on investments, the state revenues are derived from taxes on licences, on commissions to public officers, on railway, telegraph and telephone, express, and banking companies, and to a slight extent from taxes on collateral inheritance.
Education.—The charitable and penal administration of Delaware is not well developed. There is a state hospital for the insane at Farnhurst. Other dependent citizens are cared for in the institutions of other states at public expense. In 1899 a county workhouse was established in New Castle county, in which persons under sentence must labour eight hours a day, pay being allowed for extra hours, and a diminution of sentence for good behaviour. At Wilmington is the Ferris industrial school for boys, a private reformatory institution to which New Castle county gives $146 for each boy; and the Delaware industrial school for girls, also at Wilmington, receives financial support from both county and state.
The educational system of the state has been considerably improved within recent years. The maintenance of a system of public schools is rendered compulsory by the state constitution, and a new compulsory school law came into effect in 1907. The first public school law, passed in 1829, was based largely on the principle of “local option,” each school district being left free to determine the character of its own school or even to decide, if it wished, against having any school at all. The system thus established proved to be very unsatisfactory, and a new school law in 1875 brought about a greater degree of uniformity and centralization through its provisions for the appointment of a state superintendent of free schools and a state board of education. In 1888, however, the state superintendency was abolished, and county superintendencies were created instead, the legislature thus returning, in a measure, to the old system of local control. Centralization was again secured, in 1898, by the passage of a law reorganizing and increasing the powers of the state board of education. The state school fund, ranging from about $150,000 to $160,000 a year, is apportioned among the school districts, according to the number of teachers employed, and is used exclusively for teachers’ salaries and the supplying of free text-books. This fund is supplemented by local taxation. No discrimination is allowed on account of race or colour; but separate schools are provided for white and coloured children. Delaware College (non-sectarian) at Newark, founded in 1833 as Newark College and rechartered, after suspension from 1859 to 1870, under the present name, as a state institution, derives most of its financial support from the United States Land Grant of 1862 and the supplementary appropriation of 1890, and is the seat of an agricultural experiment station, established in 1888 under the so-called “Hatch Bill” of 1887. In 1906–1907 Delaware College had 20 instructors and 130 students. The college is a part of the free school system of Delaware, and tuition is free to all students from the state. There is an agricultural college for negroes at Dover; this college receives one-fifth of the appropriation made by the so-called “new Morrill Bill” of 1890.
History.—Delaware river and bay were first explored on behalf of the Dutch by Henry Hudson in 1609, and more thoroughly in 1615–1616 by Cornelius Hendrikson, whose reports did much to cause the incorporation of the Dutch West India Company. The first settlement on Delaware soil was made under the auspices of members of this company in 1631 near the site of the present Lewes. The leaders, one of whom was Captain David P. de Vries, wished “to plant a colony for the cultivation of grain and tobacco as well as to carry on the whale fishery in that region.” The settlement, however, was soon completely destroyed by the Indians. (See Lewes.) A more successful effort at colonization was made under the auspices of the South Company of Sweden, a corporation organized in 1624 as the “Australian Company,” by William Usselinx, who had also been the chief organizer of the Dutch West India Company, and now secured a charter or manifest from Gustavus Adolphus. The privileges of the company were extended to Germans in 1633, and about 1640 the Dutch members were bought out. In 1638 Peter Minuit on behalf of this company established a settlement at what is now Wilmington, naming it, in honour of the infant queen Christina, Christinaham, and naming the entire territory, bought by Minuit from the Minquas Indians and extending indefinitely westward from the Delaware river between Bombay Hook and the mouth of the Schuylkill river, “New Sweden.” This territory was subsequently considerably enlarged. In 1642 mature plans for colonization were adopted. A new company, officially known as the West India, American, or New Sweden Company, but like its predecessor popularly known as the South Company, was chartered, and a governor, Johan Printz (c. 1600–1663) was sent out by the crown. He arrived early in 1643 and subsequently established settlements on the island of Tinicum, near the present Chester, Pennsylvania, at the mouth of Salem Creek, New Jersey, and near the mouth of the Schuylkill river. Friction had soon arisen with New Netherland, although, owing to their common dislike of the English, the Swedes and the Dutch had maintained a formal friendship. In 1651, however, Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Netherland, and more aggressive than his predecessors, built Fort Casimir, near what is now New Castle. In 1654 Printz’s successor, Johan Claudius Rising, who had arrived from Sweden with a large number of colonists, expelled the Dutch from Fort Casimir. In retaliation, Stuyvesant, in 1655, with seven vessels and as many hundred men, recaptured the fort and also captured Fort Christina (Wilmington). New Sweden thus passed into the control of the Dutch, and became a dependency of New Netherland. In 1656, however, the Dutch West India Company sold part of what had been New Sweden to the city of Amsterdam, which in the following year established a settlement called “New Amstel” at Fort Casimir (New Castle). This settlement was badly administered and made little progress.
In 1663 the whole of the Delaware country came under the jurisdiction of the city of Amsterdam, but in the following year this territory, with New Netherland, was seized by the English. For a brief interval, in 1673–1674, the Dutch were again in control, but in the latter year, by the treaty of Westminster, the “three counties on the Delaware” again became part of the English possessions in America held by the duke of York, later James II. His formal grant from Charles II. was not received until March 1683. In order that no other settlements should encroach upon his centre of government, New Castle, the northern boundary was determined by drawing an arc of a circle, 12 m. in radius, and with New Castle as the centre. This accounts for the present curved boundary line between Delaware and Pennsylvania. Previously, however, in August 1680, the duke of York had leased this territory for 10,000 years to William Penn, to whom he conveyed it by a deed of feoffment in August 1682; but differences in race and religion, economic rivalry between New Castle and the Pennsylvania towns, and petty political quarrels over representation and office holding, similar to those in the other American colonies, were so intense that Penn in 1691 appointed a special deputy governor for the “lower counties.” Although reunited with the “province” of Pennsylvania in 1693, the so-called “territories” or “lower counties” secured a separate legislature in 1704, and a separate executive council in 1710; the governor of Pennsylvania, however, was the chief executive until 1776. A protracted boundary dispute with Maryland, which colony at first claimed the whole of Delaware under Lord Baltimore’s charter, was not settled until 1767, when the present line separating Delaware and Maryland was adopted. In the War of Independence Delaware furnished only one regiment to the American army, but that was one of the best in the service. One of its companies carried a number of gamecocks said to have been the brood of a blue hen; hence the soldiers, and later the people of the state, have been popularly known as the “Blue Hen’s Chickens.”
In 1776 a state government was organized, representative of the Delaware state, the term “State of Delaware” being first adopted in the constitution of 1792. One of the peculiarities of the government was that in addition to the regular executive, legislative and judicial departments there was a privy council without whose approval the governor’s power was little more than nominal. In 1786 Delaware was one of the five states
