Wawassan

Wawassan is an old Indigenous name for the Brandywine, a creek flowing through wooded country toward the Christina and Delaware rivers. The valley was part of the Lenape homeland, and its waters furnished shad as well as a course through the hills. At a bend in the creek stood Queonemysing, a Lenape village whose people continued to live there as European settlement spread around them.

In 1683 Lenape leaders sold land between the Christina and Chester creeks to William Penn while reserving a strip along the Brandywine for their own use. Settlers nevertheless encroached on the reserved land. Farms and water-powered mills appeared along the creek in the following decades, and dams interfered with the fish runs on which the Lenape had relied.