While Delmar was founded and named in 1859, the earliest uses of the name Delmarva occurred several years later (for example on February 10, 1877, in The Middletown Transcript newspaper in Middletown, Delaware[1]) and appear to have been commercial and booster-driven; for example, the Delmarva Heat, Light, and Refrigerating Corp. of Chincoteague, Virginia, was in existence by 1913[2]—but general use of the term did not occur until the 1920s.

[3] At the northern point of the peninsula there is a geographic fall line that separates the crystalline rocks of the Piedmont from the unconsolidated sediments of the Coastal Plain.

[5] It has been suggested that Delmarva residents have a variation of Southern American English which is particularly prevalent in rural areas.

Legislative attempts to break away the Eastern Shore counties of Maryland and join them with Delaware were made several times.

Thus, these sites suggest a human presence in the Middle Atlantic region during the Last Glacial Maximum.

[14] In addition several archaeological sites on the Delmarva peninsula with suggestive (but not definitive) dating between 16,000 and 18,000 years have been discovered by Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware.

These factors led Stanford and Bradley to reiterate in 2014 their academic advocacy of pre-Clovis peoples in North America and their possible link to paleolithic Europeans.

They set up villages – scattered groups of thatch houses and cultivated gardens – where conditions favored farming.

During the harsh winter, whole communities would move to hunting areas, seeking the deer, rabbit and other game that kept them alive until the spring fishing season.

When the farmland around their villages became less productive – the inhabitants did not practice crop rotation – the native people would abandon the site and move to another location.

Their territories and populations ranged from Cape Charles, Virginia, to the Indian River inlet in Delaware.

[19][20][21] In 1566, an expedition sent from Spanish Florida by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés reached the Delmarva Peninsula.

The expedition consisted of two Dominican friars, thirty soldiers and an indigenous Virginia boy, Don Luis, in an effort to set up a Spanish colony in the Chesapeake.

James I of England had granted Virginia 400 miles of Atlantic coast centered on Cape Comfort, extending west to the Pacific Ocean to a company of colonists in a series of charters from 1606 to 1611.

In the 1632 Charter of Maryland, King Charles I of England granted "all that Part of the Peninsula, or Chersonese, lying in the Parts of America, between the Ocean on the East and the Bay of Chesapeake on the West, divided from the Residue thereof by a Right Line drawn from the Promontory, or Head-Land, called Watkin's Point, situate upon the Bay aforesaid, near the river Wigloo, on the West, unto the main Ocean on the East; and between that Boundary on the South, unto that Part of the Bay of Delaware on the North, which lieth under the Fortieth Degree of North Latitude from the Equinoctial, where New England is terminated" to Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, as the colony of Maryland.

This would have included all of present-day Delaware; however, a clause in the charter granted only that part of the peninsula that had not already been colonized by Europeans by 1632.

Tourism is a major contributor to the peninsula's economy with the beaches at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, Ocean City, Maryland, Assateague Island National Seashore, Maryland, and Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, Virginia, being popular tourist destinations.

Salisbury University also adds to the economic activity of the Delmarva, with an estimated $480 million in contribution impact.

New Castle and Kent Counties in Delaware are served by the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, designated market area and stations WPVI-TV, WCAU-TV, KYW-TV and WTXF-TV.

Sussex, Dorchester, Wicomico, Worcester and Somerset Counties are served by the Salisbury, Maryland, designated market area, the only based on the peninsula.

Accomack and Northampton Counties are primarily served by the Norfolk/Virginia Beach designated market area and stations WAVY-TV, WVEC-TV and WTKR-TV.

[25] It ran the Del-Mar-Va Express day train from New York City, through Wilmington, Dover, Delmar, Salisbury, and Pocomoke City to the Cape Charles, Virginia, ferry docks and it ran the Cavalier counterpart night train.