Odessa, Delaware: Renamed for a Grain Port on the Black Sea

Odessa, Delaware, was Cantwell’s Bridge until 1855, when the busy grain-shipping village renamed itself after Odessa, the big grain port on the Black Sea. Around the same time, the railroad passed the town by and went to Middletown instead.

Cantwell’s Bridge

The old name came from a family and a toll bridge. The 1908 History of the State of Delaware, by Henry C. Conrad, says the land first went to Alexander Hinijossa, who had been vice-director at New Amstel, now New Castle, from 1659 to 1663. When the English took over, they confiscated it and in 1676 gave it to Captain Edmund Cantwell, the first sheriff of New Castle County under William Penn.

In 1731, Conrad says, Cantwell’s son Richard got permission to build a toll bridge over Appoquinimink Creek, “and the place was then called ‘Cantwell’s Bridge,’ a resting-place for travelers from the Delaware river to the Chesapeake.” (If you read the digitized text of the 1888 History of Delaware by J. Thomas Scharf, the year there reads 1781. Conrad’s 1731 fits better: he also says the Union Lodge of Masons was founded “at Cantwell’s Bridge (Odessa) in 1765.”)

A grain town picks a grain-port name

By the 1820s, the bridge village was all about grain. Scharf says that in 1825 Cantwell’s Bridge “was the principal grain market for the surrounding country,” with grain hauled in from 12 or 15 miles around. Six big granaries on the creek held about 30,000 bushels, and from 1820 to 1840 the town shipped 400,000 bushels a year.

Then came the new name. In Scharf’s words: “In 1855 it was thought advisable to change the name of the village, and ‘Odessa’ was adopted. It was named after Odessa, Russia, a large grain port on the Black Sea.” Conrad says the same, and Henry Gannett’s book of place-name origins, published by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1905, lists the Delaware town as “named from Odessa in Russia.” You can see the logic: a grain town naming itself after a big grain port.

The railroad that went to Middletown

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Scharf says the new Delaware Railroad opened another route for grain and “was a decided injury to the business interests of the village.” By his day, a single grain boat was left on the run to Philadelphia.

Conrad is harsher, and he blames some of the townspeople. “A few old fogy wiseacres in the fifties, who declared that their shipping facilities were ‘good enough,’” he wrote, “drove the railroad, seeking to pass through the village, off to Middletown, then much inferior in population and business. This sealed the fate of Odessa.” By 1908, he said, Odessa’s “big granaries have totally disappeared from her rotting wharves,” and he called it “in very sooth a ‘Deserted Village.’”

So the town took the name of a big grain port at almost the moment its own grain trade began to slip away. The 1899 map with this story shows how it played out: the railroad runs through Middletown, about three miles west, and Odessa sits on its creek with no tracks at all.

Sources & further reading

• J. Thomas Scharf, History of Delaware, 1609-1888, vol. 2 (1888), pp. 1005–1006. Hinijossa and Cantwell, the toll bridge (the digitized text reads 1781), the grain trade of 1820–1840, the 1855 change “after Odessa, Russia, a large grain port on the Black Sea,” the damage done by the Delaware Railroad, and the nearest railroad at Middletown, “three miles distant” (p. 1006).
• Henry C. Conrad, History of the State of Delaware, vol. 2 (1908), pp. 553, 560–562. The Union Lodge “instituted at Cantwell’s Bridge (Odessa) in 1765” (p. 553); the 1676 grant to Edmund Cantwell, Richard Cantwell’s toll bridge in 1731, the 1765 tannery, the 1855 renaming “after the Russian grain point of that name on the Black Sea,” and the “old fogy wiseacres” who sent the railroad to Middletown.
• Henry C. Conrad, History of the State of Delaware, vol. 1 (1908), pp. 7–8. Odessa, “formerly Cantwell’s Bridge,” once the shipping center for a farming region whose products later went by rail.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States, 2nd ed. (USGS Bulletin 258, 1905), p. 229. Odessa, Delaware, “named from Odessa in Russia.”
• GNIS feature 214404, Odessa (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for the town: county and coordinates.