Blog Posts Archive

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 […]

John Dickinson Plantation burial ground for enslaved men, women and children, and for free African Americans who died on the site, to be preserved and interpreted.

Next year, the public will get new access to the John Dickinson Plantation thanks to a pathways project that will connect the site to the St. Jones Reserve.

Tours of the plantation enable visitors to compare and contrast lifestyles of the wealthy Dickinson family with those of tenants, poor whites, enslaved individuals and free Blacks residing in Kent County during the 1700s and early 1800s. School tours complement Delaware’s Social Studies Standards. A special thematic demonstration (weaving, hearth cooking, etc.) can be scheduled […]

The division is seeking descendants of those who lived, worked and died at the John Dickinson Plantation in an effort to tell the stories of Indigenous and free, indentured and enslaved people of color who have been overlooked in historical accounts.

A new website featuring 131 names shares the stories of the enslaved, indentured, freedom-seeking and free Black people who lived, worked and died at and near the John Dickinson Plantation.

It was January 18, 1740 when Samuel Dickinson, a wealthy Quaker tobacco planter and merchant of Talbot County, Maryland moved his family to the plantation on Jones Neck, southeast of Dover, Delaware. John Dickinson was seven years old at the time. Over the next 68 years, until his death in 1808, John Dickinson split time […]