Pencader Hundred lay at the shortest overland link between the Delaware River watershed and the Chesapeake Bay, making it a hub of Mid-Atlantic travel and shipping by way of either the Delaware River or the Chesapeake Bay. Native Americans used the rivers in the two watersheds to travel from the Piedmont to the Coastal Plain for food gathering and for trading furs and materials such as jasper from Iron Hill, and their trails passed through Pencader. As European settlements grew into cities, Pencader remained a center point midway between Philadelphia and Baltimore, New York and Washington, and Boston and Richmond, so travelers between these early urban centers passed through the area, and much of today's commerce still follows those early routes. The area's geology includes Piedmont rocks, metamorphosed sedimentary rocks of the ancient North American continent and adjacent ocean basin; the Wilmington Complex, igneous and metamorphic rocks of a volcanic island arc that collided with the ancient North American continent during tectonic convergence; and Atlantic Coastal Plain rocks, sedimentary rocks of the Cretaceous Period deposited over eroded metamorphic basement after North America drifted away from Africa and Europe to form the Atlantic Ocean basin. Along the Fall Line, the Christina River drops 350 feet in 15 miles from its source near Kemblesville, Pennsylvania, to Smalley's Dam, providing water power for grist and saw mills. The sequence of the area's past includes volcanic action that formed the Wilmington Complex 550 to 35 million years ago, glacial action that formed the Coastal Plain around these two formations 250 million years ago, evidence of Native American occupation in the Pencader area during summer migration from 12,000 B.C. to 10,000 B.C., and the arrival of Swedes on the Kalmar Nyckel in 1638, bringing European agricultural practices to the Pencader area.