U.S. Route 1
U. S. Route 1 is a major north–south U. S. Highway that serves the East Coast of the United States, it runs 2,369 miles, from Key West, Florida north to Fort Kent, Maine, at the Canada–US border, making it the longest north–south road in the United States. US 1 is paralleled by I-95, though the former is farther west between Jacksonville and Petersburg, Virginia; the highway connects most of the major cities of the East Coast—including Miami, Richmond, Washington, D. C. Baltimore, New York City and Portland, passing from the Southeastern United States to New England. While US 1 is the easternmost of the main north–south U. S. Highways, parts of several others occupy corridors closer to the ocean; when the road system was laid out in the 1920s, US 1 was assigned to the existing Atlantic Highway, which followed the Fall Line between the Piedmont and the Atlantic Coastal Plain north of Augusta, Georgia. At the time, the highways farther east were of lower quality and did not serve the major population centers.
Construction of the Interstate Highway system changed the use and character of US 1, I-95 became the major north–south East Coast highway by the late 1960s. US 1 travels along the east coast of Florida, beginning at 490 Whitehead St. in Key West and passing through Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, West Palm Beach, Fort Pierce, Cocoa, Daytona Beach, Palm Coast, St. Augustine, Jacksonville; the southernmost piece through the chain islands of the Florida Keys, about 100 miles long, is the two-lane Overseas Highway built in the late 1930s after railroad tycoon Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway's Overseas Railroad, built 1905-1912 on stone pillars was ruined by the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. The rest of US 1 in Florida is a four-lane divided highway, despite the existence of the newer I-95 not far away. Famous vacation scenic route Florida State Road A1A is a continuous oceanfront alternate to US 1 that runs along the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean, cut only by assorted unbridged inlets and the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.
North of Jacksonville, US 1 turns northwest towards Georgia. In Florida until the 1990s, US 1 used high-contrast markers; the part of US 1 in Georgia, as it shifts from the coastal alignment in Florida to the Fall Line alignment in South Carolina, is very rural, passing through marshes and former plantations between the towns and cities of Folkston, Alma, Lyons and Augusta. The Georgia Department of Transportation has an ongoing plan to widen all of US 1 to four lanes with bypasses, more than 50 percent complete. In South Carolina, US 1 serves rural areas as it falls west of I-95 while the coastal areas are served by routes east of it. Starting in South Carolina, US 1 is paralleled by Interstate 20 along the Fall Line through Aiken and Columbia to Camden and Lugoff. US 1 functions as a local two-lane road with occasional boulevard stretches. After Camden, US 1 continues northeast away from any Interstate towards Bethune, Patrick, McBee and Cheraw with no bypasses or four-lane sections except around Cheraw through the US 52 and SC 9 multiplexes.
After SC 9, it continues northward into North Carolina as a two-lane highway. SCDOT has no plans to widen or bypass any US 1 alignments northeast of Camden to the North Carolina line. Between the South Carolina line and the US 74 bypass, US 1 is a two-lane road but sees a considerable amount of truck and tourist traffic of people cutting through from the US 74/US 220 and I-73/I-74 corridor attempting to reach points south and east. US 1 goes with a bypass in the future plans. North of the NC 177 junction, it becomes four lanes or greater, becoming a super-street with limited access and becoming a limited access freeway. US 1 becomes a major artery for the state. After Richmond County, it goes into Moore County with two expressway bypasses in Southern Pines and Cameron. US 1 continues with the Jefferson Davis Highway label through Lee County and Sanford, on to Cary and Raleigh. US 1 runs concurrently with US 64 through most of Cary, where the freeway underwent a major renovation and improvements that added lanes in both directions.
