7 Most Unconventional Towns In Delaware

Everything about Delaware (DE) is unconventional. Not only is it the oldest state (admitted on Dec. 7, 1787), narrowest state (spans approximately 9 miles at its thinnest and 35 miles at its widest), and arguably oddest shaped state (its northern border is near-circular, its southern border is a near-right angle, its western border is the Mason-Dixon Line, and its eastern border is the Atlantic Ocean), Delaware has more companies than people, thanks to certain corporate incentives. You should thus expect to see oddities during a DE vacation. Away from "conventional" hubs like Wilmington and Dover are small communities that are considered strange even by Delaware standards. Here are the places to find "mermen," scrapple, and hordes of horseshoe crabs in offbeat Delaware.

Lewes

In 1631, a couple of dozen Dutch sailors developed a tract of land on America's coast. Named Zwaanendael, Swaanendael, and Swanendael (all variants of "Swan Valley" in archaic Dutch), it was the first European colony in the future state of Delaware. Only a year passed before the entire colony was destroyed by aggrieved Natives. As other nations like Sweden and Britain violently laid their own claims, Delaware became never-land land for the Netherlands. The nascent United States made the ultimate claim over Delaware and its first colony, which had been revived as "Lewes" under British rule.

Today, Lewes is a pastiche of historic peculiarity, preserving relics like the Cannonball House, which displays the British cannonball that smashed its foundation during the War of 1812, and the Zwaanendael Museum, which honors Lewes' Dutch founding in a traditional Dutch-style building. The museum's quirkiest artifact is a "merman," one of two known humanoid-fish constructions displayed in Delaware (the other occupies the DiscoverSea Shipwreck Museum in Fenwick Island).

Rehoboth Beach

From a Christian temperance colony to Delaware's LGBTQIA+ party capital in a century. If that's not the subtitle for Rehoboth Beach, it certainly should be. Founded by Methodists in the early 1870s, Rehoboth's purpose was "providing and maintaining a permanent camp meeting ground and Christian sea-side resort, where everything inconsistent with Christian morality, as taught by the said church, shall be excluded and prohibited." Several years later, one of those moral inconsistencies, liquor, was explicitly banned from sale. However, as lavish beach homes usurped ascetic tents and secular vacationers replaced Christian abstainers, dancing, gambling, and drinking became normal.

To help curb this perceived hedonism, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union erected a water fountain on Rehoboth's boardwalk in 1929. Though still quenching pure thirsts, the fountain is largely drowned out by bars like Zogg's, Dogfish Head (whose infamous Steampunk Treehouse is in nearby Milton), and the LGBT-friendly Blue Moon.

Bridgeville

For a state of its size, Delaware has extremely weird culinary traditions. They blend in the vicinity of Bridgeville, a town of roughly 2,600 people near the Maryland border. Since 1926, Bridgeville has been the manufacturing hub of scrapple, a mishmash of cornmeal, flour, spices, and pig parts made into a Mid-Atlantic delicacy. RAPA Scrapple, which runs a scrapple-shaped factory in downtown Bridgeville, is the world's largest scrapple producer and has been sponsoring the yearly Apple Scrapple Festival since 1992. Believe it or not, Apple Scrapple used to be the second-strangest food fest in Bridgeville.

For about a decade, Bridgeville hosted Punkin Chunkin, a three-day event where pumpkins were chucked rather than chomped. After spectators got hurt, one critically, by increasingly ambitious air cannons, the festival was moved out of state. You can try an even less appetizing-sounding tradition in neighboring Ellendale, whose Southern Grille is the last Delaware restaurant serving up muskrat on the regular. Once a booming industry pulling in ~50,000 'skrats a year, muskrat harvesting is drawing its last breaths.

New Castle

Ironically, New Castle is a preserve of Old Delaware. Many of the state's oldest buildings survive in this 5,600ish-person "city." They include the Dutch House (c. 1690), Amstel House (c. 1738), and New Castle Court House (c. 1732). All are tourable museums. There's even a tavern called Jessop's, which serves Old Country grog and game in an alleged colonial cooperage. New Castle leans so hard into its past that reenactments are common, especially during annual events like A Day in Old New Castle and the Separation Day Festival. The former is held on the third Saturday in May, and the latter runs during the second weekend of June.

Laurel

Laurel harkens back to a time when sweet potatoes were king. Taters were once the sweetest cash crop in Delaware, and Laurel was the heart of potato production. To process the near-half-million bushels grown per year in the early 1900s, potato houses sprouted around Laurel. After blight struck in circa 1940, only the houses remained.

Today, just a few of those structures, which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, survive in varying stages of decay. To see flourishing survivors of an incongruous ecosystem, head southeast to Trap Pond State Park, a Southern-style bayou in temperate Delaware. It is home to the "northernmost naturally occurring stand of baldcypress [trees] in the US."

Slaughter Beach

Each spring and early summer, an idyllic Delaware beach town hosts an orgy/massacre of horseshoe crabs. Don't worry: that's a natural cycle for the crabs and their predators, who gorge on legs and eggs after the crabs come ashore to spawn. It has thus become a natural sight for humans, who travel to the now-protected beach, as well as nearby beaches like Kitts Hummock Beach and North Bowers Beach, to witness the phenomenon. The town has gone so far as to make the horseshoe crab its official animal, put the alienesque creature on its flag, and furnish yearly crab counts by the Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve and other environmental organizations.

But the quirkiest thing about this town is that "Slaughter Beach" probably has nothing to do with slaughtered crabs. Origin theories range from an Indigenous-colonist conflict to an early postmaster named Slaughter to an Old English word for "slough." As such, PETA's recent plea for a name change from Slaughter Beach to Sanctuary Beach went unanswered.

Arden

"You are welcome hither," Arden says, as long as you love art, nature, and 99-year leases on land that you cannot own. This northern DE village was born out of Single-Tax and Arts and Crafts movements at the turn of the 20th century. Not only is it a rare experimental community that worked, but it also spawned two neighboring villages, Ardentown and Ardencroft. In the Ardens, you can find colorful homes, fairytalelike forests, "gilds" for everything from gardening to folk dancing to reciting Shakespeare, and a yearly Arden Fair. The Ardens' oddest site, appropriately, is the Oddporium, a museum/store dedicated to oddities and curiosities. Some might say that all of the Ardens is a curiosity.

Already unconventional, Delaware is even more unconventional if you consider small towns rather than big cities. Yes, "big" is perhaps too generous for any DE city, but "small" is the proper adjective for Lewes, Rehoboth Beach, Bridgeville, New Castle, Laurel, Slaughter Beach, and Arden. "Odd" is also proper since their top attractions range from taxidermied hoaxes to communal gilds. Visit these small, odd settlements to be genuinely enthralled during a Delaware vacation.