Delaware History Lives On in Its Corners and Crossroads

DINAHS CORNER, Del. — “If you don’t know your Corners and Crossroads, you don’t know Delaware,” said Joan Stewart, 40, as she collected her mail from a rural box on the country road near her home.

A black, wooden-wheeled, horse-drawn Amish buggy rattled by just as she reached into her mailbox. “This is Amish country, you know,” she said, commenting on the passing carriage. “Dinahs Corner is the heart of Delaware’s Amish settlement. Every other house around here is Amish.”

Delaware, America’s second-smallest state, 96 miles long, 9 to 35 miles wide, is mostly farmland, a state sprinkled with tiny hamlets called Corners and Crossroads and other communities with quaint names like:

Blackbird, Brick Store, Alms House, Hour Glass, Little Heaven, Rising Sun, Blue Ball, Cocked Hat, Heartsgravel, Mermaid, Old Furnace, Seven Hickories and Shortly.

There are more than 100 Corners and Crossroads listed on the Delaware state map: Anthony’s Corner, Cabbage Corner, Dinahs Corner, Everetts Corner, Stumps Corner, Pine Tree Corner, Packing House Corner, Shaft Ox Corner, McKay’s Corner, McKnatt Corner and many more.

Crossroads include Gum, Kings, Queens, Lords, Marvels, Milford, Smith, Jones and Dutch Neck.

Many Corners and Crossroads do not appear on the maps. Their names are known only to locals.

Delaware’s population is only 600,000. Its biggest city, Wilmington, has 72,000 people. Dover, the capital, has a population of 23,000.

Harvey Yoder, 51, an Amish with a long, scraggly white beard, has lived on a farm in Dinahs Corner all his life. He uses a horse and plow to till his field. His home has no electricity.

“We Amish won’t get involved with modern things,” he explained. He said there are about 200 Amish families in Delaware, about 1,500 Amish in all living in a 14-by 12-mile area.

At Old Wiley School Corner, handsome, 6-foot, bearded Amish schoolteacher Cristy Byler, 26, was teaching 39 first- to eighth-graders in the one-room Old Wiley School. There was no electricity in the school house, no lights. It was a gloomy day outside, making it hard for the children to read inside.

The curriculum at the Amish school was deliberately designed so that the children don’t learn too much about the world. In Delaware, Amish children do not go farther than eighth grade. Amish don’t listen to the radio, watch television, read the daily newspapers or popular magazines.

“I went to Old Wiley School all my years,” said Byler, who has been the school’s sole teacher since he was 18. The shy youngsters sat at turn-of-the-century-style desks with inkwells. Girls wore black bonnets, long dresses, black stockings; boys wore suspenders over their shirts to hold up their trousers. Outhouses stood outside the school.

What are you going to do when you graduate from school, eighth grader Benny Beachy, 13, was asked. “I’m going to do what all the boys do, help my pa on the farm,” he replied.

Few fences separate farms or homes in Delaware. Even the country cemeteries are without fences.

“Don’t need fences around cemeteries. They’re not going anywhere,” observed Helen McVey, 82, who lives in a hamlet called Alms House, named years ago when the state poor farm was located there.

(By the way, Delaware is one of few places left in America where footstones are still used with headstones in graveyards.)

“Miss Helen,” as the widow is known to everyone, has been out of the tiny state only twice in her life, and then only for a few days. “Why leave?” she mused. “Couldn’t find a prettier, more peaceful place.

“As my time is drawing close, I’ve gotten a prune face, but I don’t have to look at it. I didn’t get these wrinkles from worryin’.”

A graduate of Old Shade School in Alms House, Miss Helen pointed out the local landmarks. “That old CCC camp over there hasn’t been used since Roosevelt’s time,” she noted.

Howard Killen, 66, runs the Rainbow Inn, a bar and cafe in Little Heaven, in the middle of the state. Years ago, said Killen, there was a community up the road called Little Hell.

“I’ve been halfway around the world, to a country fair and to two hog callin’s, and Little Heaven is still the best place on earth,” allowed Killen.

Out in the country miles from any populated area is Oliver Jones Crossroads, site of Oliver Jones General Store, the most famous country store in all Delaware.

When Oliver Jones, who is now 70, graduated from high school in 1936, he started his store in a closet in his home. Farmers would bring their eggs and vegetables to trade for merchandise. The young entrepreneur would take the farm products he received in trade and sell them in the city and use that money to buy more merchandise.

“My mother said one day: ‘Son, I want to talk to you. If you’re going to keep the store, you better build you a building,’ ” recalled Jones. He erected the store, has since added seven additions plus two 130-by-21-foot warehouses.

He sells 32 tons of Christmas candy alone each year. People shop at his store from as far away as Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The saying is, “If you can’t get it anywhere else, come to Oliver Jones.”

Port Penn (pop. 237), where Delaware Bay meets the Delaware River, calls itself the muskrat capital of the world. The town has an annual marshland dinner featuring muskrat as the main course.

Locals call the foot-long, ratlike rodent “rats.” Muskrat is a Delaware delicacy sold at groceries and seafood shops and featured at local restaurants.

“All my life since I can remember I’ve been munching on rats,” said farmer Burton Voss, 68. “I like the taste of rats. Some fry ‘em, some pot ‘em (cook them in little iron pots), some bake ‘em. Best eating there is. You wouldn’t know what you were eating unless you knew what it was.”

Bob Beck, 62, Delaware Fish and Game biologist, agreed that “it’s the name that stops most folks from ever trying rats. They don’t know what they’re missing.”

Local trappers sell muskrat pelts to New York fur buyers who pay $6 to $8 a skin.

At Pine Tree Corners the other day, Jeanette Bailey, 49, with her husband, James, 50, owner of Bailey’s Seafood, put up a sign advertising muskrat with the opening of hunting season for the rodent.

“Rats are good eating. We sell all we get. We sell them for $1.25 each,” said Jeanette Bailey. “Delawarians like raccoon, too. We sell raccoon for 79 cents a pound.”

That’s the way it is out in the Corners and Crossroads and other quaint places in rural Delaware.