Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area
By Laura Obiso
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About this ebook
Laura Obiso
Writer and naturalist Laura Obiso is a Sussex County native and has spent more than 20 years roaming around the DWGNRA. She is a member of the Walpack Historical Society.
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Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area - Laura Obiso
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INTRODUCTION
The Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area (DWGNRA) was created in 1965 to manage the recreational facilities and opportunities surrounding a 40-mile-long reservoir that would result from damming the Delaware River at Tocks Island. The dam would flood 23,000 acres of the upper Delaware River valley from a point just north of the Delaware Water Gap almost to Port Jervis, New York—an area known since the 1600s as the Minisink. The project was the brainchild of the Army Corps of Engineers.
The Lenape (pronounced Len-AH-pay) people were living, hunting, fishing, and farming the fertile valley when the first Dutch explorers and settlers arrived in the 1600s. For the most part, the Lenapes and the Europeans that settled in the valley enjoyed a peaceful coexistence, until the Lenapes realized that their home territories were becoming smaller and smaller. The infamous Walking Purchase of 1737 was the major event that set hostilities in motion.
By the time of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, a series of forts had been constructed through the Minisink. Headquarters was located near the Isaac VanCampen Inn, a yaugh house on the Old Mine Road. John Adams, Gen. Horatio Gates, Benedict Arnold, and Count Casimir Pulaski were among the more notable people who spent the night at VanCampen’s.
In the mid-1800s, people living in nearby cities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey discovered the unspoiled beauty and nature of the Delaware Water Gap. It was not long before nearly 40 hotels were built in the mountains and nearby towns. Landscape painters, naturalists, bird-watchers, botanists, actors and actresses, businessmen and their families, and even presidents came to relax in the natural beauty and wilderness. Many farmers catered to the needs of tourists by providing room and board during the summer tourist season.
In 1955, one of the worst and deadliest floods in the nation’s history struck the Delaware valley. People started speaking up about flood control, and the Army Corps of Engineers targeted the Delaware River. They theorized that a dam would also provide drinking water and hydroelectric power for growing distant cities. The Tocks Island dam was authorized by Pres. John F. Kennedy in 1962 and included the creation of a Tocks Island Recreation Area to manage the facilities around the reservoir. The federal government began to acquire the homes and farms of valley residents, either by purchase or, for those really stubborn folks who refused to sell, by exercising the governmental right to eminent domain and seizure.
The idea of the Army Corps of Engineers did not fare well with activists who were already at work saving a small glacial lake on top of the mountain very close to Tocks Island. The fight to save Sunfish Pond, coupled with groups already forming to fight the dam, created a huge environmental movement in the upper Delaware River valley and started a political and environmental war that raged for decades.
In the wake of a massive environmental opposition, dwindling funds, and finally an unacceptable geological assessment for the safety of the dam, the push to build the Tocks Island dam waned. The government put the National Park Service in charge of the acquired properties. Instead of a reservoir, the area became the DWGNRA.
The National Park Service suddenly found itself the caretaker of hundreds of vacant historical houses that were not supposed to be there. For the park service, there followed many years of hard feelings and miserable failures, but it also managed to pull a few gems from the rubble of the Tocks Island fiasco.
In spite of its infamous beginnings, the DWGNRA is now a pristine, environmentally rich valley protecting the lands immediately adjacent to the wild and scenic Delaware River. Instead of condominiums and developments, there are 70,000 acres of managed wilderness, all within a short ride of the New York and Philadelphia metropolitan areas.
While it is impossible to tell the whole story of the DWGNRA in such a small space, it is hoped that the photographs and text will chronicle the life and times of this historic valley and the dam that nearly destroyed it forever. Future preservation depends on one’s awareness of what took place here. It is hoped that this book will institute that awareness.
One
PEOPLE OF THE MINISINK
The Minisink was the name applied to about a 60-mile stretch of the Delaware River valley, from the Delaware Water Gap to about present-day Narrowsburg, New York. Where the Neversink River joins the Delaware River in Port Jervis, New York, the Delaware River makes a right-angle turn and flows southwest, parallel and immediately behind a ridge of mountains on the New Jersey side and with lesser mountains and ridges on the Pennsylvania side. The river makes a sharp S turn at Walpack Bend and continues its course to the water gap. At the Delaware Water Gap, the river again turns to the southeast and follows a less mountainous course to the Delaware Bay and Atlantic Ocean.
The Native Americans living in the Minisink area at the time the Europeans arrived were the Munsi Indians. From about the year 1600, the Lenape people lived throughout most of New Jersey and neighboring areas. Territory divided the Algonquin-speaking Lenapes into three groups, including the Unalachtigo Indians, living around Delaware Bay; the Unami Indians, living in central New Jersey; and the Munsi Indians (also written Munsee or Minsi), living in northern New Jersey and northeastern Pennsylvania. Later the English collectively called all these people Delawares, because of their proximity to the river. In the late 1600s, the Lenapes were loosely dominated by the more warlike Iroquois. Taking advantage of this social hierarchy, the Europeans called upon the Iroquois to persuade the reluctant Lenapes to leave the upper Delaware River valley in the years after the Walking Purchase of 1737.
Archaeological evidence shows that Paleo-Indians first inhabited the Minisink area almost 11,000 years ago after the retreat of the glacier that once covered the