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If Quakers kept the faith, wanting to remain a plain people who frowned upon ostentation, they would have to master the art of spending without being arrogant,. Not surprisingly, people of this persuasion would not like the Grand Tour, which would attract all sorts of name droppers and businessmen who believed that humanity was eager to hear of their success. The Poconos aptly suited the Quaker ethos. The Poconos were a niche resort partially because of poor accessibility.
Prior to the building of railroads, Americans avoided land travel as much as possible, preferring river or sea travel to stagecoach rides over unpaved roads. For this reason, the rich often chose to vacation at Atlantic Ocean resorts, which they could easily reach by sailing up and down the coast. A comparison of the Poconos with the Catskill Mountains of the Hudson River Valley underscores the importance of good transportation.
By contrast, the upper Delaware River was unfriendly to traffic. The rapids and low waters below Delaware Water Gap prevented Philadelphians from reaching the Poconos by steamboat. In the Pocono stretch of the river, from Delaware Water Gap to Port Jervis, navigation was nearly impossible, except for rafts. Later in the nineteenth century, small steamers occasionally attempted to reach Port Jervis.
If they succeeded and managed to return to Delaware Water Gap, they rarely repeated the adventure.
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Not surprisingly, the Catskills developed a brisk vacation trade earlier than the Poconos. Aside from access, the Catskills had the good luck of favorable publicity. Thomas Cole, perhaps the most famous member of the Hudson River School, went a step further. He argued that water at rest could stir the soul. Nature at peace was not the original sublime, but it was reassuring. It made the sublime more accessible to the timid. The Poconos also attracted artists. From the river, depending on the time of day, Mount Minsi on the Pennsylvania side of the river and Mount Tammany on the New Jersey side would cast ominous shadows.
Artists loved to paint rowboats on the still waters with the twin peaks looming in the background. The overall effect is not the sublime of thunderous, misty Niagara Falls, but a gentler sublime, one that invites contemplation. It is the sublime of Thomas Cole, who heard sound in silence and saw fury in peace. Pocono artists never received the acclaim of their counterparts in the Hudson River School.
Likewise, James Fenimore Cooper, another early American writer who reached a national audience, used the Catskills as the setting for two of his novels: Along with the landscape artists, Irving and Cooper established an atmosphere of adventure and mystery for the Hudson River Valley that permeated the national consciousness throughout the century. As early as the s, this free publicity helped create a Catskill resort culture that was far better known than its Pocono counterpart.
Fly-fishing was an art in itself with a lore and a rich literature. Here again, the Catskills won the publicity war. According to flyfishing historian Ernest Schwiebert, American popular culture places the cradle of fly-fishing innovation in certain streams of the Catskills. Schwiebert begs to differ. There is also considerable evidence that Henryville House on its laurel-sheltered upper reaches is the oldest trout-fishing hotel in America, and its rambling clapboard structure sheltered every major American angler from its establishment in until the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties.
Indeed, the Poconos deserve attention if only for the famous people who fly-fished in the mountain streams. Harrison and Cleveland, in fact, were guests during the same week prior to their election campaigns—the campaigns in which they ran against each other. If the Poconos had inspired a great literature, the region would have attracted greater numbers of visitors and much more attention. The problem with the Poconos was not an absence of literary material, for the Poconos did have the stuff of historical fiction. In the eighteenth century, the Lenape Indians were driven off their lands, but got their revenge during the French and Indian War of —63—and again during the Revolution, when they killed isolated farmers.
Nonetheless, they were defeated, and they eventually left. As for the colonists, they produced a great villain in Tom Quick, who allegedly murdered nearly a hundred Indians during and after the Indian wars. In explaining why he had killed an Indian baby, he replied that "nits make lice. The patriots who stayed home lost several minor engagements. The worst was the Wyoming Massacre, which took place in the Wyoming Valley at the edge of the Poconos when a mixed Indian-Tory force routed American militiamen.
The Indians ran amok and took scalps. The survivors, mostly women and children, fled through wilderness and swamps, reaching Dansbury East Stroudsburg only after a long trek and near starvation. Here were martyrs for the new Republic whose sad and inspiring story was the stuff of mythology. These American heroes were begging for an immortality that would make them standard fare in textbooks. All they needed was a bard, a latter-day Homer.
The associate judge of the Pike County court, Dingman served on the bench for twentysix years, beginning three years before the creation of the county in Although his office proclaimed dignity, Dingman was uneducated and boorish. He addressed a fellow judge as "Bub" and. One time, Dingman was passing sentence on a vagabond accused of theft.
Go get off the face of the earth. Authors could have found literary material among the rafters, too. Rafters were often farmers who saw more money in cutting trees and floating them to market than in tilling the stony soil. All along the upper Delaware Valley, on the New Jersey and New York banks as well as on the Pocono side of the Delaware River, trees were cut, lashed into rafts, and floated during the spring, when flooding raised the low water level of the river and allowed rafts to clear the rocks.
Some rafters rode the current as far as Philadelphia. After arriving, the rafters broke the rafts, sold the wood, and took the stagecoach back—or saved money by walking. The first rafter in the area, a man named Daniel Skinner, dates back to colonial times. In his early days, Skinner sailed in the Caribbean Sea and saw ships with pine masts. He realized that a market existed for the tall white pine trees back home in Wayne County. After his first rafting attempt failed, he succeeded with a second; he reached Philadelphia in and sold his wood for great profit. His exploits on the river earned him the unofficial title of "Lord High Admiral of the Delaware.
