New Sweden: America's forgotten 17-year Swedish colony in the Delaware Valley

From 1638 to 1655, a small Swedish settlement called Nya Sverige spanned parts of present-day Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland — including the ground where Philadelphia, the celebrated ‘birthplace of America,’ would later rise. It was the smallest, least-populated and shortest-lived European colony in what became the United States, and unusually, it began as a deliberately covert venture. Peter Minuit, the ousted former governor of New Netherland who had bought Manhattan for the Dutch, pitched the scheme to Sweden as revenge, exploiting a stretch of the Delaware River the Dutch claimed but had never fully purchased or defended. In 1638 the settlers built Fort Christina, the first permanent European settlement in the valley, near modern Wilmington.

The colony never turned a profit. Minuit drowned within months, Sweden sent no supply ships for years at a stretch, and the population never exceeded roughly 400 — many of them ‘Forest Finns’ skilled at frontier living, since Finland was then part of Sweden. Survival depended heavily on cooperation with the Lenape and other Indigenous nations, whom the Swedes are portrayed as treating with comparative respect. Governor Johan Printz expanded the territory and built additional forts before a 1653 settler petition accusing him of abuse forced him to step down — one of the earliest successful political protests in the colonies.

Despite its brevity, New Sweden left a lasting cultural imprint: settlers introduced the log cabin — the oldest surviving example in the Western Hemisphere dates to 1638 in New Jersey — and brought Lutheran Christianity to the region. Both Wilmington and Philadelphia still echo the colony’s origins in their flags. The piece, part of a series marking the US’s 250th anniversary, argues this near-forgotten outpost quietly helped shape the young nation’s frontier culture.