Rehoboth Beach — The 1873 Founding, the Nation's Summer Capital, and a Real LGBTQ+ Community History

A Camp-Meeting Town That Became the Nation’s Summer Capital

Most beach towns on this coast started as land speculation — a developer bought a stretch of sand and built a boardwalk to sell lots. Rehoboth Beach started differently. In 1873, Rev. Robert W. Todd of St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Wilmington had visited a camp meeting on the New Jersey Shore, modeled on Ocean Grove, and brought the idea home. The newly formed Rehoboth Camp Meeting Association purchased 414 acres of Sussex County oceanfront and laid out the town in a distinctive fan-shaped plan — streets radiating outward rather than a simple grid — that still shows up on a map of the town today. The Association itself disbanded in 1881, but the town it platted kept growing: incorporated in 1891 as Henlopen City, renamed Rehoboth Beach in 1893. The name itself is Hebrew for "broad spaces," a phrase that appears three times in the Old Testament, chosen deliberately by religious founders rather than picked as a generic resort brand. A one-mile wooden boardwalk went up that same founding year, 1873, predating almost everything else in town by decades.

The town’s second identity arrived via a road. In 1925, a newly paved highway connected Georgetown, Delaware to Rehoboth Beach, opening direct, practical access from Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Northern Virginia for the first time. Legislators, diplomats, and federal employees started coming down for the summer in real numbers, and the nickname "the Nation’s Summer Capital" stuck. That identity is not just a historical footnote — it is still visible today. Joe Biden owns a beach house in the North Shores neighborhood, immediately adjacent to Rehoboth Beach (technically just outside the town’s own city limits, but consistently associated with it in national coverage), long described in the press as a "Summer White House." A town platted by a Methodist minister ended up, a half-century later, hosting the federal government’s summer migration — two chapters of the same place, not competing stories.

The numbers behind that "summer capital" identity are genuinely extreme, and they are worth stating plainly rather than glossing over. The 2020 census counted 1,108 permanent, year-round residents in Rehoboth Beach. The same town’s population swells to more than 25,000 during summer months. Of the town’s 3,081 total housing units, 79.7 percent were recorded as vacant in that census — not abandoned, but seasonal: second homes and vacation rentals sitting empty outside the summer season. The median age among year-round residents is 64.3, and 47.3 percent are 65 or older, while only 5.1 percent are under 18. Median household income among the permanent population is $43,194. Read together, these numbers describe a town whose everyday, year-round character and its summer character are close to two different places sharing one zip code — a genuinely different market dynamic than a town with a more even population curve.

Alongside the camp-meeting founding and the summer-capital identity, Rehoboth Beach carries a third defining feature: a real, significant, and still-active LGBTQ+ community. The town has functioned as an LGBTQ-friendly getaway for generations, with visible community presence growing through the 1980s alongside real friction — community backlash, the national AIDS crisis, and Moral Majority-era pressure that were not unique to Rehoboth Beach but were felt here too. In the 1990s, CAMP Rehoboth (Create A More Positive Rehoboth, founded circa 1990-91) organized specifically to challenge anti-gay policy in the town, and openly gay commissioners have since been elected to serve on Rehoboth Beach’s own town government. Today, the town has a meaningful number of LGBTQ-owned businesses and real representation in local governance, and two areas — Poodle Beach, near the south end of the boardwalk, and North Shore Beach, inside Cape Henlopen State Park — are named, recognized gathering places for the community. This is a genuinely different identity than the "party-heavy" reputation that describes neighboring Dewey Beach just up the coast; Rehoboth’s LGBTQ+ history is community-rooted and decades-deep, not a nightlife label, and it deserves to be described that way rather than flattened into a stereotype.

Underneath all three identities sits a small, walkable town with real commercial landmarks that predate most of the region’s modern development. Funland, the boardwalk amusement park, opened in 1962 and is still a fixture. Grotto Pizza was founded in Rehoboth Beach in 1960 before expanding into a regional chain. Dogfish Head Brewery’s original brewpub is on Rehoboth Avenue, the town’s main commercial street. The Tanger Outlets along Delaware Route 1 draw shoppers from well beyond the immediate area, helped along by a real, well-known structural fact: Delaware has no state sales tax at all, which matters for both everyday retail and larger purchases. None of this is generic "beach town amenities" filler — these are specific, dated, named businesses with real histories of their own.

The town also carries a lesser-known wartime chapter. During World War II, the U.S. military built submarine-monitoring towers in what is now Cape Henlopen State Park to help detect German submarines entering Delaware Bay, working in coordination with the artillery at Fort Miles. From 1942 to 1943, the Rehoboth Beach Airport operated as Civil Air Patrol Coastal Patrol Base 2, flying anti-submarine support missions during the Battle of the Atlantic; Captain Hugh R. Sharp and 1st Lt. Edmond Edwards became the first civilians ever awarded the Air Medal after a rescue mission on July 21, 1942. The airport closed in 1987 and its site is now the Rehoboth Shores Estates community, marked today by a 2006 Delaware Public Archives historical marker. Separately, in 2011 the town received a 5-Star water-quality rating from the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of only 13 U.S. locations so honored that year, and Delaware’s beaches overall ranked #1 for water quality among 30 U.S. coastal states that same year.

On current figures, the honest approach is to hedge rather than guess. No current (2026) year-round population count beyond the 2020 census figure of 1,108, no current median home price, no active-listing count, and no specific current rental rate for Rehoboth Beach is confirmed here — treat any newer number you see elsewhere as needing direct confirmation with a local source. No current Sussex County or Rehoboth Beach-specific property tax rate or assessment figure is stated here; direct those questions to Sussex County government and the Town of Rehoboth Beach’s own finance office. Beach parking was reported at $4 per hour as of March 2024, per Wikipedia — that rate may well have changed since, and should be verified directly with the Town of Rehoboth Beach before relying on it. No current flood-zone designation for any specific parcel, and no dated 2025-2026 storm damage, erosion event, or beach-replenishment project specific to Rehoboth Beach, is stated here as fact. This page is independent research, not legal, tax, insurance, or financial advice — confirm anything time-sensitive with the appropriate licensed professional or local government office before making a decision.