M.A.N A.ND N_ATU RE IN DE LAWARE. AN EN v 11tC) N 1vt t: NTA L H 1STC) Rv C) r THE r 1 RST STAT 1.:. 163 1 ·- 2000 W I L L I A J\.1 1-L W I L L I AM S M.AN AND NATURE TN DELAWARE AN lNVIRONivHNlAL H I STORY or THE I:I n.sr STAn , 163 1 2000 \,VI LLIAtvt H . VVI LLIAMS MAN AND NATURE IN DELAWARE: AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE FIRST STATE, 1631 – 2000 by William Henry Williams A Delaware Heritage Press Book Published by the Delaware Heritage Commission 121 Duke of York Street Dover, DE 19901 Telephone: (302) 744-5077 Website: heritage.delaware.gov Copyright © 2007 by Helen G. Williams All Rights Reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN (hardcover edition): 0-924117-36-2 ISBN (softcover edition): 0- 924117-37-0 ISBN (ePUB edition): 978-0-924117-42-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2008939314 Previous page: Eroding Beaches— This photograph of two World War II-era U.S. Army towers in the surf north of Rehoboth Beach provides a perfect metaphor for man’s changing relationship with nature in Delaware. When the towers were built about 1941, they were well back from the ocean. As late as the mid- 1970s, they were still some forty to fifty feet behind the dune line. Today, waves routinely break along the towers’ bases, photo by Richard B. Carter, 1999. Dedicated to Dr. Robert L. Phyliky, to the late William E. Lowe Jr., and to the late John A. Murray When man interferes with the Tao, the sky becomes filthy, the earth becomes depleted, the equilibrium crumbles, creatures become extinct. Tao Te Ching 1 Circa 600 B.C. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I AM INDEBTED TO OVER ONE HUNDRED people for their contributions to the completion of this book. Most cannot be included in this formal thanks but their efforts are greatly appreciated by the author. Those that I specifically recognize on this page include six people who read and commented on the entire manuscript, and helped in a number of other ways. They are, Larry Curtis, Sam Glasscock, Carol Hoffecker, Kathleen Jamison, and Ed Kee. I am particularly grateful to Richard B. Carter, who not only read the entire manuscript but then went on to direct this project to completion and provided a number of his photographs for the book. Those who read and commented on at least one or two chapters of the manuscript include Marshall Becker, Barbara Benson, Molly Murray, and David Small. Others who supplied critical information or other significant help include Mike Apgar, John Bryson, Pat Canzanno, Wendy Carey, Lorraine Fleming, Kevin Connelly, Mary Sue Drugash, Shirin Jamasb, Aleta Esham, Georgia Ryan, Randy Goss, David Grettler, William Henderson, Mary Tylecki Dickson, Tim Kavil, Charlie Kopay, Daniel Leathers, Judith Showell Loeber, June MacArtor, Russell McCabe, Peter Martin, Richard Kiger, Kate Marvel, J.L. Miller, Governor Russell W. Peterson, Ellen Rendle, Connie Cooper, Jonathan Sharp, Harry Themal, and Jerry Vaughn. Institutions and their respective staffs who were particularly helpful include the Betz Library, Delaware Technical and Community College, Georgetown; the Delaware Public Archives; the Historical Society of Delaware; and the Morris Library of the University of Delaware. Delaware Technical and Community College, Georgetown, supplied an office for the author’s use during the research and writing phase of this book. Karen Druliner edited the original manuscript. Lastly, the Delaware Heritage Commission took on the major responsibility of publishing this study of Delaware’s environmental history. William H. Williams ADDITIONAL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The Delaware Heritage Commission acknowledges with gratitude the efforts of our good friend and former Executive Director, Dr. Deborah Haskell, in working with Dr. Williams on proofreading and later in helping to format the reference notes. Jason L. Burleson-Gibson, formerly of the Delaware Public Archives, created and enhanced maps and used his considerable graphics skills to assist with illustrations. The commission would also like to thank the very talented nature photographer, Dolores S. Michels of Felton, for the use of several of her fine nature photographs. We are especially grateful to the Williams family for making it financially possible for this work to have an excellent scholarly index. In particular, the commission wishes to thank Bill Williams’s son, Mark T. Williams, a faculty member at Boston University, both for his editorial assistance and for arranging for this work to benefit from the services of an outstanding editor and indexer, Louisa R. Mandarino of BU’s Editorial Institute. Ms. Mandarino, a PhD candidate in the field of literary