and second in carriages and leather.

  The wealth from that wartime boom pushed residential development westward along tree-lined streets of large homes. The first horsecar line, started in 1864 along Delaware Avenue, made that expansion possible. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, businessman William Poole Bancroft, influenced by the landscape work of Frederick Law Olmsted, led the creation of Rockford Park and Brandywine Park, establishing the city's first comprehensive park system.

  DuPont's influence extended well beyond the factory. The company built Wawaset Park in 1918 as a residential community for its employees, commissioning Baltimore architect Edward L. Palmer Jr. to design homes on a 50-acre plot that had previously served as a horse racing track and fairground. Wawaset Park was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.

• 5. Occupation, Riots, and Decline

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  The 20th century brought both wars and upheaval to Wilmington's streets. Both World Wars kept the city's shipyards, steel foundries, and chemical producers running around the clock. The labor demand drew large numbers of migrants to the city, and racial tensions that followed boiled over in the Wilmington race riot of 1919.

  The construction of Interstate 95 in the 1950s cut through several Wilmington neighborhoods and accelerated the population decline that suburban growth had already begun. Urban renewal projects in the 1950s and 1960s cleared entire blocks of housing in the Center City and East Side areas.

  The most severe political episode in the city's modern history followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the 4th of April 1968. A few days later, riots erupted. On the 9th of April, Governor Charles L. Terry Jr. deployed the National Guard and the Delaware State Police at the request of Mayor John Babiarz. Babiarz asked Terry to withdraw the Guard the following week. The governor refused, keeping them in place until his term ended in January 1969. That nine-month deployment is reported to be the longest occupation of an American city by state forces in the nation's history.

  In 2014, the city recorded 28 homicides, producing a rate of 39.5 per 100,000 residents, ten times the national average. By August 2017, Wilmington had already surpassed its total homicide count for all of 2016. A turnaround followed: according to the Wilmington Police Department's 2018 Compstat report, shooting incidents that year dropped to 72, a 33 percent decrease from the 15-year average of 108.

• 6. Finance, Corporations, and the 1981 Pivot

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  The single law that most reshaped Wilmington's economy in modern times was the Financial Center Development Act of 1981, passed under Governor Pierre S. du Pont IV. Among its provisions, the act eliminated the usury laws that most states maintained, removing the cap on interest rates banks could legally charge customers. Similar liberalizing legislation followed in 1986.

  National and international banks moved operations to the city. Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, and Barclays all maintain Wilmington presences, typically running credit card operations. The Dutch banking giant ING Groep N.V. headquartered its U.S. internet banking unit, ING Direct, in Wilmington; that unit later became Capital One 360. Wilmington Trust is based at Rodney Square in the city center.

  Delaware's corporate law framework draws companies for reasons beyond banking. The state's Court of Chancery decides legal disputes with a judge rather than a jury, and is known for its speed and expertise in corporate matters. It can grant injunctions and restraining orders of particular value when shareholders seek to block mergers or acquisitions. A dedicated chancery courthouse was built in Georgetown, Sussex County, in 2003, and has hosted high-profile proceedings including the Disney shareholder litigation.

  Because so many companies incorporate in Delaware, the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, located in Wilmington, handles one of the largest caseloads of the 94 federal bankruptcy courts in the country. Wilmington is also home to one Fortune 500 company, E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, and hosts science and technology firms including Incyte, Chemours, Corteva, and Solenis.

• 7. Culture, Festivals, and Bob Marley

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  Wilmington's ethnic diversity surfaces most visibly each spring and summer when the city's neighborhoods host a series of festivals. The Italian Festival, held annually by St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in the second week of June, is the most popular. Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church organizes a Greek Festival, and St. Hedwig's Catholic Church hosts the Polish Festival. The Big August Quarterly, honoring African American religious freedom, has been held since 1814.

  The Peoples' Festival adds an unexpected international thread. Bob Marley once lived in Wilmington while trying to earn enough money to establish his Tuff Gong music studio in Jamaica. The festival, started in 1994, pays tribute to him each summer on the Wilmington riverfront with reggae and world beat performers.

  The Riverfront area itself underwent a major transformation beginning in the 1990s. The Delaware Theatre Company had opened its current space on Water Street in 1985. The Chase Center on the Riverfront opened in 1998 as the First USA Riverfront Arts Center and was later converted into the city's convention center in 2005. The groundbreaking for Justison Landing in 2006 started Wilmington's largest residential development since Bancroft Park was built after World War II.

  Wilmington's memorial day parade holds a distinction of its own: it is reported to be the oldest continuously running parade in the United States. The Quaker Hill neighborhood's cemetery at the Wilmington Friends House is the burial site of abolitionist Thomas Garrett and John Dickinson, a signer of the U.S. Constitution.