Not far from the Pennsylvania border, there is a small colonial-era property off Naaman’s Road in Delaware. It’s a charming building, called the ‘Robinson House,’ which has been whitewashed and maintained to look appropriate for the period of its original construction. It feels suspiciously out of place so close to various industrial complexes and a major interstate highway. Behind the estate is a relic of a bygone world. It doesn’t look like much. Just a small stone box. Most passersby don’t give it a second look, assuming it’s just another quaint pre-industrial building that bears little to no significance to their world. It is, in fact, one of the few surviving artefacts from the time when the region was part of the Kingdom of Sweden.
Most Americans are familiar with the colonial past. That is to say, the British colonial past- the pilgrims, Jamestown, Boston, Philadelphia, William Penn, et cetera. But the earliest elements of America’s colonial origins are more complex. Many other peoples helped lay the foundation for what Gordon S. Wood termed the ‘idea of America’. There is still talk of the Dutch presence in New York, of how they established the colony, which was taken over by the English and grafted to the growing British Empire. Less common in our cultural consciousness is the history of the Swedes along the shores of the Delaware. And yet, like the Dutch, they were here, and their presence influenced all things that came afterwards. Their work of settlement impacts our contemporary world in strange and unconscious ways. We walk down the literal and metaphorical paths they made without a second thought.
Curiously, there are few material markers of this world. The ghosts of the Swedish colony of the Delaware still haunt placenames in the region. Along the various lanes and streets of modern Philadelphia, the passerby might spy a few names obscured by centuries of development. Swanson Street bears witness to a time when the Swanson brothers’ log cabin stood along the narrow lane of Wicaco, the place where Swedes and Lenape Indians once engaged one another in trade. Local tradition holds that Catherine Street is named for a young Swedish girl, Catherine Hanson, the first colonist to die in the New World. In nearby Bridgeport, sometimes still appropriately called ‘Swedesburg’, Rambo Street recalls the colonist Peter Rambo, the man whose surname would christen a new type of apple. Gunner’s Run, once a wild creek snaking across the city, preserves the memory of the Gunnarsson family. The Swedish Queen Christina, who reigned during the time of the establishment of New Sweden, is also the eponymous source of various local place-names: the Christina River, Queen Village in Philadelphia, and both Christiana, PA, and Christiana, DE.
Elsewhere, Swedish names remain scattered across the Delaware Valley region like breadcrumbs. Mullica Hill in New Jersey remembers Finnish settlers who arrived during the era of New Sweden, including the Mullica family, whose descendants are still spread throughout South Jersey. The small suburban town of Morton, Pennsylvania, takes its name from the old Swedish settlement of Mårtensson’s. And even places that are distinctively non-Swedish still recall the brief political adventure of the Scandinavian encounter with the American frontier. Naamans Creek in Delaware is born from the memory of the Swedes encountering a local Lenape chieftain, whom they granted the Biblical name of Naaman (2 Ki. 5) for reasons that have been lost to history.
New Sweden’s limited physical infrastructure also survived long beyond its tenure as a royal colony. A surprising amount of the original Swedish colonial road network in Delaware and Salem County, New Jersey, follows routes first established by Swedish settlers moving between their sundry plantations. Sinnicksons Landing Road in Salem County preserves the folk memory of one such forgotten river crossing. Locally, the most famous example of this may be Swedesford Road. The name refers to a Swedish crossing of the Schuylkill River near what became Matson’s Ford, later Conshohocken.
Even the legal and civil foundations of Pennsylvania and Delaware bear distinctively Swedish fingerprints. Despite the collapse of the colony in 1655, the Swedish courts continued operating under Dutch and later English rule until 1681. The Swedish court in Upland (modern Chester, PA) was in unbroken operation until the time when William Penn arrived and reorganized the colony under British provincial lines. Settlers accustomed to Swedish legal customs often retained them even after formal Anglicization. Some of the oldest landgrants in the region are etiologically Swedish, and remained valid with the arrival of Penn and his English Quakers. This would prove a challenge for Penn’s surveyors, who had to translate the colloquial ‘Swedish mile’ (6.2 miles) into the Imperial system, sometimes to great frustration. Even today, portions of Philadelphia’s modern real estate market still rest upon the original Swedish claims surveyed a generation before the official establishment of the city.
The outside observer might point to the lack of linguistic continuity. There are no Swedish words that entered into American parlance in the same way that Dutch did through the conduit of New Amsterdam. This is true. However, the Swedish colony endowed North America with one of its most indelible symbols- the log cabin. Finnish settlers brought with them the tradition of hirsirakentaminen (log building), utilizing their familiar method of homestead construction technique, drawn from their own heavily wooded homeland. In turn, this tradition would be adopted by Americans in their travels across the Western frontier. Future generations would assume this to be a purely English tradition, quickly forgetting its provenance. By some fluke of providence, or perhaps real estate development, a few of these 17th-century cabins do survive to this day, remaining as some of the oldest continually occupied buildings on the continent.
Common to the region is also the term ‘Brandywine,’ which is seemingly ubiquitous, as it is reflected in various institutions and place names. However, even those who live along the Delaware rarely recall the word’s original meaning. The local waterways of the region once had Swedish names, most of which were later replaced with more familiar Dutch or English terms. Among them, the modern Brandywine Creek was once touted as Fiskiekylen (Fish Creek), but usually on older maps of the period as Brännvins kilen (Vodka Creek), named for the dark color of the water that resembled a familiar Swedish spirit. This 17th-century drinking joke was defanged and eventually adopted into common speech as a distinctive regionalism of the lower Delaware Valley. Brännvin remains a popular Nordic spirit in Norway and Sweden to this day.
As is commonly the case, churches perhaps provide the most tangible link to New Sweden. Holy Trinity Church, better known locally as ‘Old Swedes’ in Wilmington, still stands near the site of Fort Christina, where Swedish settlers first landed in 1638. Additionally, Gloria Dei Church in Philadelphia, often called ‘Old Swedes Church’, remains one of the city’s oldest surviving buildings. It was here that Swedish was still being spoken until the middle of the 19th century, when the distinctiveness of the ethnic Swedes in South Philadelphia faded into the patchwork of the new nation.
Historically, Americans have been encouraged to think of themselves as rugged, self-made individuals, free to detach themselves from any place or history. Our national roots are comparatively shallow beside those of many nations, which claim their origins deep in antiquity and prehistory. Yet our landscape offers a different kind of lesson. Our towns and cities have distinctive personalities, sometimes born from the vision of their respective founders, sometimes the result of their political histories. Every community is built upon foundations laid by older ones, and is at times the unconscious heir of the forgotten past. We inherit places we did not build and civilizations whose origins we do not fully comprehend. Understanding the cultural layers of our own civilization deepens our attachment to it. To know a place well, to be a denizen of a specific locale, is to know something of those who loved it before us.
It is fitting that there are no surviving Swedish inscriptions. The cemeteries attached to old Swedish parishes are either in English or their texts have been washed away by four centuries of rain. The ancient Psalmist writes, “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more” (Ps. 103:15–16). Such is the fate of New Sweden. Its people were scattered, absorbed into a larger American story that is still unfolding, and its institutions and cultural distinctions disappeared from the banks of the Delaware. The kingdom that sponsored the Swedish colony would never again possess a foothold in North America, and the descendants of its settlers gradually ceased to think of themselves as being Swedes at all. Like the weathered foundations of an old homestead hidden beneath newer construction, New Sweden is overlooked, woven so deeply into the fabric of the Delaware Valley that most who live there no longer recognize what they are standing on.
Image Credit: American Swedish Historical Museum
