Tuesday, November 11, 2025

Where Faith Held a Colony Together: The Swedish Church on the Christina

Tracing my Peterson family’s beginnings in Delaware’s oldest surviving church

Reconstruction of Fort Christina, the Swedish settlement established in 1638 on the Christina River.
The church was later built on part of the old fort site.

When the Swedish settlers arrived along the Delaware River in the 1600s, they brought with them little more than their faith, their work ethic, and a determination to build a new community. Long before Wilmington became a city, these families raised a small stone church on the site of their first fort at Christina. That church, known today as Holy Trinity or Old Swedes Church, has stood for more than three centuries as both a house of worship and a witness to the passing generations.

Engraving of “Swede’s Church, Wilmington, Del.,” by John Sartain, in Elizabeth Montgomery, Reminiscences of Wilmington, in Familiar Village Tales, Ancient and New (Philadelphia: T.K. Collins Jr., 1872). Public domain, image restoration by Steve Peterson, 2025.

Elizabeth Montgomery, writing in Reminiscences of Wilmington, in Familiar Village Tales, Ancient and New (1872), tells how the early settlers from New Jersey would row their boats across the river on Sunday mornings, tying them to the tree roots along the Christina shore before going inside for worship. The simple act of pulling up their boats and gathering under one roof became a weekly ritual of faith and fellowship. For a people far from their homeland, this church was not just a place to pray, it was a lifeline to identity and community.

Illustration of Swedish settlers arriving by boat to attend services at Old Swedes Church, based on accounts from Elizabeth Montgomery, Reminiscences of Wilmington (1872). Artistic reconstruction, 2025. Public domain for research and illustrative purposes.

For genealogists, this little stone church remains one of the most valuable sources for tracing families in the region. Before Delaware kept consistent civil records, the church’s baptism, marriage, and burial entries were the only written proof that a person had lived, loved, and died there. In these pages, faith and recordkeeping merged, preserving family ties long after paper and ink should have faded.

Among those early entries are the names of John Peterson and Ruth Pyles, who were married at Old Swedes on July 9, 1773. A year later, their son Robert Peterson was born January 28, 1774, and baptized there on November 11, 1774. The handwriting is simple and clear—“Robert Son of John & Ruth Peterson born Janry 28th baptizd Novr 11th 1774.” That single line quietly links one Delaware family to a story stretching back to the first Swedish pioneers who built the church nearly a century before.

The original church record for Robert’s baptism reads, “Robert Son of John & Ruth Peterson born Janry 28th
baptizd Novr 11th 1774.” (Records of Holy Trinity [Old Swedes] Church, Wilmington, Delaware, 1697–1773.)

Today, the church still stands near the original site of Fort Christina, where the first Swedish settlers landed in 1638. Its stone walls, hewn from local blue granite, have outlasted every generation that once filled its pews. The river no longer runs as close as it did in their time, industrial growth and land reclamation have reshaped the shoreline, but in 1774, the Peterson family would have found themselves only steps from the water’s edge.

“Map of Wilmington as of 1772, with the addition of original tracts, Indian trails, and land marks,” Delaware Public Archives. Public domain. The letter “A” marks the Swedish Church (Old Swedes) south of the Christina Creek.

To walk through the churchyard today is to move through time, to stand where boats once tied to trees and where voices once rose in hymns of gratitude. For those of us tracing our roots, the Old Swedes Church reminds us that faith and recordkeeping often worked hand in hand to preserve what civil institutions had not yet begun to keep: the record of a life.

Primary and Historical References

Modern Interpretive and Genealogical References


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