Dover, Delaware: The Town That Asked to Be Canterbury

Dover, Delaware, nearly became Canterbury: in 1699, Kent County asked for that name, and the council in Philadelphia granted everything else but kept Dover. William Penn had already called the place Dover on paper back in 1683, and a 1905 U.S. Geological Survey book on place names, by Henry Gannett, says the name comes from the town in England.

Penn’s town on paper

Penn wanted a proper county seat for Kent. J. Thomas Scharf, in his two-volume History of Delaware (1888), prints the warrant Penn signed in Philadelphia on “ye 11th of ye 6th mo., 1683,” which Scharf dates to August. It ordered a surveyor to lay out “ye land appointed for ye town of Dover, in ye county of Kent,” with “one high street one hundred and fifty feet wide” and the courthouse and prison on the cross street.

Then nothing happened for a long time. Scharf says the town “was not at once laid out.” The county bought 200 acres from William Southebee in 1694 and put up a courthouse around 1697, but there was still no real village around it.

Canterbury, please

So in 1699, the people of Kent County wrote to the Provincial Council in Philadelphia. The council’s own minutes, printed in 1852, record their petition at the meeting of May 15, 1699, with Lieutenant Governor William Markham and nine council members present. They wanted the courthouse land made a township, with lots, a common, a market place and two fairs a year, and they wanted it “called by the name of Canterburry.”

The council said yes to nearly all of it. The answer in the minutes reads: “the Leiut. Governor and Council granted the same as is desired, & that after ye 20th of June next, the within town shall be called Dover.”

As it turns out, the petition itself shows the name wasn’t new. The residents described their land as lying “on the south side of dover river,” so Dover was already the name of the stream next to the courthouse. Nobody in the minutes explains why the council preferred it to Canterbury, though, and Scharf doesn’t either.

A name before a town

Even with a name, Dover took years to become a place you could walk around in. Scharf says that when the Assembly of the three lower counties passed an act in 1717 to survey the land into lots and streets, the law described it as the tract “commonly called the town of Dover.” The commissioners named in that act laid out the plot, and by May 1718 they were selling land. Henry C. Conrad, in his 1908 history of the state, tells the same story of the petition, the rejected Canterbury and the June 20 date. Today the federal place-names database lists Dover as the capital of Delaware.

Canterbury didn’t go away

You’ll find a Canterbury in Kent County anyway. Henry Gannett’s 1904 gazetteer of the state, also for the U.S. Geological Survey, lists it as a “village in Kent County near Dover.” None of these sources connects it to the name the townspeople asked for in 1699, so it may be a coincidence. Either way, the county ended up with a Canterbury too, just not as its county seat.

Sources & further reading

• Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, vol. 1 (1852), pp. 555–556. The council meeting of May 15, 1699, with William Markham as lieutenant governor; the Kent County petition for a township “called by the name of Canterburry”; the land “on the south side of dover river”; and the reply that the town “shall be called Dover.”
• J. Thomas Scharf, History of Delaware, 1609-1888, vol. 2 (1888), pp. 1042–1043. Penn’s warrant of the 11th of the Sixth Month (August) 1683 for “ye town of Dover”; the purchase from William Southebee in 1694; the courthouse of about 1697; the 1717 act on the land “commonly called the town of Dover.”
• Henry C. Conrad, History of the State of Delaware, vol. 2 (1908), p. 633. The 1699 petition, the name “Canterbury,” and the council’s choice of “Dover” from June 20, 1699.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States, 2nd ed. (USGS Bulletin 258, 1905), p. 108. Dover, Delaware, “named from the town in England.”
• Henry Gannett, A Gazetteer of Delaware (USGS Bulletin 230, 1904). Canterbury, “village in Kent County near Dover.”
• GNIS feature 217882, Dover (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record: “Capital of State of Delaware.”