Delaware History Museum & Mitchell Center
A former Market Street department store links Delaware’s broad history to African American experiences, voices, and struggles for freedom.
Artwork inspired by Frank E. Schoonover
Read the museum’s permanent strands together, not as a main story and an appendix. Discover Delaware surveys the state from the seventeenth century onward. In the same building, the Mitchell Center’s Journey to Freedom follows African American lives from Antoni Schwartz’s arrival with Swedish colonists through Wilmington’s 1968 upheaval and later art and activism. Oral histories and music complicate a simple founding-to-present timeline.
The center honors Jane and Littleton Mitchell: an early African American Delaware nurse and a Tuskegee Airman who led the state NAACP for decades. Spend time with one voice or artifact to follow a life rather than only dates. The repurposed Woolworth storefront is at 504 North Market Street; the society’s separate research library is across the street at 505.
- Museum address
- 504 North Market Street
- Mitchell Center
- Inside the museum building
- Research library
- Across the street at 505
Quick guide
- Read the two strands
- Move between Discover Delaware and Journey to Freedom rather than treating them separately.
- Follow a voice
- Oral histories turn a statewide chronology into a lived account.
Know before you go
- Begin with an object
- Ask whose labor or decisions brought it into the collection.
- Hear a personal account
- The Mitchell Center uses voice and music alongside artifacts.
- Notice the old store
- A former retail building has become a public history space.
- Look across Market
- The research library is a distinct society site, not another museum gallery.
Good to know
The Mitchell Center is within the same museum and included in the same admission, not a second destination with a separate ticket. The research library is at 505 North Market Street across the road.
Notice these
- Discover Delaware
- Journey to Freedom
- Jane and Littleton Mitchell legacy