North of Raleigh, US 1 crosses Interstate 540 and again becomes a four-lane divided arterial to Interstate 85 near Henderson. The North Carolina Department of Transportation has begun a corridor study for this section of US 1. Moreover, NCDOT is planning to finish four-laning US 1 in Richmond County past NC 177 with a Rockingham bypass to the east. There are no plans from SCDOT to widen US 1 from the state line. From Henderson into Virginia, US 1 runs parallel with I-85 as a two-lane local road until the state line, where Virginia hosts a continuous third center lane for alternate passing towards US Highway 58 before South Hill. Main articles: U. S. Route 1 in Virginia, District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New YorkIn the Mid-Atlantic region, US 1 serves some of the most populated areas of the east coast. Through Virginia, US 1 is paralleled by Interstates: the remainder of Interstate 85 to Petersburg, Interstate 95 through Richmond and Fredericksburg to Alexandria, Interstate 395 into Arlington.
In most of Virginia, US 1 is called Jefferson Davis Highway by state law, although most of the Fairfax County portion is better known as Richmond Highway.
Philadelphia
Philadelphia, sometimes known colloquially as Philly, is the largest city in the U. S. state and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-most populous U. S. city, with a 2017 census-estimated population of 1,580,863. Since 1854, the city has been coterminous with Philadelphia County, the most populous county in Pennsylvania and the urban core of the eighth-largest U. S. metropolitan statistical area, with over 6 million residents as of 2017. Philadelphia is the economic and cultural anchor of the greater Delaware Valley, located along the lower Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, within the Northeast megalopolis; the Delaware Valley's population of 7.2 million ranks it as the eighth-largest combined statistical area in the United States. William Penn, an English Quaker, founded the city in 1682 to serve as capital of the Pennsylvania Colony. Philadelphia played an instrumental role in the American Revolution as a meeting place for the Founding Fathers of the United States, who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 at the Second Continental Congress, the Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.
Several other key events occurred in Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War including the First Continental Congress, the preservation of the Liberty Bell, the Battle of Germantown, the Siege of Fort Mifflin. Philadelphia was one of the nation's capitals during the revolution, served as temporary U. S. capital while Washington, D. C. was under construction. In the 19th century, Philadelphia became a railroad hub; the city grew from an influx of European immigrants, most of whom came from Ireland and Germany—the three largest reported ancestry groups in the city as of 2015. In the early 20th century, Philadelphia became a prime destination for African Americans during the Great Migration after the Civil War, as well as Puerto Ricans; the city's population doubled from one million to two million people between 1890 and 1950. The Philadelphia area's many universities and colleges make it a top study destination, as the city has evolved into an educational and economic hub. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Philadelphia area had a gross domestic product of US$445 billion in 2017, the eighth-largest metropolitan economy in the United States.
Philadelphia is the center of economic activity in Pennsylvania and is home to five Fortune 1000 companies. The Philadelphia skyline is expanding, with a market of 81,900 commercial properties in 2016, including several nationally prominent skyscrapers. Philadelphia has more outdoor murals than any other American city. Fairmount Park, when combined with the adjacent Wissahickon Valley Park in the same watershed, is one of the largest contiguous urban park areas in the United States; the city is known for its arts, culture and colonial history, attracting 42 million domestic tourists in 2016 who spent US$6.8 billion, generating an estimated $11 billion in total economic impact in the city and surrounding four counties of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia has emerged as a biotechnology hub. Philadelphia is the birthplace of the United States Marine Corps, is the home of many U. S. firsts, including the first library, medical school, national capital, stock exchange and business school. Philadelphia contains 67 National Historic Landmarks and the World Heritage Site of Independence Hall.
The city became a member of the Organization of World Heritage Cities in 2015, as the first World Heritage City in the United States. Although Philadelphia is undergoing gentrification, the city maintains mitigation strategies to minimize displacement of homeowners in gentrifying neighborhoods. Before Europeans arrived, the Philadelphia area was home to the Lenape Indians in the village of Shackamaxon; the Lenape are a Native American tribe and First Nations band government. They are called Delaware Indians, their historical territory was along the Delaware River watershed, western Long Island, the Lower Hudson Valley. Most Lenape were pushed out of their Delaware homeland during the 18th century by expanding European colonies, exacerbated by losses from intertribal conflicts. Lenape communities were weakened by newly introduced diseases smallpox, violent conflict with Europeans. Iroquois people fought the Lenape. Surviving Lenape moved west into the upper Ohio River basin; the American Revolutionary War and United States' independence pushed them further west.
