Research Notes

Delaware Water Gap, where the river kept the valley

Hotel keepers turned a river notch into a season, and a government tried to turn the valley into a lake. The hotels burned, the lake was never built, and the river is still there, with a park around it and a stream running where a hotel kitchen stood.

A stream through the kitchen

The Delaware River comes down between two mountains and cuts a notch through the ridge, and the notch is the whole story. Travellers could pass through it, but for a long time they could hardly stop in it. The mountains came right down to the water, and there was no room for a road. A visitor who rode the wagon road through the Gap described it as a "wagon road leading between the mountain's edge & the river & which all the labour of the inhabitants have been ineffectual to make more than about 8 feet wide or to clear from excessive roughness as it leads over one rough hillock to another the whole distance."

The valley beyond the notch was called the Minisink, home of the Lenape. Antoine Dutot, a Frenchman who had fled a slave uprising in Santo Domingo, arrived there with a plan to lay out a city, and gave the place his own name. Dutotsburg never became the city he imagined. His wooden buildings fell into disrepair, and eventually Dutotsburg became known as the borough of Delaware Water Gap. Dutot began a small hotel overlooking the river, and ran out of money before it was finished.

Samuel Snyder bought the unfinished hotel from Antoine Dutot, enlarged it, finished it, and named it the Kittatinny. It held twenty-five guests, and it filled in its first season. William A. Brodhead rented the Kittatinny, then bought it, and kept enlarging it until it held two hundred and fifty guests. The hotel stood on a plateau above the river, and a mountain stream ran down behind it, through the kitchen, where it was used for cooking and washing. A hotel is a machine for feeding people, and this one had its water supply running through the room where the food was made.

The Kittatinny's success brought other hotels, and families opened their own houses to visitors. The town's year-round population was only about four hundred, and in summer it swelled with some two thousand five hundred visitors, many of whom stayed for the whole season.

Six hours from New York

The railroad turned a visit into a season. Before it, the Gap was reached by river, rough roads, and stagecoach. When the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad reached the Delaware, a train could leave New York in the morning and arrive at Delaware Water Gap in the early afternoon, a trip of almost six hours. A father could put his family on a train for the summer and return at the weekend. That timetable, more than any advertisement, made the season possible.

Luke W. Brodhead, who managed the Kittatinny after William A. Brodhead, built a rival hotel on the ledge behind it, the Water Gap House. He also wrote a book about the Gap, listing what it offered: "The principal sources of amusement and recreation are the rambles over miles of mountain paths with vistas of great beauty opening at frequent intervals; carriage drives in many directions over a picturesque and interesting country; steamboat and rowboat service, and good bass fishing on the river in season and trout fishing in the adjacent streams."

A steamboat called Kittatinny churned up and down on a three-mile run in and below the Gap. Guests came back to the same hotel year after year, calling it their second home. The old Kittatinny was pulled down and a bigger New Kittatinny rose in its place, holding five hundred guests. The Water Gap House was rebuilt too, under its new owner, John Purdy Cope, who advertised it in a New York newspaper: "Capacity, 300. A MOUNTAIN PARADISE; highest altitude, coolest location, always a breeze, no humidity…. Commanding views for 30 miles in every direction of the grandest scenery east of the Rockies."

Two fires, no rebuilding

The season ended with several small changes arriving together. Cars freed travellers from the train timetable, and a weekend outing with the whole family, stopping for a night at a comfortable hotel, began to replace the summer-long separation of father from family. The large hotels, built for guests who stayed for months, found fewer guests who wanted to stay that way. The hard years of the Depression finished what the car had started.

Then fire did what economics had begun. One November afternoon, workmen helping to close the Water Gap House for the winter discovered a fire in one of the guest rooms. Fire companies answered in light rain, but the whole wooden building was levelled in a matter of hours. Four days later it was announced that a new hotel, as large as the Water Gap House and fireproof, would be built on the same site, in time for some of the next season. The hotel was never built.

Sixteen years later, the Kittatinny burned. John Purdy Cope, who by then also owned the Kittatinny, and his family were woken in the early hours of the morning by a passing motorist who had seen flames coming from the hotel. Within two hours the entire structure was engulfed. The Kittatinny was never rebuilt either. The stream that had run through its kitchen kept running, downhill to the river, past a foundation with no hotel on it.

A lake forty miles long, on paper

The Gap's second undoing came from the government, not from fire. After two hurricanes battered the eastern seaboard in a single August, rivers overflowed their banks, and nearly a hundred people lost their lives on the banks of a single creek in the Poconos. Congress turned to the Army Corps of Engineers and to an old river basin study, and the Corps proposed a dam on the Delaware at the southern tip of Tocks Island, a short way upstream from the Gap. The dam would have created a lake roughly forty miles long and a mile wide, for flood control, city water, power, and recreation.

Before a dam could be built, the land had to be emptied. Some six hundred families and property owners whose land would be drowned had to be displaced, and some of those families had lived and worked on that land for centuries. The Corps bought the land, and to offset the cost it rented some of the newly acquired houses for the short term. People who had unwillingly sold their homes watched strangers from outside the valley move into their houses.

Opposition grew slowly and then all at once. A few voices against the dam grew into an uproar, as new studies challenged the wisdom of turning a free river into a still body of water, and as the basin states counted the cost of building roads and services for millions of visitors to a quiet place. The commission that governed the river basin voted to shelve the dam. The land the government had already acquired was handed over to the National Park Service, and the recreation area that had been planned as a narrow strip around a reservoir became a park of seventy thousand acres, with forty miles of protected free-flowing river. The lake was never built, and the land bought for it became the park.

