Delmarva Back Roads

Looking east at the Mispillion River and Riverwalk from downtown Milford Milford  is different from other towns we’ve seen so far along the Delaware Bayshore Byway. First, it’s a lot bigger—there were far too many historic buildings here for us to see during our half-day visit. Second, while many individual buildings have been preserved, overall it’s not a preserved town like Port Penn, Odessa, Leipsic or Little Creek. Everywhere you look, there are modern buildings next to historic ones. So, while you can learn what life was like here 100-200 years ago, you won’t feel transported back in time as you might in other Delaware Bayshore Byway towns. Like all towns along the Delaware Bay, Milford historically made its living from the water. Here plenty of giant white oak trees in the 1700s and 1800s plus a navigable river meant the major industries were sawmills and shipbuilding. Shipbuilding was already thriving here by the 1780s, when the Reverend Sydenham Thorne built a dam across ...

  Some call Slaughter Beach the jewel of the Delaware Bay because of its beautiful setting. While we’ve enjoyed several other beaches along the Delaware Bay, this is indeed one of widest and longest, with a good two miles of beach along the bay. It's great for beachcombing and sunbathing, but there are a lot of pebbles, so it’s not great for wading, swimming or walking barefoot. Slaughter Beach looking south There are several  theories on why Slaughter Beach got its gruesome name. One is that the first postmaster here was named Slaughter. Another is that horseshoe crabs that come here to spawn every spring are often flipped over by waves and (unless flipped back by a volunteer) die, hence the “slaughter” of the horseshoe crabs. The most gruesome story is that early European settlers slaughtered local native Americans. [UPDATE 8/15/2021: I've learned yet another theory! In a letter to Delaware Online, Barbara Slavin, Ocean View Historical Society, says the name comes from t...