People

Zane Grey Fishing in the Delaware River.

The National Park Service protects and interprets historic sites in the region and works to tell the stories of the people who made these places significant to the Upper Delaware corridor.

One of the sites, Roebling's Delaware Aqueduct, carried the Delaware and Hudson Canal over the Delaware River. As the oldest wire cable suspension structure in the U.S. with its historic elements intact, it is a testament to the engineering genius of John A. Roebling, a German immigrant to the United States who also designed the Brooklyn Bridge.

Prolific author Zane Grey, known as "the father of the western novel," was inspired to launch his early writing career on the banks of the Upper Delaware River. Zane was eager to escape the bustling New York City to canoe and fish along the Delaware. Today his former residence is now a self-guided museum owned by the National Park Service.

 

The Delaware House was located on the banks of the Delaware River in Lackawaxen, PA.

The idyllic Cowen Farm sits nestled between the Delaware and Hudson Canal and the Delaware River. Although today it is a National Park Service ranger station, walking along the grounds offers a glimpse into the lives of the Cowen and Stage families who owned the land for at least 80 years from 1835 to 1915. Through farming, shop keeping, and teaching, the families were just one part of the rich community found in the Upper Delaware corridor.

Lastly, the region has been a getaway for vacationers since the late 1870s when the Erie Railroad began to promote the region as a sportsman's paradise. Over time, tourism slowly became the number one industry in the Delaware Valley. Thousands of people traveled by train to visit the dozens of resorts in the region to fish, boat, and enjoy the natural beauty of the area. As railroad travel gave way to the automobile, campgrounds, canoe rentals, and bed and breakfast inns sprung to accommodate a new generation of travelers. Today, visitors from all across the country continue to come to the Delaware Valley to enjoy the beauty of the area and to explore the river.

The river valley continues to support thousands of residents that have settled, developed, and made this region their home and opened it up to tourists and river enthusiasts. Through the use of oral history interviews, the National Park Service has started to collect the stories of some of the local residents so that people who have the stories of some of the local residents so that the people who have experienced the changes in the valley can tell their story first hand.