Blog Posts Archive

Day-long series of activities explores occupations of the 1700s including preserving food in the smokehouse, dyeing cloth, carpentry, blacksmithing and making bricks out of clay.

Efforts to expand The Plantation Stories Project, which aims to capture the stories of African American people who were oppressed and marginalized at the John Dickinson Plantation, continue.

Historic site is preparing for a public meeting to form a Descendant Community Engagement Group. Collaboratively, the group will provide recommendations for the interpretation of the site, including the African Burial Ground.

The public is invited to learn more about the inclusive work being done at the John Dickinson Plantation and through the formation of a Descendant Community Engagement Group.

Employee known for conducting highly entertaining site tours and for excelling at all forms of period demonstrations.

The public will soon be able to explore information on a handful of the free and enslaved people who lived, worked and died at the John Dickinson Plantation through an enhanced online spreadsheet that is part of a larger Plantations Stories Project.

Programs explore the experiences of the enslaved and free African Americans who lived, labored and died on the John Dickinson Plantation.

Archaeology and landscape-design projects to help tell the stories of African Americans who lived and died at the John Dickinson Plantation.

A Great Worthy of the Revolution John Dickinson is known as “The Penman of the Revolution” because he was able to put on paper the thoughts and ideals which formed the foundation for our brand new country. John Dickinson was a man trained by scholars. He used his knowledge to think for himself. His pen […]

November 2, 1732 – John Dickinson was born in Talbot County, Maryland. January 18, 1740 – Dickinson family moved into the mansion in Kent County, Delaware. December 1753 – John Dickinson arrived in London and spent four years studying law at the Middle Temple Inns of Court. 1757 – John Dickinson returned to America and […]

The John Dickinson Plantation was home to a variety of people. We share the stories of the tenant farmers, indentured servants, free and enslaved Black men, women, and children who lived, labored, and died on the plantation. John Dickinson was a framer and signer of the U.S. Constitution and was known as the “Penman of […]

Welcome Center Five Stories: The People and Families of the Plantation “Five Stories” explores the lives of a wide variety of people who lived in the late-18th- to early-19th-centuries on the plantation of John Dickinson, one of the founding fathers of the United States, signer of the U.S. Constitution and “Penman of the Revolution.” Panels […]

A Site of Conscience is a place of memory that confronts both the history of what happened there and its contemporary legacies.

Project supported, in part, by a $5,000 grant from
the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Background The start of John Dickinson’s career as the “Penman of the Revolution” began with a political pamphlet titled “The Late Regulations” which expressed Dickinson’s thoughts on the Revenue Act (Sugar Acts) of 1764 which raised taxes on sugar. Many Americans, including John, felt Parliament was threatening the rights of the colonies and the “Acts,” […]

Penning A Revolution Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania John Dickinson’s most famous contribution as the “Penman” and for the colonial cause was the publication of a series of letters signed “A FARMER.” Dickinson’s thoughts concerning the new Townshend Acts were published in most of the colonial newspapers as well as abroad in England and […]