#6 - Island at the Center of the World (but not the RHH’s World)

 #6 - Island at the Center of the World (but not the RHH’s World)

In the previous post I talked about how I started my research on the Ryves Holt House. At the beginning I was simply curious about the house and wanted a quick read on how old it was and its early history. Except, after a quick Google and Wikipedia search, I discovered some inconsistencies and started to consider that I may have found questions without answers. But I knew I did not know much about early American Colonialism and Architecture. I took a few courses in undergrad and in graduate school, but I definitely could use a refresher.

Popular history books can be a great place to begin orienting yourself in a new historical period. If you aren’t entirely familiar with a certain period, geographic area, architectural style or anything else, it can be a great idea to look for popular history books on the topic. Often, these are books written by journalists or amateur historians and published by a reputable publishing house. So, they should be historically accurate, easy to read, and accessible to those without specific knowledge of the books’ topics. However, popular history books may not include the nuanced story, since they are meant for a general audience, not specialized historians and academics. 

But considering I was still just generally curious about the Ryves Holt House at this point, I thought to look for easily accessible popular history books on the Ryves Holt House, Lewes, and early American Colonial history. As it turns out, there aren’t any popular history books about the RHH itself. This may end up being good for me as that could be a gap I could fill, but that meant I needed to widen my gaze. I ended up finding four books:

-Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto (ordered from my favorite bookstore, Powells’)

-Hidden History of Lewes by Michael Morgan (for free with Kindle Unlimited)

-Remembering Sussex County by James Diehl (also included with Kindle Unlimited)

-The Journals of the Lewes Historical Society (purchased at the RHH in Lewes)

Over the next few posts, I will discuss these four books/journals. I will start with the one mostly likely to be familiar to you: Island at the Center of the World. It was published back in 2005 by Russell Shorto, a combo author/historian/journalist. This book was really one of the first popular history books to revive the story of the New Netherlands Colony which eventually was replaced by the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. I highly recommend it as an entry to the history of New Netherland and early America. It's written in a narrative style which makes it very pleasurable to read without being too dry. It is also likely available at your local library and/or used bookstore.

I chose to read this book because I knew it would be a good way to get my bearings in the time period of the Ryves Holt House. It would help me understand very early America; that 1665 build date predates William Penn, the New York Colony, and Lord Baltimore’s Maryland. This means the house must be somehow tied into the story of New Netherland. Unfortunately, the book barely talks about the ‘South River’ or Delaware Bay and the southern edges of the colony. It focuses mostly on the Island from the title - New Amsterdam/Manhattan. The book did however give me a few clues about what was going on in and around Lewes in the 17th century. It mentions a Pieter Plockhoy and his utopian pilgrim colony that settled on the southside of Delaware Bay in 1663, but that it was destroyed by the English after a few months. It also mentioned that the upper reaches of the Delaware Bay were originally controlled by the Swedes at Fort Christina (modern day Wilmington), beginning around the 1630s. But then the Dutch settled at New Amstel (New Castle) in 1656. They had a lot of traffic, but little infrastructure in the Delaware Bay area….And that was really about it from The Island at the Center of the World.

So, how does this change my understanding of the history of the Ryves Holt House? It shows that if 1665 is the build date, then the RHH would have been built after the Plockhoy settlement. The Plockhoy settlement can’t be Zwaanendael (if that massacre story is true) because the latter was in the 1630s, and Plockhoy settled in 1663. The book doesn’t describe where the Plockhoy settlement was, but if it was on the South side of the bay, then its history might parallel Lewes’. The Plockhoy settlement was destroyed by the English, so perhaps the RHH is a 1665 English building and not Dutch at all. Also, if the Zwaanendael and Plockhoy settlements were both Dutch, then it seems unlikely I need to look to New Sweden for information about the RHH. 

The next steps, besides reading those three books mentioned at the beginning of this post, would be to look more into New Netherland on the South River (aka Delaware Bay), the Plockhoy settlement, early Maryland, and early New York. I need to figure out who controlled Lewes in 1665 to determine which colony the town belonged to when the RHH was supposedly built.