Qualla: Sussex County, Delaware

Sussex County, Delaware: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. When David Pieterszoon de Vries sailed back into Zwaanendael in December 1632, the colony was gone. The Dutch whaling outpost he had founded on June 3, 1631, near the present site of Lewes had been the first European settlement in Delaware. He had left the colony with men, supplies, and a contract to harvest right whales from the bay. He came back to find the buildings burned, his men dead, and the Lenape who had killed them watching from the woods. The dispute had begun, the Indians explained through interpreters, over a stolen tin coat of arms and a series of misunderstandings about land use. Sussex County, Delaware - the southernmost county in the state - had announced itself to European history with a massacre. The county has spent the four hundred years since trying to be quieter.

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Sussex County, Delaware: Who Owns the Bay?

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nolabob, CC BY-SA 4.0. After the Zwaanendael massacre, Sussex County passed through a sequence of European hands. The Dutch returned to settle the Hoernkills region around Cape Henlopen in 1663 with a Mennonite colony led by Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy, only to have the English destroy that settlement th...

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Image: Nolabob | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sussex County, Delaware: Georgetown, the Town Built on a Spreadsheet

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eli Pousson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Lewes served as the Sussex County seat for over a century, but the town sits on the Atlantic coast and was inconvenient for residents of the western part of the county. In 1791, the Delaware General Assembly approved moving the seat to a more central location. There was no existi...

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Image: Eli Pousson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Sussex County, Delaware: The Great Cypress Swamp

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kej605, CC BY-SA 3.0. Western Sussex County contains the Great Cypress Swamp - one of the northernmost natural stands of bald cypress trees in North America. The swamp covers roughly 50,000 acres straddling the Delaware-Maryland line, with the bald cypress trees concentrated in the wetter southern por...

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Image: Kej605 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sussex County, Delaware: The Beaches and the Inland Bays

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dough4872, Public domain. Sussex County contains all of Delaware's Atlantic coast - from Cape Henlopen in the north through Rehoboth, Dewey, the Bethanies, and Fenwick Island. The beaches anchor the county's tourism economy and have transformed the eastern margin of the county from rural farmland to summe...

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Image: Dough4872 | Public domain

Sussex County, Delaware: The Vice President and the Conservatives

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kej605, CC BY-SA 3.0. Joe Biden's beach house, in the North Shores community between Rehoboth and Dewey Beach, has put Sussex County in the national political conversation more than the county's politics would predict. Sussex is the most conservative county in Delaware. The county has supported a Demo...

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Image: Kej605 | CC BY-SA 3.0