Page:Mennonite Handbook of Information 1925.djvu/52



The story of locating a colony of Waldensian and Mennonite people in the southern part of the state of Delaware suggests to the reader an interest if not an awakening in him to feelings of sympathy and compassion, equal to those held for the French settlers who were expelled to the number of seven thousand souls from their homes in Acadia on the eastern shores of Canada, and who were distributed in the British colonies along the Atlantic coast from Massachusetts to Louisiana.

Historians are able to find scanty and only disconnected accounts of the very early settlements that were made by Mennonites in Delaware. It is stated that in the year 1656, three hundred Waldensians located on the Horekill Inlet. The name is applied to the long estuary extending from Lewes Cape for five miles in a southeasterly direction to the town of Lewes, a place of 2,000 population today. Others think the name Horekill Inlet is the mouth of the stream, now marked on modern maps as Broadhill Creek.

It is also mentioned that as early as 1663, one Cornelius Plockhoy, himself a Mennonite from Amsterdam, Holland, established a settlement here with forty-one of his followers. This colony had not been established for much over twelve months before English vessels arrived, and finding that the