So you're curious about Wilmington, Del., Joe Biden's hometown …

Somehow the nation has elected a president from suburban Wilmington, Del. The New York Times asked a writer to explain.

He didn't do a super job. The Times' man credited Swedes with founding the town in 1683, by which time the actual settlement was nearly 50 years old, and was owned by William Penn, who was English. The Swedes, by the way, have vanished. The Nanticokes, who met them, are still here.

The Times guy said he couldn't find Delaware's famous Chancery Court, which settles high-stakes corporate control battles and neighbors'complaints about hedges, because "there is not even a sign." There is a sign. Plus there are not one, but three Chancery Courts in Delaware, and they are all on your smartphone map, smart guy.

He let the governor's propaganda manager say, unchallenged, that Delaware gets 30% of its revenues from corporate fees. But one-third of those "corporate" revenues are actually escheat, "unclaimed" funds the state has a well-connected private firm extract from unwary bank and brokerage customers, many of them in far-off countries.

A federal judge may yet curb this piracy. Which is a nightmare for Delaware lawmakers: Will they be forced to start charging retail sales tax and take down all those Home of Tax-Free Shopping signs?

Despite what the Times writer claimed, Delaware has a dramatic place in American history. I'm afraid it's not true that the Stars and Stripes first flew in combat at the Revolutionary War Battle of Cooch's Bridge (the Cooches still live next door) — the battle was ferocious, though a British win, but the flag's presence was a newspaperman's fantasy, much later.

But it's true that Delaware became the first state to accept the Constitution, after substantially reshaping it: the state's delegates threatened to rejoin England if the Constitutional Convention scrapped the one-state, one-vote principle of the Articles of Confederation.

Back when I had to show up in the Philadelphia Inquirer newsroom daily, I walked past Bedford's stone house every morning on my way to the train station. The station could be named for Bedford, a Delaware hero who's safely dead and past controversy, but instead is named for Biden, even though he's still alive. It's open every day, so lawyers from Washington and New York can wrestle in Chancery and be home for dinner. The Bedford house is open two days a year, because we don't advertise; some of the people from larger states are still sore, and they might come and steal stuff.

(This is also true for one of the nicest Delaware state parks, Flint Woods, 10 minutes from Biden's house. Movie director M. Night Shyamalan filmed the spooky-trees part of "The Village" there. But here there really is no sign; you have to know where the access path is, and where to safely park on the shoulder of the road. There are hunting stands and archers killing deer there all fall, but it's a nice walk after Mass, because in Delaware there's no hunting on Sunday. And the Times says we're "dull.")

Delaware is mostly Democratic, but it's also conservative, and not always about the best traditions: It was about the last place in the U.S. to outlaw legal hanging, the stocks, the whipping post, and slavery.

The state produces four Cs: chemicals, credit cards, corporate charters and chickens. Though the Times' man rightly noted the dismantling of the DuPont Co. and the slowing of the credit card banks, which I've reported in detail.

He missed the chemical spinoffs and fintech startups, and he doesn't seem to have talked to any actual du Ponts, who are thick on the ground here, and busy building stuff. He talked with Mayor Mike Purzycki, but doesn't note the hulking second-term septagenarian is an old NCAA football star. (Who briefly played in the NFL. Can your mayor say that?)

New Castle owes its preservation to long years as a lived-in, largely blue-collar place, with enough factories (and the first Amazon warehouse) to get by, but not enough to have to knock down anything old (when I moved my family to Delaware the colonial Supreme Court was rented by a waste-treatment company; atop the Opera House is a remarkable used-book store.)

The Times showed the broken sign on the hamburger joint where Biden likes to pose for man-of-the-people photos off Interstate 95, but complains this area lacks indigenous junk food; if they'd asked around they'd have found the Capriotti's chain deli's Bobbie, a much more rational post-Thanksgiving-turkey choice than tetrazzini; or spezzato-on-a-roll, a Wilmington staple born on Little Italy's Union Street restaurant row and raised at its pack-em-in church fairs.

A quick trip past the early Biden tract split-level in Brandywine Hundred, then on to the president-elect's current compound on preppy Barley Mill Road (no through traffic when he's home) and his pricey retail haunts in nearby Greenville (where clerks joke they are on notice not to let any Bidens comp expensive items for the publicity it will supposedly bring them), to his church, the gentrified millworkers' parish St. Joseph's-on-the-Brandywine, where pastors have been known to call out the president-elect's departures from Catholic orthodoxy, would have completed the picture.

Do come back.