#19 - The Burning of the Whorekill

Now that we have some basic context for the Ryves Holt House and Lewes/Swanendael/Whorekill, it's really time to start to delve into primary sources. Primary sources are historical documents describing things contemporaneously to the actual events. So, letters, court papers, journals, etc. There are of course, many hurdles to using primary documents. They may not be in English and even if they are, the older the object, the harder the English will be to understand. There can be access issues, especially during Covid, most archives and special collections are closed. The documents may not be available online, so travel to specific archives and collections can be required. 

Because of this, I first gathered easy to find and open access sources. This also included some articles written using primary documents that tended to quote from them for the most part. We will work with one of these today: “The Burning of the Whorekill, 1673,” written in 1950 by Leon DaValinger, Jr., a historian who served as the Delaware State Archivist from 1941 to 1970. In this article, he primarily uses unpublished (as of 1950, anyway!) depositions describing the Lord Baltimore Raids from the Cadwalader Collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. If you remember dear reader, the Lord Baltimore Raids were a series of attacks by Marylanders on the town of Whorekill between 1671 and 1673. This is a key event in the history of Lewes for dating the Ryves Holt House. If the house was indeed built in 1665, then it would have had to survive the raids in some form, enough for some part of the structure to survive. I hoped these depositions could give me some idea of the level of destruction. These turned out to be super helpful! The depositions do disagree a bit on timing and specifics, but overall it does seem like the town was wholesale destroyed. This could mean the RHH was built on a burned out site, or heavily rebuilt. 

Of course, this is a 70 year old article using sections of primary sources from the 1680s to describe events from the 1670s. I would really need to track down the original documents (and any other existing depositions) and read them in their entirety. But, the information gathered from the article is striking. Everyone describes the town being burned to the ground; a few mention that a barn or two may have been spared, but basically Whorekill was razed. The raiders were ordered to “...burne all their houses and that he must not Leave one stick standing…” The houses “...ware by then sett on fire and Burnt to the Ground…” One poor man, John Roades, Jr. claimed they burned his father’s home, tobacco house and other outbuildings before murdering his father. 

The early 1670s, is also very interesting. I knew from the beginning that dating the RHH straddled the line between Dutch and York English control, but adding in the Baltimore English to the mix is really fascinating. The Dutch surrendered in 1664 to English control (Duke of York), but retook power between 1673 and 1674 before again surrendering to the English. During this time Maryand contested New York’s right to the land, hence the Lord Baltimore Raids. Then in 1681, Delaware was handed off the William Penn and Pennsylvania. So, these depositions were actually give to the representatives of Penn in the 1680s, but during the Raids themselves how did they identify? English or Dutch? English settlers on Dutch land, Dutch settlers on contested land? Marylander or New Yorker? The names suggest some sort of mix, although some names could have been Anglicized: Kiphaven, Helmaus, Cornelison, Roades, etc. 

It's pretty common knowledge now to know about the international fight over land in the New World: England, France, and Spain constantly fought and traded sides over the Caribbean, France and England fought over the Canadian frontier, and the Dutch and English fought over New England and the Mid-Atlantic. But have you heard about strife between colonies of the same nation? Maryland vs. New York is really an example of the power struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism going on in Old World England, but I haven’t come across any scholarly work on this… Yay, another rabbit hole. But, if the RHH was built in 1665, that places it firmly in the center of this strife between Maryland, New Netherland, and New York. If it was built in 1685 though, that places it comfortably at the beginning William Penn’s Pennsylvania colony and its political history is much more simple. The same, of course, cannot be said for the town of Whorekill, however, it would have witnessed everything! 

I followed this article with a few attempts at primary records: Some Records of Sussex County Delaware, compiled in 1909 by CHB Turner and Original Land Titles in Delaware: 1646-1679. The problem is these, while easily accessible online, aren’t so easily understandable on their own. They could end up being extremely useful to figure out what happened at the site of the RHH and goings-on in Lewes, but they are dense material full of names and dates and site descriptions with no bearing on modern descriptions. For now, I decided to shelve them. I need to build up a listing of people, places, and dates before taking these. The Hidden History of Lewes, which we went over a while back describes the Census of 1671 that will be helpful, too. I am going to start marking down names when I encounter them so I can start to have a listing of people with biographies and dates so I can figure out who major players are. Once I know who to look for and when, I can go through these dense primary sources to attempt to see patterns related to Lewes and the RHH. And hopefully, by that time I will be able to go visit the original primary documents!