editing, went above and beyond the call of duty both in preparation of the index and in editing and proofreading the final camera-ready manuscript. Richard B. Carter PREFACE Memories of William H. Williams Bill Williams left us much too soon. He passed away on Saturday, April 7, 2007, at the age of seventy years. He had completed his work on this book just days before his passing. Bill had served on the Delaware Heritage Commission for some seven years and had served as chairman of our publications committee. He believed that because of the increasing cost of university press books and because the commission’s publications are in large part underwritten by annual appropriations from the Delaware General Assembly, the Heritage Commission could play a unique role in publishing new scholarly works by Delaware historians at a cost well within the reach of people of average means. As he was nearing completion of this manuscript, he came to me and said that he would like the Heritage Commission to publish the book. He gave us this wonderful work with the understanding that he would receive nothing for it. You will understand, therefore, why I see Bill’s environmental history of Delaware as his parting gift to the people of his adopted state. Bill grew up in Southold, on Long Island’s North Fork, where his father was the local high school principal. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Drew University in 1958 and an M.S. in education from Yeshiva University the following year. After teaching social studies for a time in Pawling, New York, he decided to pursue a Ph.D. in history at the University of Delaware. Bill and his wife, Helen, moved here with their young family in the 1960s. To our everlasting good fortune, the Williamses adopted Delaware and made it their home. In 1967, the Williamses moved to the southern Delaware town of Georgetown so that Bill could teach history in the University of Delaware parallel program on the campus of the newly established Delaware Technical and Community College. He remained there for the rest of his career. During the course of those years Bill showed himself to be a wonderfully gifted teacher who inspired and challenged hundreds and hundreds of southern Delaware students. Bill also emerged during those years as one of the three or four finest historians ever to live and work in Delaware. The first of his seven books, an expansion of his doctoral dissertation, Anglo-America’s First Hospital: The Pennsylvania Hospital, 1751–1841, was published in 1976. In the years that followed, Bill published two works of popular history, Delmarva’s Chicken Industry: Seventy-five Years of Progress (1998), and Delaware, The First State — An Illustrated History (1999). Along the way he published a history of Georgetown’s Wesley United Methodist Church (1979) and two books which have become classics of Delaware historical scholarship, The Garden of American Methodism: The Delmarva Peninsula, 1769–1820 (1984), and Slavery and Freedom in Delaware, 1639–1865 (1996). Man and Nature in Delaware is in many ways the summing up of Bill’s life and work as an historian. In its pages, he gives us a magnificent and sweeping view of this state that he came to know and love so well. He takes us from man’s earliest habitation here, some fifteen thousand years before the time of Christ, up to the present day, and shows us how man’s use of Delaware’s lands, waters and air has changed. His book is a testament to the fact that history must treat the totality of the human experience on this earth. It is not just a record of wars and exploration and political intrigues, but, in a broader sense, the story of how man interacts with his environment. He has left us with a clear warning of what the future may hold for us and for our children if we do not come to grips with the forces we have so thoughtlessly unleashed. Bill always approached the study of history with enormous powers of perseverance, true intellectual integrity, and a courageous willingness to follow wherever the data led him. He did not shy away from tough subjects, and he always allowed his conclusions to be shaped by the facts as they emerged through his careful and wide-ranging research. People like Bill Williams don’t come along very often in life. My colleagues and I on the Heritage Commission and our staff are honored to have known and worked with this good and wise man. We are proud to have been able to assist him in bringing this, his last, and to my mind his finest, work to the people of Delaware whom he came to know and love so well. It is our hope that this book and its author will assume their rightful place among the brightest stars in the firmament of historical scholarship.