It is quite probable that this Old Swedes’ Church remained the active center for worship long after the Swedes were swept from power on the Delaware.
Peter Stuyvesant, at the head of a large fleet and formidable expedition, September, 1654, captured Fort Cassimer, or Trinity, as the Swedes called it, then after a siege of fourteen days compelled the surrender of Fort Christina, which was defended by Governor Johan Claesson Rysingh.
In the articles of capitulation, which were formally drawn up and signed September 25 by the two commanders on the “parade ground” outside the fort, it was agreed that the Swedish soldiers were to march out with the honors of war.
The “guns, ammunition, implements, victuals and other effects belonging to the Crown of Sweden and to the South Company,” in the fort or its vicinity, were to remain their property. The Swedish settlers might stay or go, as they chose, and for a year and six weeks, if they stayed, need not take the Dutch oath of allegiance. Swedes who remained should enjoy the Lutheran faith, the “liberty of the Augsburg Confession,” and have a minister to instruct them.
When the English came to the South River in the fall of 1664, the Swedes at Tinicum still were worshiping in their Lutheran Church.
After the departure of Governor Rysingh, in 1653, there was only one minister among the Swedes on the river, the man who was variously called Laers, Laurentius Carolus, Lock, Lokenius, etc., was a poor fellow whose missteps and mischances, moral lapses and legal misdemeanors are repeatedly mentioned in the scanty chronicles of the time. He preached in the Swedes’ Church at Tinicum and at Crane Hook, between Christina and New Castle, where a log church was built about 1667. Lock died in 1688.
When Governor Andros visited the Delaware, in 1675, the New Castle Court decreed, when designating places of meeting for worship, “that the church at Tinicum Island do serve for Upland and parts adjacent.”
Great Tinicum Island stands with Jamestown and Plymouth as one of the birthplaces of America.
Lewis, in the history of Chester County, says that the Swedes came from New Castle and places along the Delaware, both above and below, to worship in that building.
About this time the settlement at Upland, now Chester, began to thrive, and it was not long before it became a more important place than Tinicum.