The text below is from a newspaper article handed down in the family in an envelope marked "Caldwell".

Every true son of Delaware rejoices in the title of the "Blue Hen's Chickens," but the reason and origin of the title is somewhat cloudy in the minds of even the Delawareans themselves. Occasionally a version of the origin of the term is printed, but it seldom agrees in essential particulars with the previous versions. The latest writer on the subject gives in a Delaware paper a story of the originator of the title, which brings him to his death at the battle of Camden, and other writers carry him through the Revolution, from Long Island to Yorktown.

When the Revolution broke out, the first - or, at any rate, the second - company of militia formed in Delaware to uphold the Continental cause vi et armis was organized in Kent county by a bluff and jovial gentleman named Jonathan Caldwell. He became its captain. Captain Caldwell was a noted devotee of the gentle art of cock-fighting, and his fame as a breeder and owner of game cocks had spread all over the Delaware and Maryland peninsulas, and no main in the 11 counties was complete without his presence.

It was natural, therefore, that when his company first paraded on Dover green there should appear among the impediments a wagon loaded with coops of game cocks of the Caldwell strain, crowing vigorously. His company was then titled "Blue Hen's Chickens," and marched to the North with the Delaware regiment under Colonel Haslet.

At the battle of Long Island, Haslet's men were brigaded with Smallwood's Maryland regiment and four Pennsylvania regiments, under Brigadier General William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, and with Haslet and Smallwood sitting on a court-martial against their will, "Brave Mordecai Gist, with his sword in his fist," and Thomas McDonough held the British while the army escaped - both the Maryland "macaroni" and the Delaware "game cocks" going through the fight under their majors and cutting their way out with fearful loss. Long Island fully established for all time the fame of the "Blue Hen's Chickens" as game fighters and of Caldwell's company as typical Delaware soldiers.

The doughty Captain relieved the tedium of camp life with cocking mains, and his progeny of the blue hen pervaded Washington's army with shrill clarion calls of challenge and victory. At White Plains, Haslet''s regiment again distinguished itself, and at Princeton it was completely decimated, its gallant colonel falling on that field.

It was succeeded in the army by the equally brave Delaware regiment of foot raised by Colonel David Hall, which went through the Southern campaign side by side with the Maryland Line, and with the latter shared the laurels of Camden, Guilford, Eutaw, Ninety-six and Yorktown. From losses in battle the "Blue Hen's Chickens" were finally reduced to a single company, under the command of the senior captain, Robert Kirkwood, and Greene's reports of the Southern campaign give honorable mention, in every engagement, to "Kirkwood's Delawares."

At the Cowpens, Captain Kirkwood repulsed Tarleton's cavalry, and made with the Marylanders the famous bayonet charge ordered by Colonel John Eager Howard. Captain Kirkwood, the great grandfather of the late Robert Kirkwood Martin, constructor of the Gunpowder water-works which supply the city of Baltimore, and grandfather of the late General R. H. K. Whitely, U.S.A., of Baltimore, was killed at St. Clair's defeat, a captain in the regular army, after having passed through 32 battles during the Revolution without a disabling wound.