Editing New Castle, Delaware (section)

===17th century===
New Castle was originally settled by the [[Dutch West India Company]] in 1651 under the leadership of [[Peter Stuyvesant]] on the site of a former indigenous village, "Tomakonck" ("Place of the Beaver"), to assert their claim to the area based on a prior agreement with the original inhabitants of the area. The Dutch originally named the settlement [[Fort Casimir]], but this was changed to Fort Trinity following its seizure by the colony of [[New Sweden]] on [[Trinity Sunday]] in 1654. The Dutch conquered the entire colony of New Sweden the following year and rechristened the fort as Nieuw-Amstel, named after the [[Amstel]]. This marked the end of the Swedish colony in Delaware as an official entity, but it remained a semi-autonomous unit within the New Netherland colony and the cultural, social, and religious influence of the Swedish settlers remained strong. As the settlement grew, Dutch authorities laid out a grid of streets and established a common green in the town's center, which continues to this day.

In 1664, the English [[Conquest of New Netherland|seized the entire New Netherland colony]] in the [[Second Anglo-Dutch War]]. They changed the name of the town to "New Castle" and made it the capital of their [[Delaware Colony]]. The Dutch regained the town in 1673 during the [[Third Anglo-Dutch War]] but it was returned to Great Britain the next year under the [[Treaty of Westminster (1674)|Treaty of Westminster]]. In 1680, New Castle was conveyed to [[William Penn]] by the [[James II of England|Duke of York]] by [[livery of seisin]] and was Penn's landing place when he first set foot on American soil on October 27, 1682. This transfer to Penn was contested by [[Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore|Lord Baltimore]] and the boundary dispute was not resolved until the 1763-1767 survey conducted by Mason and Dixon, now famed in history as the [[Mason–Dixon line]].<ref name="Eckman 1947">{{cite web |last=Eckman |first=Jeannette |author-link=Jeannette Eckman |title=Delaware Street Area |website=New Castle History And Archaeology Project  |url=https://nc-chap.org/eckman/htm/11-delst_area.php |year=1947 |access-date=2023-11-10}}</ref><ref name="Weslager 1988 p. ">{{cite book |last=Weslager |first=Clinton Alfred |title=New Sweden on the Delaware |publisher=Middle Atlantic Press |publication-place=Wilmington, DE, US |date=1988 |isbn=978-0-912608-65-5 |oclc=470579367 |page=}}</ref>{{page needed|date=November 2023}}