Unlike the religious dominance of Puritans in New England and Anglicans in the South, the mid-Atlantic colonies of eighteenth-century America were covered with an assortment of northern European churches and sects. By the 1740s, an overflow of New England Puritans shared New York with an earlier immigrant population of Reformed Dutch and French Huguenots. In the Raritan valley of New Jersey, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians lived alongside enclaves of more Dutch, and coexisted with English Quakers, Swedish and German Lutherans, and a variety of sectarians along the lower Delaware River and in the city of Philadelphia. On the upper Delaware were further German settlements while along the western frontiers of Penn's colony additional Scotch-Irish Calvinists were to be found.
Flood Magnitude and Frequency of the Delaware River in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania