Sussex County, Delaware

The largest county in Delaware by area, it has the smallest human population. This population dwarfs the population of many other states when you count the chickens, however: at any given moment, Sussex County has, on average, over 500 chickens per person. This is one of the reasons that Delaware's state bird is the blue hen.

Sussex County has several beautiful beach towns, which draw tourists every summer primarily from Washington D.C., Baltimore, Pennsylvania, and occasionally New Jersey. Among these towns are Bethany Beach, Fenwick Island, and Rehoboth Beach, our nation's "summer capital" (so-called because everyone who's anyone from Washington, D.C. takes their vacation there). Because of its cosmopolitan summer population, Rehoboth has many excellent restaurants. Rehoboth also has a very large, vocal, and supportive gay and lesbian community. This occasionally runs widdershins to the other 90% of the county's inhabitants, who are, at best, intelligent open-minded people living in a rural area, and at worst, rednecks and bigots. I like to think the latter are a dying breed, but Sussex was the only county to fight for the South in the American Civil War, and old habits die hard.

The poultry industry, with such kingpins as Purdue, Allen, and Tyson, is a major employer in the west of the county, and a giant force in the local economy. Migrant workers from Mexico, Laos, Guatemala, and Vietnam all come to Delaware for the (relatively) good pay to be had doing the unpalatable work that goes on in a poultry processing plant. In the summer, their children typically get jobs on chicken farms as chicken catchers, or helping with the corn crop. While many of the migrants are poor, several hard-working families have risen to become household names within the county's social, political, business, religious, and school athletic circles (which often overlap heavily).

The county seat is Georgetown, and it is fairly central to the county. The south edge of the county is the state line, and is collinear with the Mason-Dixon Line, and runs east to west. The western edge of the county is also a state line with Maryland, was also surveyed by Mason and Dixon, and is dotted with towns like Delmar and Marydel. The southern and western edges meet in the center-point of the Delmarva Peninsula, equidistant from the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean. The north edge of the county is formed by the Mispillion River and a westward line from the Mispillion's southwesternmost point. North of that line is Kent County, Delaware.

There are no interstate highways in Sussex County, and no "exits": all roads are surface roads, and there are very few places where a road will have more than two lanes going in any one direction. U.S. Highway 13 runs north through the county, as does U.S. Highway 113, an offshoot of US-13. Maryland/Delaware 404 runs east-to-west from Kent Island, Maryland all the way to Rehoboth, keeping its numerical designation across the state line (it is incorrectly signed as a US road in two places). Delaware Route 1 runs north-south along the coast. Major east-west roads through Sussex County are all two-digit even numbers: DE-18, DE-20, DE-24, DE-26, DE-30, and DE-54 are the most commonly used. Because of the swamps and irregular parcels of farmland, our grid is not as clean as the rural grids found in the midwest, but it is a grid.