DEDelaware Fun Facts

Delaware's northern border is an arc. Surveyors swung a 12 mile radius from the cupola of the courthouse in New Castle and drew a curve, making it the only circular state boundary in the country. Every other line on the US map is straight, follows water, or follows a ridge.

Facts most people get wrong

• First State refers to the Constitution, not to settlement. Delaware's convention ratified on December 7, 1787, by a unanimous 30 to 0 vote, beating Pennsylvania by five days. Swedish, Dutch and English colonists had been arguing over the same ground for 150 years before that.
• The Fortune 500 companies here are addresses, not offices. More than two thirds of the Fortune 500 are incorporated in Delaware, and the state's registry holds over two million entities for a population near one million. A single building at 1209 North Orange Street in Wilmington serves as the registered address for hundreds of thousands of them.
• No sales tax does not mean no tax. Delaware charges sellers a gross receipts tax on their revenue instead, and that cost tends to end up in the shelf price.
• It is the second smallest state, not the smallest. Delaware covers about 1,982 square miles. Rhode Island is smaller at roughly 1,545.
• A Union state can still have a bad record on emancipation. Delaware never seceded, yet its legislature rejected the Thirteenth Amendment in February 1865 and did not ratify it until 1901, more than 35 years later.
• Joe Biden is not a native son. He was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and moved to the Wilmington area at age 10, then represented Delaware in the Senate for 36 years.

Records and firsts

• Delaware has the lowest mean elevation of any state, about 60 feet above sea level. Its high point, Ebright Azimuth at 447.85 feet, sits on a residential street in north Wilmington and is the lowest state summit in the country.
• Three counties, New Castle, Kent and Sussex, are fewer than any other state runs.
• Swedish colonists at Fort Christina, founded in 1638 where Wilmington now stands, introduced the log cabin to North America.
• Nylon was invented in 1935 by Wallace Carothers at the DuPont Experimental Station outside Wilmington. DuPont itself started in 1802 as a gunpowder mill on the Brandywine.
• When its second span opened in 1968, the Delaware Memorial Bridge became the longest twin span suspension bridge in the world.
• Delaware was the last state to receive a National Park Service unit. First State National Historical Park was designated in 2013.

Geography that surprises

• Because of the Twelve Mile Circle, Delaware's territory crosses the river and runs to the low water mark on the New Jersey shore. The Supreme Court confirmed it in 2008 by blocking a gas terminal New Jersey wanted to build off its own bank.
• The Wedge, a triangle of about one square mile between the circle and the Maryland line, was claimed by both Delaware and Pennsylvania until the dispute was finally settled in 1921.
• The state runs roughly 96 miles from top to bottom and between 9 and 35 miles across, so nowhere in Delaware is far from another state.
• The Mason Dixon line forms the western border, and the same survey crew that drew it also laid out the tangent line that keeps Delaware separate from Maryland.

Where the name comes from

The name arrived by accident. In 1610 the English captain Samuel Argall sheltered in a bay and named it for Thomas West, third Baron De La Warr, who was then governor of Virginia and who never set foot on the land now carrying his title. The bay passed the name to the river, the river to the colony, and the colony to the state. English settlers later applied the same word to the Lenape people, so a Native nation ended up known by the name of an English baron who never met them. Dover, the capital since 1777, was laid out in 1683 on orders from William Penn and named for the port in Kent.

Bordering states

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