New Castle, Delaware. City and Business guide.

Welcome to New Castle, Delaware.

New Castle is a city in New Castle County, Delaware, six miles (10 km) south of Wilmington, situated on the Delaware River, at the head of Delaware Bay.

Landing Place of William Pen. Photo by eilatan, August 2005
One of its famous residents was John Walter Bratton who was raised in New Castle by his grandmother and in his long Broadway career wrote over 250 published songs, the most famous being Teddy Bears' Picnic.

New Castle was the eastern terminus of the New Castle and Frenchtown Railroad, the second oldest (1852) rail line in the country. It traversed the Delmarva peninsula, running to Elk River, Maryland, from where passengers changed to packet boats for further travel to Baltimore and points south.

New Castle, Delaware was originally settled by Swedes in 1640, followed by the Dutch in 1651, under Peter Stuyvesant on the site of a former Indian village, "Tomakonck" ("Place of the Beaver"). The original name of New Castle was Fort Casimir. This was changed to "Trefaldigheet" ("Trinity") following its capture by the Swedes on Trinity Sunday, 1654. After its recapture by the Dutch the following year, the name was changed to New Amstel. Under Sir Robert Carr, the British routed the Dutch in 1664 and changed the name to New Castle. The Dutch again seized the town in 1673 but it was returned to Great Britain the next year under the Treaty of Westminster. In 1673 it was conveyed to William Penn by the Duke of York and was Penn's landing place when he first set foot on American soil in 1682. This transfer to Penn was contested by Lord Baltimore and the boundary dispute was not resolved until the survey conducted by Mason and Dixon, now famed in history as the Mason-Dixon Line.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z