Lower Counties
| Delaware Colony | ||||||||||
| Colony of England (1664–1707) Colony of Great Britain (1707–76) |
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| Capital | New Castle | |||||||||
| Languages | English, Dutch, Munsee, Unami | |||||||||
| Government | Constitutional monarchy | |||||||||
| Legislature | General Assembly of Delaware Colony | |||||||||
| History | ||||||||||
| • | Established | 1664 | ||||||||
| • | Independence | 1776 | ||||||||
| Currency | Pound sterling | |||||||||
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| Today part of |
 United States
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Delaware Colony in the North American Middle Colonies consisted of land on the west bank of the Delaware River Bay. In the early 17th century the area was inhabited by Lenape and possibly the Assateague tribes of Native Americans. The first European settlers were the Swedes and the Dutch, but the land fell under English control in 1664. William Penn was given the deed to what was then called "the Lower Counties on the Delaware" by the Duke of York, in a deed separate from that which he held for the larger Province of Pennsylvania. Delaware was then governed as part of Pennsylvania from 1682 until 1701, when the Lower Counties petitioned for and were granted an independent colonial legislature, though the two colonies shared the same governor until 1776, when Delaware's assembly voted to break all ties with both Great Britain and Pennsylvania.
From the early Dutch settlement in 1631 to the colony's rule by Pennsylvania in 1682, the land that later became the U.S. state of Delaware changed hands many times. Because of this, Delaware became a very heterogeneous society made up of individuals who were both religiously and culturally diverse.
The first European exploration of what would become known as the Delaware Valley was made by the Dutch ship Halve Maen under the command of Henry Hudson in 1609, during a voyage to locate the Northwest Passage to Asia. Hudson sailed into what now is the Delaware Bay. He would name it the South River, but this would later change after Samuel Argall discovered the river in 1610 after being blown off course. Argall would later rename the river Delaware, after Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, the second governor of Virginia. Follow-up expeditions by Cornelius May in 1613 and Cornelius Hendrickson in 1614 mapped the shoreline of what would become Delaware for inclusion in the New Netherland colony. Initial Dutch settlement was centered up river at Fort Nassau at Big Timber Creek south of what is now Gloucester City, New Jersey.
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