WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

Delaware’s volume in the American Guide Series was first published in June 1938 by The Viking Press of New York, sponsored by Lieutenant Governor Edward W. Cooch, who opened the book with a short foreword tying its appearance to a specific anniversary: 1938 marked the three-hundredth year since the first permanent European settlement in Delaware, the Swedish landing that founded Fort Christina. Cooch called the guide “a welcome contribution to the understanding and appreciation of this, the First State,” noting that its publication had been timed deliberately to coincide with the tercentenary celebration.

The body of the book was assembled under three credited editors, Jeannette Eckman, Anthony Higgins, and William H. Conner, whose preface thanks Arthur L. Bailey of the Wilmington Public Library and a long roster of named consultants, from former U.S. Senator Thomas F. Bayard to local judges, librarians, and clergy across the state. The editors were candid about the risks of the undertaking, acknowledging that material drawn from fragmentary and sometimes conflicting sources was bound to contain errors, and they invited readers to report mistakes so corrections could be made in later printings.

Because of the tercentenary, the editors gave the colonial period unusually full treatment: the book’s history essay and its tour descriptions both linger over the layered Swedish, Dutch, and English settlement of the Delaware River valley in a way few other state guides of the series attempt for so early a period. That emphasis suits a state whose identity already rested on a double claim to firstness, first permanent Delaware settlement in 1638, and first state to ratify the federal Constitution in 1787.

The guide is organized in four parts. The first surveys Delaware’s natural setting, history, government, and cultural life across sixteen essays, from individual aspects of the state down through architecture. The second profiles eight cities and towns, Arden, Dover, Lewes, Milford, Newark, New Castle, Rehoboth, and Wilmington. The third lays out sixteen numbered automobile tours and their lettered branches, a close-grained road survey suited to the compactness of so small a state, reaching from the Pennsylvania and New Jersey lines south through Dover to the Maryland border and the Atlantic beaches. A closing set of appendices supplies a chronology, bibliography, and index.

Read today, the Delaware guide offers a detailed period portrait of the state on the eve of the industrial expansion, centered on the Du Pont enterprises, that would soon reshape it, and a snapshot of how Delaware understood its own colonial origins at the moment it paused to celebrate three hundred years of continuous settlement.