On July 1, 1776, Delaware's two Continental Congress delegates in Philadelphia were deadlocked. Thomas McKean voted for independence. George Read voted against. The Delaware vote would not count unless a third delegate broke the tie. Caesar Rodney was 80 miles south at his Kent County plantation, sick with what was probably cancer of the face that had already disfigured him - he wore a green silk handkerchief over the affected side. When McKean's messenger reached him at midnight, Rodney mounted a horse and rode through a thunderstorm. He arrived at the Pennsylvania State House on July 2 in his boots and spurs, walked in, and voted yes. Delaware became one of thirteen colonies pledging independence by exactly one vote. The state has commemorated the ride on a quarter, a statue, a highway, and roughly every elementary school history textbook in the state ever since.
Delaware is the second-smallest state by area and the sixth-smallest by population, but it is sixth-densest. Its 96-mile length and 9-to-35-mile width make it small enough to drive across in any direction in under two hours. The state is divided into just three counties - the fewest of any state - running north to south: New Castle, Kent, and Sussex. New Castle, the northern county, includes Wilmington and is suburban Philadelphia. Kent, in the middle, holds the state capital at Dover. Sussex, in the south, contains the Atlantic beaches and the agricultural and poultry-producing west. The state has the lowest mean elevation in the country; its highest point is the Ebright Azimuth in New Castle County at less than 450 feet above sea level. Delaware was the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, on December 7, 1787 - a date the state still marks with a holiday. The First State license plate is not marketing copy. It is technical accuracy.
Delaware's northern border with Pennsylvania is the most unusual state boundary in the country - an arc of a circle. The border is defined as an arc 12 miles from the cupola of the old courthouse in the city of New Castle, drawn before satellite surveying made such geometry tedious. The Twelve-Mile Circle is the only state boundary in the United States that includes a full true circular arc. The arc extends east to the low-tide mark on the New Jersey shore - meaning Delaware actually owns a small piece of land on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River, the only state-on-state shore-and-river configuration of its kind. To the south and west, Delaware's borders are mostly straight lines: the Transpeninsular Line at the bottom and the north-south line west of the Twelve-Mile Circle. The Wedge - a small piece of land between the northwest arc and the Maryland line - was disputed between Delaware and Pennsylvania until 1921. The Mason-Dixon survey took the better part of four years and is still readable across the entire western boundary.
More than three-fifths of the Fortune 500 are legally incorporated in Delaware. Over 90 percent of U.S. companies that went public in 2021 incorporated themselves here. The Delaware General Corporation Law, refined since the early twentieth century, has built up an unusually predictable body of case law in the Delaware Court of Chancery - a specialized business court without juries that resolves corporate disputes with judges who have spent their careers on these specific kinds of cases. The combination of legal predictability and tax structure - Delaware does not tax intangible assets like patents and trademarks held by Delaware-incorporated companies - made the state a corporate haven by the 1970s. The result is that for every Delaware resident, there are roughly two Delaware-incorporated companies. Most of those companies have no physical operations in the state. They have a registered agent at an address in Wilmington, a corner of a building that holds the names of thousands of similar entities. Delaware does not advertise this status. It also does not change it. The franchise tax revenues fund a significant chunk of the state budget.
In 1802, French immigrant Eleuthere Irenee du Pont built a gunpowder mill on the Brandywine Creek north of Wilmington. The mill harnessed water power from the rocky descent of the creek as it dropped from the Piedmont onto the coastal plain. DuPont gunpowder supplied the American military through the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and both World Wars. By 1917, DuPont was producing about 40 percent of all gunpowder used by the Allies in World War I. The company moved into chemistry in the early twentieth century, inventing nylon (1935), Teflon (1938), Lycra (1958), and Kevlar (1965) at research labs in northern Delaware. The Du Pont family also funded the state's public schools, the University of Delaware's expansion, and Delaware's hospitals. The family's influence on Delaware politics ran deep enough that T. Coleman du Pont—president of the company—briefly served in the U.S. Senate, appointed in 1921 and later elected for a partial term. The DuPont Hotel in downtown Wilmington and the Hotel du Pont still anchor the city's commercial life. The Brandywine valley north of Wilmington holds DuPont estates - Longwood Gardens, Winterthur Museum, the Hagley Museum on the original powder-mill site - that together constitute one of the country's most concentrated cultural-and-horticultural landscapes.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. served as U.S. Senator from Delaware for 36 years - from 1973 to 2009 - and then as vice president, and then as president from 2021 to 2025. His son Beau Biden served as Delaware's Attorney General from 2007 until his death from brain cancer in 2015. The Biden family's beach house in the unincorporated Rehoboth Beach community of North Shores has been the family's vacation retreat since 1997. Delaware is small enough that the political stories blur into the geographic stories - the Wilmington train station that Biden rode to and from Washington for decades is named for him; the Beau Biden Highway carries his son's name. The state historically swings between Republican economic policy and Democratic civil-rights positions, often in the same administration. Two U.S. senators (Tom Carper and Chris Coons), one U.S. representative (Sarah McBride - the first transgender member of Congress, elected in 2024), one governor (Matt Meyer), one cabinet-level state attorney general, and several Delaware state legislators currently serve. The smallness of the state means everyone knows everyone. A small state's politics gets personal fast.
Delaware stretches from approximately 38.45 degrees north (south at the Maryland line) to 39.84 degrees north (the Twelve-Mile Circle border with Pennsylvania). Wilmington (KILG) is the main commercial airport in northern New Castle County; Dover Air Force Base (KDOV) shares a runway with the Delaware Coast in Kent County. Sussex County Airport (KGED) is the principal field in the south. The state's narrow shape - never more than 35 miles east-west - makes it ideal for low-altitude observation. The Delaware Bay, the Delaware River, the Atlantic coast, and the Chesapeake watershed are all visible from a single 3,000-foot cruising altitude over central Kent County on a clear day. Watch for active airspace at Dover AFB and Class B airspace approaching Philadelphia from the northern part of the state.