The establishment of New Sweden in present-day Delaware was a joint business venture by the Dutch and Swiss. This occurred after previous members of the Dutch West India Company caught the interest of Gustav II Adolph, king of Sweden, in colonization in the New World. However, once the settlement was well established the Swedes bought out their Dutch employees' interest in the company. All seemed well until friction arose between the New Sweden Company and the Dutch West India Company. The latter considered the Swedes trespassers who were infringing upon their fur trade with the Indians.
First Log Cabins in America
The colony that resulted was called New Sweden. Its population was a combination of mostly Finns, as well as Swedes. This combined population first introduced new means of building construction that remained popular well into the era of settling the Great American Plains as well as the Far West. This simple form of building was the log cabin.
As cabin after cabin was constructed, and more forest was cleared to make room for fields, New Sweden expanded to both banks of the Delaware River, as well as along the bay from Cape May to Trenton on the New Jersey side. It then expanded from Cape Henlopen to beyond the Schuylkill River on the other side.
Questionable Characters Arrive
As time passed and ships arrived at the Delaware shore, some were skippered by drunken captains or were crowded with a variety of questionable characters. Numbered among these unsavory assemblies were unfaithful husbands, deserters from the army, and criminals who brought little more with them than the clothes on their backs, sometimes a little money, and nearly always a sentence of a year or two to serve. But these types did not make up the bulk of the arriving immigrants.
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