In the 1860s, the United States government sent most Lenape remaining in the eastern United States to the Indian Territory under the Indian removal policy. In the 21st century, most Lenape reside in Oklahoma, with some communities living in Wisconsin, in their traditional homelands. Europeans came to the Delaware Valley in the early 17th century, with the first settlements founded by the Dutch, who in 1623 built Fort Nassau on the Delaware River opposite the Schuylkill River in what is now Brooklawn, New Jersey; the Dutch considered the entire Delaware River valley to be part of their New Netherland colony. In 1638, Swedish settlers led by renegade Dutch established the colony of New Sweden at Fort Christina and spread out in the valley. In 1644, New Sweden supported the Susquehannocks in their military defeat of the English colony of Maryland. In 1648, the Dutch built Fort Beversreede on the west bank of the Delaware, south of the Schuylkill near the present-day Eastwick neighborhood, to reassert their dominion over the area.
The Swedes responded by building Fort Nya Korsholm, or New Korsholm, named after a town in Finland with a Swedish majority. In 1655, a
Sloop
A sloop is a sailing boat with a single mast and a fore-and-aft rig. A sloop has only one head-sail; the most common rig of modern sailboats is the Bermuda-rigged sloop. A modern sloop carries a mainsail on a boom aft of the mast, with a single loose-footed head-sail forward of the mast. Sloops are either fractional-rigged. On a masthead-rigged sloop, the forestay attaches at the top of the mast. On a fractional-rigged sloop, the forestay attaches to the mast at a point below the top 3/4 of the way to top, or 7/8 or some other fraction. Compared to a masthead-rigged sloop, the mast of a fractional-rigged sloop may be placed farther forward. After the cat rig which has only a single sail, the sloop rig is one of the simpler sailing rig configurations. A sloop has two sails, a mainsail and a headsail, while the cutter has a mainsail and two or more headsails. Next in complexity are the ketch, the yawl and the schooner, each of which has two masts and a minimum of three sails. A sloop has a simple system of mast rigging -- a backstay and shrouds.
By having only two sails, the individual sails of a sloop are larger than those of an equivalent cutter, yawl or ketch. Until the advent of lightweight sailcloth and modern sail-handling systems, the larger sails of a sloop could be a handful. So, until the 1950s, sailboats over 10 metres length overall would use a cutter rig or a two-mast rig. After the advent of modern winches and light sailcloth, the sloop became the dominant sailing rig type for all but the largest sailboats. No rig type is perfect for all conditions. Sloops, with their paucity of spars and control lines, tend to impart less aerodynamic drag. Compared to other rigs, sloops tend to perform well when sailing close hauled to windward and offer a sound overall compromise of abilities on all points of sail. Cutters and yawls are preferred to sloops when venturing far offshore, because it is easier to reef small sails as the wind increases, while still keeping the boat balanced. To maximize the amount of sail carried, the classic sloop may use a bowsprit, a spar that projects forward from the bow.
The foresail may be a jib, which does not overlap the mast more than 10 to 20 percent, or a much larger genoa. The genoa's large overlap behind the mainsail helps to guide the airflow and thereby makes the mainsail more effective. For downwind sailing, the jib or genoa may be replaced by larger curved sails known as spinnakers or gennakers. Nowadays, by far the most common sloop rig, for yachts and dinghies, is the Bermuda rig, the optimal rig for upwind sailing. Originating from the island of Bermuda in the 17th century, the Bermuda rig is simple, yet may be tuned to be maneuverable and fast; the main disadvantage is the large size of the sails on larger vessels. It is less successful sailing downwind, when the addition of a spinnaker becomes necessary for faster progress in all but the strongest winds. However, the spinnaker is an intrinsically unstable sail requiring continuous trimming. An alternative downwind sailplan, more stable but slower, is the "wing on wing". Here, the main is swung wide to lee while the jib is swung wide to windward.
