Bucks County, one of the three original counties of Pennsylvania, is bounded on the northeast and southeast by the Delaware, southwest by Philadelphia and Montgomery county, and on the north by Lehigh and Northampton counties. The surface is uneven and rolling, and the soil fertile.

This volume will contain the history of Bucks county from the discovery of the Delaware to the present time.

Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the service of the Dutch East India company, discovered Delaware bay the 28th of August, 1609, but he made no attempt to ascend the river. Captain Cornelius Jacobson May ascended the river some distance in 1614, and two years afterwards Captain Hendrickson discovered the Schuylkill.

For a number of years the history of the country watered by the Delaware is but a relation of the feeble struggles of Holland, Sweden and England for empire on its banks. It was about this period that Bucks county was first traversed by Europeans.

In 1616 three Dutch traders, setting out from Fort Nassau, now Albany, to explore the interior, struck across to the headwaters of the Delaware, down which they traveled to the Schuylkill. Here they were made prisoners by the Minquas, but were rescued by Captain Hendrickson at the mouth of that river.

The Delaware has had a multiplicity of names. The Indians called it Lenape, Wihittuck, or the stream of the Lenape. By the Dutch it was called Zuydt, or South river; by the English it was generally known as the Delaware, after Lord de-la-War, the supposed discoverer.