A Fast Landing

The Delmarva peninsula, a migratory home to millions of geese and water fowl, was formed by melting ice 100 thousand of years ago. Year round home to fox, deer, turkey, muskrat, and mink., there is evidence of human life from 2000 BC. Like the hundreds of thousands of migrating birds that come here year after year, the Lenape and Nanticoke Tribes of the Iroquois Nation also migrated to these, their most southern hunting grounds, for thousands of years. The new immigrants of the 15th century began withSweedish explorers. Then came the French Huguenots, Dutch Reformed & English Quakers seeking religous freedom. This tract of land, given by William Penn to John Hillyard in 1687 was incorporated as a town in 1720, named by Jacob Stout, ”Fast Landing” since it was such a rare and solid ground to moore his boat in the midst of what must have seemed to be unending marshes.