However the "wing on wing" configuration tends to dip the bow, requiring crew to move aft to counterbalance the dip. The wing on wing configuration cannot be heeled over to decrease waterline whereas the spinnaker configuration can be. If not tended the main can go slack to the point of being dangerously close to jibing; the jib will have that same tendency and being to windward, will snap a-lee but with no boom and being forward of the mast will make for a far less dangerous move than that of the main. A slack main when to leeward can be brought back under control by hauling on the mainsheet to bring it back in contact with the wind when on the aft quarter to windward but if the wind comes around onto the aft quarter of what had been to lee, the boat must be brought further a-lee to keep the wind strong on the main. Jamaican sloops had beams that were narrower than ocean-going Bermuda sloops, could attain a speed of around 12 knots, they carried gaff rig. The keel of Jamaican sloops would be between 50–75 feet, but could be built longer.
Jamaican sloops were built near the shore and out of cedar trees, for much the same reasons that Bermudian shipwrights favoured the Bermuda cedar: these were resistant to rot, grew fast and tall, had a taste displeasing to marine borers. Cedar was favoured over oak as the latter would rot in about 10 years, while cedar would last for nigh on 30 years and was lighter than oak. Since piracy was a significant threat in Caribbean waters, merchants sought ships that could outrun pursuers; that same speed and maneuverability made them prized and more targeted by the pirates they were designed to avoid. When the ships needed to be de-fouled from seaweed and barnacles, pirates needed a safe haven on which to car
One Last Thing...
One Last Thing... is a 2006 comedy-drama film produced by HDNet Films and released by Magnolia Pictures. It was screened at the Toronto Film Festival on September 12, 2005 and had a limited release in the United States on May 5, 2006, it was written by Barry Stringfellow. Dylan, a high school student with an inoperable brain tumor, lives with his widowed mother Carol in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, he is invited on television by a wish-granting organization and stuns viewers with his wish: he wants to spend a weekend alone with supermodel Nikki Sinclaire. Living in New York City, Nikki hears about Dylan's wish. Dylan decides to raise money and travel to New York, trying to see Nikki again. Carol struggles with allowing her sick son to be unsupervised in an unfamiliar city. Nikki has her own problems and is reluctant to speak to Dylan. Striking out and growing sicker and his friends take a cab back to Pennsylvania, to the hospital. Nikki shows up and, at his request, takes Dylan to the beach, they spend the day together talking and kissing falling asleep on a blanket.
In the morning, Nikki discovers. Nikki attends his funeral with friends and family; as he enters the afterlife, Dylan arrives on the beach to see his father, who died years before, fishing. He invites Dylan to join him. Dylan asks his father, his father replies, "You don't, you never will". Michael Angarano as Dylan Jameison Cynthia Nixon as Carol Jameison Sunny Mabrey as Nikki Sinclaire Gina Gershon as Arlene Johnny Messner as Jason O'Malley Wyclef Jean as Emmett Ducasse Gideon Glick as Slap Matt Bush as Ricky Richie Rich as Himself Ethan Hawke as Earl Jameison, Dylan's father The region 1 DVD was released on May 23, 2006. One Last Thing... on IMDb One Last Thing... at Rotten Tomatoes One Last Thing... at Box Office Mojo
Texas
Texas is the second largest state in the United States by both area and population. Geographically located in the South Central region of the country, Texas shares borders with the U. S. states of Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the west, the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas to the southwest, while the Gulf of Mexico is to the southeast. Houston is the most populous city in Texas and the fourth largest in the U. S. while San Antonio is the second-most populous in the state and seventh largest in the U. S. Dallas–Fort Worth and Greater Houston are the fourth and fifth largest metropolitan statistical areas in the country, respectively. Other major cities include Austin, the second-most populous state capital in the U. S. and El Paso. Texas is nicknamed "The Lone Star State" to signify its former status as an independent republic, as a reminder of the state's struggle for independence from Mexico; the "Lone Star" can be found on the Texan state seal.
