Delaware City — Delaware | Shared Latitude

A tiny canal town where a five-minute ferry ride drops you at a Civil War-era fort surrounded by marsh. Lia and I ate ice cream on the seawall waiting for the boat and never quite got over how few people knew this place existed.

Delaware City is easy to miss — a single main strip of low brick buildings at the eastern end of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, population under two thousand, the kind of place you’d only find on purpose. We came on purpose, for the ferry out to Fort Delaware, a Civil War prison fortress that sits on Pea Patch Island in the middle of the river, accessible only by a short boat ride that the local historical society still operates seasonally.

Crossing to Fort Delaware

The ferry itself took maybe ten minutes, cutting across brown river water thick with tidal current, and landed us at a boardwalk through tidal marsh before the fort’s granite walls came into view. Fort Delaware held tens of thousands of Confederate prisoners during the Civil War, and conditions were brutal enough that it earned a grim nickname among the men who survived it — the Andersonville of the North. Costumed interpreters worked the parade grounds when we visited, firing a period cannon that made Lia jump hard enough to drop her water bottle, and the guardhouse cells, left mostly bare, did more to convey the misery of the place than any placard could.

The granite walls of Fort Delaware rising above the marsh on Pea Patch Island near Delaware City

Canal town life

Back on the mainland, Delaware City’s waterfront is barely three blocks long but has an easy, unbothered charm — a seawall along the canal where we sat with ice cream cones watching sailboats and the occasional tanker pass, a couple of small seafood spots, and Battery Park at the canal’s edge, a quiet green space built on the site of an old Union Army fortification. The whole town felt like a place that had simply decided, decades ago, that it liked its size and had no particular interest in getting bigger.

Sailboats passing along the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal in front of the Delaware City waterfront

Getting There

Delaware City is about 20 minutes south of Wilmington and Philadelphia International Airport (PHL), just off Route 9. From Washington, D.C., it’s roughly a two-hour drive. A car is essential to reach the town, though once you’re there, everything — including the Fort Delaware ferry dock — is within easy walking distance of the small downtown.