The historic district covers most of old Lewes — roughly the few blocks bounded by the canal, Savannah Road, and the church plot at Kings Highway. Walking it is the point: 18th- and 19th-century houses in cypress shingle and brick, the small green opposite the Zwaanendael Museum, the cluster of colonial-era buildings along Pilottown Road. It is a National Historic District and signed accordingly, but no one in town treats it as a museum; people still live in most of the houses.
The Lewes Historical Society runs a campus on Shipcarpenter Street where several saved colonial buildings — the Burton-Ingram House, a doctor's office, a one-room schoolhouse — have been moved together and opened for tours in summer. The walking-tour map from the visitor's centre is genuinely useful; the district is small enough that you will not get lost, but the markers on individual houses are where the stories are.