The origin of Texas's name is from the word taysha. Due to its size and geologic features such as the Balcones Fault, Texas contains diverse landscapes common to both the U. S. Southern and Southwestern regions. Although Texas is popularly associated with the U. S. southwestern deserts, less than 10% of Texas's land area is desert. Most of the population centers are in areas of former prairies, grasslands and the coastline. Traveling from east to west, one can observe terrain that ranges from coastal swamps and piney woods, to rolling plains and rugged hills, the desert and mountains of the Big Bend; the term "six flags over Texas" refers to several nations. Spain was the first European country to claim the area of Texas. France held a short-lived colony. Mexico controlled the territory until 1836 when Texas won its independence, becoming an independent Republic. In 1845, Texas joined the union as the 28th state; the state's annexation set off a chain of events that led to the Mexican–American War in 1846.
A slave state before the American Civil War, Texas declared its secession from the U. S. in early 1861, joined the Confederate States of America on March 2nd of the same year. After the Civil War and the restoration of its representation in the federal government, Texas entered a long period of economic stagnation. Four major industries shaped the Texas economy prior to World War II: cattle and bison, cotton and oil. Before and after the U. S. Civil War the cattle industry, which Texas came to dominate, was a major economic driver for the state, thus creating the traditional image of the Texas cowboy. In the 19th century cotton and lumber grew to be major industries as the cattle industry became less lucrative, it was though, the discovery of major petroleum deposits that initiated an economic boom which became the driving force behind the economy for much of the 20th century. With strong investments in universities, Texas developed a diversified economy and high tech industry in the mid-20th century.
As of 2015, it is second on the list of the most Fortune 500 companies with 54. With a growing base of industry, the state leads in many industries, including agriculture, energy and electronics, biomedical sciences. Texas has led the U. S. in state export revenue since 2002, has the second-highest gross state product. If Texas were a sovereign state, it would be the 10th largest economy in the world; the name Texas, based on the Caddo word táyshaʼ "friend", was applied, in the spelling Tejas or Texas, by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves the Hasinai Confederacy, the final -s representing the Spanish plural. The Mission San Francisco de los Tejas was completed near the Hasinai village of Nabedaches in May 1690, in what is now Houston County, East Texas. During Spanish colonial rule, in the 18th century, the area was known as Nuevo Reino de Filipinas "New Kingdom of the Philippines", or as provincia de los Tejas "province of the Tejas" also provincia de Texas, "province of Texas", it was incorporated as provincia de Texas into the Mexican Empire in 1821, declared a republic in 1836.
The Royal Spanish Academy recognizes both spellings and Texas, as Spanish-language forms of the name of the U. S. State of Texas; the English pronunciation with /ks/ is unetymological, based in the value of the letter x in historical Spanish orthography. Alternative etymologies of the name advanced in the late 19th century connected the Spanish teja "rooftile", the plural tejas being used to designate indigenous Pueblo settlements. A 1760s map by Jacques-Nicolas Bellin shows a village named Teijas on Trinity River, close to the site of modern Crockett. Texas is the second-largest U. S. state, with an area of 268,820 square miles. Though 10% larger than France and twice as large as Germany or Japan, it ranks only 27th worldwide amongst country subdivisions by size. If it were an independent country, Texas would be the 40th largest behind Zambia. Texas is in the south central part of the United States of America. Three of its borders are defined by rivers; the Rio Grande forms a natural border with the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas to the south.
The Red River forms a natural border with Arkansas to the north. The Sabine River forms a natural border with Louisiana to the east; the Texas Panhandle has an eastern border with Oklahoma at 100° W, a northern border with Oklahoma at 36°30' N and a western
War of 1812
The War of 1812 was a conflict fought between the United States, the United Kingdom, their respective allies from June 1812 to February 1815. Historians in Britain see it as a minor theater of the Napoleonic Wars. From the outbreak of war with Napoleonic France, Britain had enforced a naval blockade to choke off neutral trade to France, which the US contested as illegal under international law. To man the blockade, Britain impressed American merchant sailors into the Royal Navy. Incidents such as the Chesapeake–Leopard affair, which happened five years before the war, inflamed anti-British sentiment in the US. In 1811, the British were in turn outraged by the Little Belt affair, in which 11 British sailors died. Britain supplied Native Americans who raided American settlers on the frontier, hindering American expansion and provoking resentment. Historians debate whether the desire to annex some or all of British North America contributed to the American decision to go to war. On June 18, 1812, US President James Madison, after heavy pressure from the War Hawks in Congress, signed the American declaration of war into law.
