![]() ![]() By the mid-eighteenth century, though, the need for fortifications in the Delaware Valley increased as Britain became locked in a century of colonial warfare with France and Spain. Spending money on forts or defense also did not interest the Quaker provincial government of Pennsylvania, created by land grant to William Penn in 1681. Without major threats to control over the region and naval supremacy in the bay and nearby Atlantic coast, the British decided not to garrison fortifications on the Delaware. In 1664, after the Dutch surrendered New Netherland to the British, they quietly abandoned their forts on the Delaware. The regained Dutch influence on the Delaware River was short-lived. New Sweden soon seized Fort Casimir, but had neither the resources nor manpower to construct and hold such a fort as aggressive New Netherland Director-General Peter Stuyvesant (1612-72) sent a thousand-man expedition up the Delaware in 1655 to retake the defensive works and bring an end to New Sweden. The new fort stood well below the Swedish forts and promised to stop Swedish ships entering the bay and river. The Dutch West India Company naturally responded to New Sweden’s threat to New Netherland’s commercial monopoly on the South River by strengthening Fort Nassau, building a number of small, fortified trading posts across the river, and erecting Fort Casimir where the river met the Delaware Bay (later the site of New Castle, Delaware). ![]() Johan Printz, the third governor of New Sweden, oversaw the construction of Fort Nya Elfsborg and Fort New Gothenburg before resigning from his position in 1653. ![]() When Lieutenant Colonel Johan Bjornson Printz (1592-1663), a veteran of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), became governor of New Sweden in 1643 he further fortified the colony with Fort Nya Elfsborg (Elsinboro, Salem County, New Jersey) and Fort New Gothenburg ( Tinicum Island, Pennsylvania) upriver on the west bank a mile south of Fort Nassau. The New Sweden Company dispatched more than a dozen expeditions over the next decade bringing Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and German settlers to the Delaware, then known as the South River. Both fortifications served as centers for fur trading, and Fort Christina also developed as an agricultural settlement. Their rivalry led to construction of Fort Nassau, built in 1626 by the Dutch West India Company on the east bank of the Delaware (the future site of Gloucester City, New Jersey), and Fort Christina, built in 1638 by the New Sweden Company at the confluence of the Christina River and Brandywine Creek (the future site of Wilmington, Delaware). The earliest fortifications in the lower Delaware region resulted from the intense economic colonial rivalries and wars of the early seventeenth century, as Dutch, Swedish, and English Protestant capitalist states battled Spanish, Portuguese, and French Catholic kingdoms for control of the North American and West Indian trade and settlement. As important structures with such long histories, forts help to explain the political, economic, and social history of the Greater Philadelphia region. Groff for the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.)Ĭonstructed from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century, defensive fortifications along the lower Delaware River and bay guarded the region during times of international and sectional upheaval. Today, the fort’s long history is a foundation for educational programming and events that support restoration and maintenance. Philadelphia, the Place that Loves You BackĮssay Fort Mifflin, shown here during a public-history event in 2014, and similar forts on the Delaware River were once a critical component in the defense of Philadelphia.Patriots may have also provided civil service, conducting public business in the newly formed American states. With a few exceptions, military service began with the Battle of Lexington (19 April 1775) and ended when the British evacuated New York (26 November 1783). American Revolutionary War Patriots include signers of the Declaration of Independence, members of local and state militias, members of the Continental Army or Continental Navy, men and women who rendered other types of aid to the cause of American independence, and those taking oaths of loyalty. Listed below are the Patriot ancestors of our chapter members and the state in which they served.
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