Kent County, Delaware
| Kent County, Delaware | ||
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The Kent County Courthouse in Dover in 2006
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 Location in the U.S. state of Delaware |
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 Delaware's location in the U.S. |
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| Founded | August 8, 1683 | |
| Named for | Kent | |
| Seat | Dover | |
| Largest city | Dover | |
| Area | ||
| • Total | 798 sq mi (2,067 km2) | |
| • Land | 586 sq mi (1,518 km2) | |
| • Water | 212 sq mi (549 km2), 26.6% | |
| Population (est.) | ||
| • (2015) | 173,533 | |
| • Density | 277/sq mi (107/km²) | |
| Congressional district | At-large | |
| Time zone | Eastern: UTC-5/-4 | |
| Website | www |
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Kent County is a county located in the central part of the U.S. state of Delaware. As of the 2010 census, the population was 162,310. The county seat is Dover, the state capital. It is named for Kent, an English county.
Kent County comprises the Dover, DE Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is included in the Philadelphia-Reading-Camden, PA-NJ-DE-MD Combined Statistical Area.
Kent County is home to an Amish community that resides west of Dover.
In about 1670 the English began to settle in the valley of the St. Jones River earlier known as Wolf Creek. On June 21, 1680, The Duke of York chartered St. Jones County, which was carved out of New Amstel/New Castle County and Hoarkill/Sussex County. St. Jones County was transferred to William Penn on August 24, 1682, and became part of Penn's newly chartered Delaware Colony.
Penn ordered a court town to be laid out, and the courthouse was built in 1697. The town of Dover, named after the town of Dover in England's Kent, was finally laid out in 1717, and became the capital of Delaware in 1777. In 1787 Delaware was first to ratify the U.S. Constitution, and became "the First State." Kent County was a small grain farming region in the 18th Century.
More recently, in the 1960s, Dover was the scene of the manufacturing of the spacesuits worn by NASA astronauts in the Apollo moon flights by ILC Dover, now based in the small town of Frederica. The suits, dubbed the "A7L," was first flown on the Apollo 7 mission in October 1967, and was the suit worn by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Apollo 11 mission. The company still manufactures spacesuits to this day—the present-day Space Shuttle "soft" suit components (the arms and legs of the suit).
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