Welcome to Hukill History.  In 1666, my first Hukill ancestor arrived in colonial America. For over 350 years, descendants of Daniel Hukill lived in the vicinity of the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware River, usually along a natural isthmus. For the early settlers, commerce across the isthmus was both valuable and labor intensive.  Back then, transportation was by cart, but also involved moving whole ships overland.  Benjamin Bullivant, a 17c attorney general wrote:

“About 8 myles below New Castle is a Creek, by which you may come to a neck of land 12 myles over…which are drawn goods to & from Maryland and Sloops also of 30 tons are carried overland in this place on certain sleds drawn by oxen & launched again into the water on ye other side.”

  This amazing observation refers to the marsh land that lies between the Appoquinimink River which extends inland from the Delaware River and one of several rivers on the Maryland side which flow to the upper Chesapeake Bay. During Bullivant’s time, a successful 17c merchant, Augustine Herman built his manor along one such riverfront. He named both the manor and the river after his childhood home of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). Herman envisioned owning and controlling the entire “12 myles” of the neck from the Bay to the Delaware River. He also imagined better ways to move his products across the isthmus, but it would take another 160 years for his vision to become a reality.

  In 1832, a canal opened across the neck that been serving as a portage. It was simply named the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal (C&D).  It created a new way to traverse the fertile low-lying land which had long been known to the Minquas (Susquehannock) and Lenni-Lenape; tobacco planters and middling farmers; slaves and slavers; Tories and Whigs, invaders and armies; Methodists, Quakers and Episcopalians; and of course, the local lumbermen and watermen.  In colonial times, some may have crossed the isthmus for mundane reasons, but others might be better described as having the motivations of smugglers, privateers, pirates–and patriots.

  I am a tenth generation descendent of Daniel Hukill. When Daniel arrived on the Chesapeake, Augustine Herman was the formidable organizer of commercial transportation between the Bay and River.  When Daniel Hukill’s son grew up, this son (also Daniel) was granted a relatively modest parcel from Herman’s swath of land. Son Daniel and his own five sons grew tobacco in the 1700s. After the Revolutionary War, my line of Hukill descendants moved to the Appoquinimink side of the isthmus. Others moved West.

  Welcome to my history. Welcome to my stories.