With most of its army in Europe fighting Napoleon, Britain adopted a defensive strategy, with offensive operations limited to the border, the western frontier. American prosecution of the war effort suffered from its unpopularity in New England, where it was derogatorily referred to as "Mr. Madison's War". American defeats at the Siege of Detroit and the Battle of Queenston Heights thwarted attempts to seize Upper Canada, improving British morale. American attempts to invade Lower Canada and capture Montreal failed. In 1813, the Americans won the Battle of Lake Erie, gaining control of the lake, at the Battle of the Thames defeated Tecumseh's Confederacy, securing a primary war goal. A final American attempt to invade Canada was fought to a draw at the Battle of Lundy's Lane during the summer of 1814. At sea, the powerful Royal Navy blockaded American ports, cutting off trade and allowing the British to raid the coast at will. In 1814, one of these raids burned the capital, but the Americans repulsed British attempts to invade New York and Maryland, ending invasions of the northern and mid-Atlantic United States from Canada.
Fighting took place overseas in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In neighbouring Spanish Florida, a two-day battle for the city of Pensacola ended in Spanish surrender. In Britain, there was mounting opposition to wartime taxation. With the abdication of Napoleon, the war with France ended and Britain ceased impressment, rendering the issue of the impressment of American sailors moot; the British were able to increase the strength of the blockade on the United States coast, annihilating American maritime trade, but attempts to invade the U. S. ended unsuccessfully. Peace negotiations began in August 1814, the Treaty of Ghent was signed on December 24. News of the peace did not reach America for some time. Unaware of the treaty, British forces invaded Louisiana and were defeated at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815; these late victories were viewed by Americans as having restored national honour, leading to the collapse of anti-war sentiment and the beginning of the Era of Good Feelings, a period of national unity.
News of the treaty arrived shortly thereafter. The treaty was unanimously ratified by the US Senate on February 17, 1815, ending the war with no boundary changes. Historians have long debated the relative weight of the multiple reasons underlying the origins of the War of 1812; this section summarizes several contributing factors which resulted in the declaration of war by the United States. As Risjord notes, a powerful motivation for the Americans was the desire to uphold national honour in the face of what they considered to be British insults such as the Chesapeake–Leopard affair. H. W. Brands says, "The other war hawks spoke of the struggle with Britain as a second war of independence; the approaching conflict was about violations of American rights, but it was about vindication of American identity." Americans at the time and historians since have called it the United States' "Second War of Independence". The British were offended by what they considered insults such as the Little Belt affair.
This gave the British a particular interest in capturing the United States flagship President, which they succeeded in doing in 1815. In 1807, Britain introduced a series of trade restrictions via the Orders in Council to impede neutral trade with France, which Britain was fighting in the Napoleonic Wars; the United States contested these restrictions as illegal under international law. Historian Reginald Horsman states, "a large section of influential British opinion, both in the government and in the country, thought that America presented a threat to British maritime supremacy."The American merchant marine had nearly doubled between 1802 and 1810, making it by far the largest neutral fleet. Britain was the largest trading partner, receiving 80% of U. S. cotton and 50% of other U. S. exports. The British public and press were resentful of commercial competition; the United States' view was. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy expanded to 176 ships of the line and 600 ships overall, requiring 140,000 sailors to man.
