Rather than live on tribal reservations, they acquired property in the European system, and became landowners indistinguishable on the record from their white neighbors. Until 1830, free nonwhite communities were tolerated or ignored in most localities by the dominant European culture. The late John Witthoft suggested that, in the Penn colonies, native groups survived on the personal manors of the Proprietors, which were effectively baronial estates exempt from local political forces. There was a manor, called Frieth, on the upper reaches of Duck Creek, in Kent County, Delaware, immediately northwest of the area where the progenitors of the Cheswold community lived during the eighteenth century. This tantalizing clue deserves to be followed.
Racial definition is a relatively new phenomenon in American law.
Before the American Revolution, only Virginia and North Carolina legally defined race in terms of ancestry. A Virginia law of 1705 defined the child of an Indian as a mulatto, but it stated that the child, grandchild, and great-grandchild of a Negro would be a mulatto. Maryland had a similar definition, but it was not explicitly stated. This universally applied mulatto label caused the Indians to disappear officially from the Delmarva Peninsula. The Maryland state historic preservation plan assumes that Native Americans ceased to exist in the colony at some time.