The river kept the valley

Walk the ground now and only remains are visible. Part of the Kittatinny's foundation still stands beneath the overlook from which visitors look out at the river and the highway bridge, the same view the hotel's guests enjoyed from its veranda. The ring of rocks that was once one of the Kittatinny's fountains survives at the overlook. The Water Gap House left ruins on the hill behind it. Old Kittatinny Park trails are walked today as part of the long trail system along the ridge, and hikers pass the same overlooks the hotel guests visited.

The stream that ran through a hotel kitchen runs to the river still. It used to feed guests. Now it feeds nothing but the valley, and the valley is still there because the river was never dammed.

See the photographs in the archive: STA-0314 STA-0333 STA-0317 STA-0337 STA-0322 STA-0338. Each record links back to its source.

Appendix

Timeline

• 1793 — Antoine Dutot lays out Dutotsburg, north of the Gap.
• 1829 — Antoine Dutot begins building a small hotel overlooking the Delaware River.
• 1832 — Antoine Dutot, out of money, sells the unfinished hotel to Samuel Snyder, who enlarges and completes it as the Kittatinny, holding twenty-five guests.
• 1841–1851 — William A. Brodhead rents the Kittatinny, then buys it and raises its capacity to sixty.
• 1853 — Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad formed, March 11.
• 1856 — First Scranton-to-Delaware train, January 21; through travel to New York, May 13; Southern Division officially opened, May 27. A morning train from New York reached Delaware Water Gap in the early afternoon.
• 1860 — Kittatinny capacity reaches two hundred and fifty guests. Catalog year for the Delaware Water Gap cards is 1860, except STA-0325, which is undated.
• 1867 — The Brainerd, the Lenape, the Glenwood, the River Farm, and the Arlington have joined the Kittatinny in offering accommodations.
• 1872 — Water Gap House opens, June 20, built by Luke W. Brodhead.
• 1874 — Brodhead brothers raise Kittatinny capacity to 275.
• 1887 — Pennsylvania Railroad Summer Excursion booklet lists twenty hotels, including a Kittatinny housing three hundred guests.
• 1892 — Old Kittatinny razed; New Kittatinny built, holding five hundred guests.
• 1908 — Water Gap House rebuilt; John Purdy Cope advertises it in the New York Times, June 14, capacity 300.
• 1915 — Water Gap House burns, November 11, discovered by workmen closing the hotel for winter; loss $150,000–$200,000; a fireproof replacement is announced four days later and never built.
• 1931 — Kittatinny burns, October 30, discovered by a passing motorist in the early morning; loss $500,000–$750,000; never rebuilt.
• 1955 — Hurricanes Connie and Diane, August; nearly 100 deaths on Broadhead Creek alone.
• 1965 — Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area established, September 1, as the project area around the proposed Tocks Island reservoir.
• 1970 — Delaware, Lackawanna and Western passenger service to the Gap ends, January 5.
• 1975 — Delaware River Basin Commission votes to shelve the Tocks Island Dam project.
• 1978 — Tocks Island Dam project cancelled, by secondary accounts; acquired land transferred to the recreation area, which holds some 70,000 acres and 40 miles of free-flowing river. Other secondary accounts give 67,000 acres, and a Park management plan gives 69,629 acres.
• Dam scale, competing figures — National Park Service: lake roughly 40 miles long and a mile wide, some 600 families and property owners to be displaced. Secondary accounts: lake 37 miles long and up to 140 feet deep, over 15,000 people displaced, 72,000 acres acquired.

Photographs

• STA-0314 — "Water Gap, (Pa.) Delaware River, by R. Newell & Sons", 1860. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/313.jpg
• STA-0333 — "Delaware Water Gap, view from hotel, by Johnson & D'utassy", 1860. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/332.jpg
• STA-0317 — "View from near the Kittanning House, looking north", 1860. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/316.jpg
• STA-0337 — "The railroad Delaware Water Gap Pa", 1860. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/336.jpg
• STA-0322 — "Marshall's Falls, near Delaware Water Gap, by Johnson & D'utassy", 1860. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/321.jpg
• STA-0338 — "Delaware Water Gap. view from Prospect Hill, by Johnson & D'utassy", 1860. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/337.jpg

Titles, places, and years follow catalog-v2.json. Source unrecorded means the catalog gives no named collection. All photographs are public domain, via the source pages linked from the catalog.

Sources

1. Antoine Dutot Museum and Gallery, "Delaware Water Gap: A Brief History", by Martin W. Wilson, Ph.D. https://dutotmuseum.org/history/
2. Society of Architectural Historians, SAH Archipedia, "Delaware Water Gap and Vicinity", by George E. Thomas. https://sah-archipedia.org/essays/PA-02-0006-0001-0002
3. National Park Service, "Origin Story: The Tocks Island Dam Controversy". https://www.nps.gov/dewa/learn/historyculture/tocks-island-dam-controversy.htm
4. National Park Service newsletter, "Resort Era to Recreation Area", Spanning the Gap, Vol. 7 No. 2, Summer 1984. http://npshistory.com/publications/dewa/spanning-the-gap/v7-2-2.pdf
5. National Canal Museum, "A Summer Getaway", June 6, 2024. https://canals.org/2024/06/06/a-summer-getaway/
6. Frank W. Sinden, "A New Park on the Delaware", Chapter 10 of Boundaries of Analysis: An Inquiry into the Tocks Island Dam Controversy. http://live-amacad.pantheonsite.io/multimedia/pdfs/publications/books/boundaries_chapterten.pdf

A social preview shows the rectified pair, not the single left eye.