The Collaborative International Dictionary
Blue Hen State
Blue Hen State \Blue Hen State\ The State of Delaware; -- a popular sobriquet. It is said, though the story lacks proof, to have taken its origin from the insistence of a Delaware Revolutionary captain, named Caldwell, that no cock could be truly game unless the mother was a blue hen, whence
Blue Hen's Chickens came to be a nickname for the people of Delaware.