Lorenzo Dow Martin and the founding of Rehoboth (1870)

Paul Lovett Lecture:  A Retrospective Look into Rehoboth’s Founding

In the early 1870s, when the Methodist Episcopalians from Wilmington decided to find a location for camp meetings, they settled on a seaside farm below Lewes. That farm, belonging to a cranberry farmer named Lorenzo Dow Martin, would become the commercial core of Rehoboth Beach.  Lorenzo’s tiny farmhouse would serve as the operational headquarters from which the town was created. That farmhouse, now over 200 years old, still exists in Rehoboth at 30 Christian Street. It is built with wooden pegs and rests on a foundation of tree trunks.