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Otto Wolgast (c. 1640–1681) was one of the first settlers of Lewes, Delaware in what is now the United States. He was an early magistrate and follower of Mennonite reformer Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy at the Dutch colony of the Zwaanendael in the New Netherlands. He would later serve as Justice of the Peace under the English colonial authorities.J. Thomas Scharf, History or Delaware 1609–1888. Vol 1. (Philadelphia: L J Richards & Co., 1888) 510.
Plockhoy, Wolgast and forty other followers arrived at the Hoornkil, present day Lewes, on 28 July 1663, traveling on a Dutch Sloop, the Sint Jacob.Evelyn Jackson, “The Wilgus Family of Baltimore Hundred, Sussex County, Delaware,” Maryland/Delaware Genealogist Volume XX No 1 (January 1979) 26-27. Wolgast was the only Pomeranian immigrant to the Dutch Colony of Zwaanendael and would go on to have a profitable and successful life as one of the founders of the town of Lewes, Delaware.Christian Gellinek, Those Damn' Dutch: The Beginning of German Immigration in North America During the Thirty Years’ War (New York: Campus Verlag, 1996) 63. Wolgast would be named a magistrate of Lewes by Francis Lovelace, the English governor of New Castle in 1669. Wolgast was also commissioned into the King's service in 1669 and listed as a "Pomeranian who became commissioned at Fort Whorekil" in contemporary records.C.H.B. Turner, Some Records of Sussex County Delaware. (Philadelphia: Allen, Lane, & Scott, 1909) 29. The Census of 8 May 1671 of the Delaware Colony listed forty-seven people living in the Whorekil. "Otto Wolgast, his wife, one son and one servant" were listed in the census, implying Otto’s household comprised almost one tenth of the settlement at the time.Peter Stebbins Craig, 1671 Census of the Delaware, (Philadelphia: Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, 1998) 74.
Otto was present at the Hoornkill in 1673 when the English under Captain Robert Carr took the Zwaanendael colony from the Dutch and burned the Hoorkill to the ground. Carr reported back to his superiors that he had: "Destroyed the Quaking society of Plockhoy to a naile."Leon de Valinger, Jr., The Burning of the Whorekill 1673, (Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol 74 No. 4, 1950) 473–487.
In November 1674, Otto was reappointed a magistrate for Lewes, and in June 1675 he was recorded in the early records of the Colony as a "Justice and good ordinary planter". Finally in 1680, Sir Edmond Andros, the English Governor of the Dominion of New England appointed Otto Wolgast as "Justice of the Peace at the Whorekill and Dependencies." Otto Wolgast died in May 1681. He is remembered as one of the first settlers in Colonial Delaware, an early magistrate in the colony, and helping to found the city of Lewes in Colonial Delaware.Turner, Some Records of Sussex County, 29, 37.
The Wilgus Site, named after the descendants of Otto Wolgast, is a prehistoric Native American camp site in coastal Sussex County, Delaware, near Bethany Beach. The site is located along a now-inundated tributary of the Indian River. Evidence of the site indicates it was occupied during the Adena culture during the Early Woodland Period. The site was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
A direct descendant of Otto Wolgast is the Anglo-Dutch author Linda Wilgus who writes historical fiction novels and literary fiction short stories in the
Another direct descendant of Otto Wolgast is William J. Wilgus, a civil engineer who built several important public buildings in the 19th century including Grand Central Station in New York, invented the Wilgus-Sprague System of powering trains via a Third Rail system of train electrification. He served in the Allied Expeditionary Force as the chief of rail logistics in the First World War. Wilgus State Park in Auscutney, Vermont was built on land donated by Wilgus in 1933.William J. Wilgus, "Transporting the A.E.F. in Western Europe, 1917–1919." New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1931.
In February 2025, an article in Naval History magazine published by the United States Naval Institute focused on the Battle of Iwo Jima. The article featured one of Otto Wolgast's direct descendants, James E. Wilgus, Jr. who survived a kamikaze attack on the USS Saratoga (CV-3) on the night of 21 February 1945. James was born in 1926, on the same land settled by Otto Wolgast in 1663.J. Brandon Wilgus, "Iwo Jima: A Tale of Two Carriers", Naval History
/ref>The Bookseller. "Simon & Schuster UK triumphs in three-way auction for Linda Wilgus' The Sea Child"
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