Fort Christina

The capital of New Sweden, founded in 1638 where two rivers meet

Fort Christina was the first Swedish settlement in North America and the principal town of New Sweden, built in 1638 where the Brandywine meets the Christina River, about a mile east of today's downtown Wilmington, Delaware, and two miles up from the Christina's mouth on the Delaware. It was named for Christina, Queen of Sweden.

The plan went back to King Gustavus Adolphus. On 29 March 1638 the ships Kalmar Nyckel and Fogel Grip, carrying the first Swedish and Finnish settlers, came up to a stone outcrop on the Christina that made a natural wharf, known as the Rocks. Their commander was Peter Minuit, former director of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, who chose the spot for the beaver trade with the Lenape and because it was easy to defend, and had an earthwork fort thrown up around the Rocks. The Dutch already claimed the river, which they called the South River, but the Swedes claimed much of present-day Delaware and in time parts of southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey as well.

Friction with the Dutch never let up. Governor Peter Hollander Ridder strengthened the earthworks in 1640, and the fort was rebuilt entirely in 1647. In 1651 Peter Stuyvesant planted Fort Casimir at present-day New Castle, only 7 miles south, to menace the Swedes; in 1654 Governor Johan Risingh captured it, then ringed Fort Christina with a wooden palisade against the reprisal he expected. It came in 1655. Stuyvesant laid siege with hundreds of mercenaries and chartered warships, and after ten days the fort surrendered, ending Sweden's official presence in America. Stuyvesant renamed it Fort Altena, but most of the colonists stayed on, free to keep their language and their church. The English took the river in 1664, and the old Swedish works around the Rocks decayed and vanished. Americans built new fortifications on the site during the Revolution and Fort Union during the War of 1812, and in the 19th century the peninsula filled with factories.

In 1938, for the 300th anniversary, Delaware made a park of the Rocks and the fort site. President Franklin D. Roosevelt came to the dedication with Sweden's Crown Prince Gustav Adolf, and Sweden gave a black granite monument by the sculptor Carl Milles, topped with a replica of the Kalmar Nyckel, paid for by public subscription. Today the site is in the care of the National Park Service and interpreted by the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation. There is no fee, and the site is open from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day, with reduced hours into October.