While the Royal Navy could man its ships with volunteers in peacetime, it competed in wartime with merchant shi
Wilmington, Delaware
Wilmington is the largest and most populous city in the U. S. state of Delaware. The city was built on the site of the first Swedish settlement in North America, it is at the confluence of the Christina River and Brandywine River, near where the Christina flows into the Delaware River. It is the county seat of New Castle County and one of the major cities in the Delaware Valley metropolitan area. Wilmington was named by Proprietor Thomas Penn after his friend Spencer Compton, Earl of Wilmington, prime minister in the reign of George II of Great Britain; as of the 2017 United States Census estimate, the city's population is 72,846. It is the fifth least populous city in the U. S. to be the most populous in its state. The Wilmington Metropolitan Division, comprising New Castle County, DE, Cecil County, MD and Salem County, NJ, had an estimated 2016 population of 719,876; the Delaware Valley metropolitan area, which includes the cities of Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey, had a 2016 population of 6,070,500, a combined statistical area of 7,179,357.
Wilmington is built on the site of Fort Christina and the settlement Kristinehamn, the first Swedish settlement in North America. The area now known as Wilmington was settled by the Lenape band led by Sachem Mattahorn just before Henry Hudson sailed up the Len-api Hanna in 1609; the area was called "Maax-waas Unk" or "Bear Place" after the Maax-waas Hanna. It was called the Bear River because it flowed west to the "Bear People", who are now known as the People of Conestoga or the Susquehannocks; the Dutch heard and spelled the river and the place as "Minguannan." When settlers and traders from the Swedish South Company under Peter Minuit arrived in March 1638 on the Fogel Grip and Kalmar Nyckel, they purchased Maax-waas Unk from Chief Mattahorn and built Fort Christina at the mouth of the Maax-waas Hanna. The area was known as "The Rocks", is located near the foot of present-day Seventh Street. Fort Christina served as the headquarters for the colony of New Sweden which consisted of, for the most part, the lower Delaware River region, but few colonists settled there.
Dr. Timothy Stidham was a prominent doctor in Wilmington, he was born in 1610 in Hammel and raised in Gothenburg, Sweden. He is recorded as the first physician in Delaware; the most important Swedish governor was Colonel Johan Printz, who ruled the colony under Swedish law from 1643 to 1653. He was succeeded by Johan Rising, who upon his arrival in 1654, seized the Dutch post Fort Casimir, located at the site of the present town of New Castle, built by the Dutch in 1651. Rising governed New Sweden until the autumn of 1655, when a Dutch fleet under the command of Peter Stuyvesant subjugated the Swedish forts and established the authority of the Colony of New Netherland throughout the area controlled by the Swedes; this marked the end of Swedish rule in North America. Beginning in 1664 British colonization began. A borough charter was granted in 1739 by King George II, which changed the name of the settlement from Willington, after Thomas Willing, to Wilmington after Spencer Compton, Earl of Wilmington.
Although during the American Revolutionary War only one small battle was fought in Delaware, British troops occupied Wilmington shortly after the nearby Battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777. The British remained in the town until they vacated Philadelphia in 1778. In 1800, Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, a French Huguenot, emigrated to the United States. Knowledgeable in the manufacture of gunpowder, by 1802 DuPont had begun making the explosive in a mill on the Brandywine River north of Brandywine Village and just outside the town of Wilmington; the DuPont company became a major supplier to the U. S. military. Located on the banks of the Brandywine River, the village was annexed by Wilmington city; the greatest growth in the city occurred during the Civil War. Delaware, though remaining a member of the Union, was a border state and divided in its support of both the Confederate and the Union causes; the war created enormous demand for goods and materials supplied by Wilmington including ships, railroad cars, gunpowder and other war-related goods.
By 1868, Wilmington was producing more iron ships than the rest of the country combined and it rated first in the production of gunpowder and second in carriages and leather. Due to the prosperity Wilmington enjoyed during the war, city merchants and manufacturers expanded Wilmington's residential boundaries westward in the form of large homes along tree-lined streets; this movement was spurred by the first horsecar line, initiated in 1864 along Delaware Avenue. The late 19th century saw the development of the city's first comprehensive park system. William Poole Bancroft, a successful Wilmington businessman influenced by the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, led the effort to establish open parkland in Wilmington. Rockford Park and Brandywine Park were created due to Bancroft's efforts. Both World Wars stimulated the city's industries. Industries vital to the war effort – shipyards, steel foundries, machinery, a
_flickr.jpg)
Media related to Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania at Wikimedia Commons