Rafters lived in shanties on their rafts, but they would stop at night, unwilling to navigate the river in darkness. A favorite destination was Milford. As many as two hundred rafters would stay overnight, drinking and carousing, giving Milford the flavor of a frontier town. The hard work created great appetites. A legend has it that one rafter ordered two dozen eggs, a dozen fried and a dozen boiled, at a restaurant in Belvidere, New Jersey. The bony Delaware shad was a popular dish. It was said that eating fish was akin to eating corn.
The fish entered in the east corner of the mouth and emerged. Little was written about these colorful characters, and ignorance is no excuse. During the nineteenth century, rafting was a well-known activity. It peaked in the s, but some 3, rafts passed through Lackawaxen in Pike County as late as The last rafters floated down the Delaware River in the early twentieth century.
People living downstream likewise must have known of them. The Delaware River rafters were the equivalent of the boatmen of the Mississippi River, needing only an eastern Mark Twain to make them part of American lore. No such writer appeared, and no great novel was written. The Delaware River rafters were fated to end up as footnotes to history, omitted from the main narrative. All of Pocono history has suffered the same neglect. The region had eccentrics, soldiers, and Indians. There were battles and, ultimately, genocide, for the Indian population disappeared after the wars of the eighteenth century.
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The Pocono mountains held much literary raw material—yet, incredibly, inspired little literature. Why eastern Pennsylvania produced a meager literature on the Poconos is difficult to explain. Philadelphia had its share of literate persons who were aware of the Poconos.
An explanation for the absence of a Pocono literature may have been given by E. The book is a remarkable analysis of how Philadelphians think—and, by extension, how their neighbors in eastern Pennsylvania think as well. Much of eastern Pennsylvania was settled by sects that valued Quaker pacifism and modesty.
Baltzell claims that Bostonians are chauvinistic about their town, while Philadelphians are negative about theirs. Anyone who has heard Philadelphia sports fans jeer the home team—the unforgiving storm of catcalls for the slightest mistake—will understand what Baltzell means. Baltzell explains the difference between the two cities by pointing to their respective religious heritages.
During the French and Indian War, their pacifism drove them out of Philadelphia politics. They retreated into their private worlds, doomed to be perennial outsiders who denied greatness in themselves and in others. Baltzell accuses Quakers of being smug and contented, but having little ambition for Philadelphia.
Baltzell adds that Quakers and Episcopalians of Quaker descent had the drive to make money but refused the civic obligations of wealth. An economic elite that refused to lead, Quakers had an enormous impact on nineteenth-century Philadelphia. According to Baltzell, their civic absenteeism explains why local pride was weak, why Philadelphia lost economic leadership to New York City, and why the city did not care if its museums and schools were inferior to those of New York and Boston.
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No literature on the Indian wars and the Revolution would come from a pacifist environment, nor would a region obsessed with modesty celebrate its scenery and lore. But if residents of eastern Pennsylvania would not call attention to themselves, neither would anyone else. As a result, the Poconos never penetrated the American mind as deeply as the Catskills. This was true in the nineteenth century—and it remains true today.
The Poconos stopped being a niche region and entered the mass age of Victorian vacationing when the railroads came. The reinvention of the Poconos was somewhat fortuitous. There was no master plan in the Poconos, no clever entrepreneur who decided to kick-start a vacation economy by bringing in the railroad. The Poconos were quite different from Atlantic City, where savvy businessmen of the s laid out a railroad to Philadelphia, realizing that a seashore resort would attract city folk who needed something to do on a Sunday afternoon. The needs of New York City explain rail service in the Poconos.
Completed in , the Erie Railroad carried freight to and from the city; it also connected the city to the Poconos, although it was in the paradoxical situation of never stopping there. The distance between Milford and Port Jervis was eight miles and required a river crossing, but, as matters turned out, this was close enough. The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, commonly called the "Lackawanna," was similarly serendipitous for the future resort industry. Completed five years after the Erie Railroad, the Lackawanna Railroad was also a freight carrier: Although the Lackawanna Railroad regarded passenger service as secondary, it allowed Monroe County and southern Pike County to tap the prospective vacation markets of northern New Jersey and New York City.
The orientation of the vacation business in Monroe County changed forever as its hotels and boardinghouses began to cater to New Yorkers as well as Philadelphians. Four of these stations would be magnets for numerous hotels and boardinghouses. In these early days, the Delaware Water Gap station had the most vacation traffic. Without this station, the village would have remained a backwater. Three miles to the northwest was the East Stroudsburg station, which was responsible for making the Stroudsburgs another vacation center.
Twenty miles inland lay the mountain stations of Cresco and Mount Pocono.
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Their importance would come later in the century. Another way in which the Lackawanna Railroad boosted vacation travel in these years was by improving service. In , the Lackawanna shortened travel time between Philadelphia and the Poconos by arranging a connection between its trains and the Pennsylvania Railroad at Manunka Chunk in New Jersey. Passengers from Philadelphia left the Pennsylvania Railroad train at the Manunka Chunk station, crossed the platform, and boarded the Lackawanna from New York.
New Yorkers saved an hour of travel time. By , five trains left New York City every day for the Poconos. Of course, the entire trip from New York City took far more time, for a horse and buggy were needed to reach a railroad station. Moreover, river tunnels did not yet exist. New Yorkers needed to ferry. The Poconos were not close, but still, they were not very far. Excessive travel time would not ruin a short vacation. A stay at a nineteenth-century resort was a social ritual that was identified with refinement.
When straying from the resort, they might have been willing to countenance a few country bumpkins, but they would not want regular contact with the crass and the vulgar.
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In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Poconos were not yet ready to become a resort area. The isolated region was home to farmers, lumberjacks, and tanners whose hardscrabble lives would not suit a resort culture. There was a lady lumberjack, for instance, who smoked a pipe and drove a team with masculine abandon.
She was not exactly the sort that refined city women who discussed the latest English novels cared to meet. Milford had the flavor of a frontier town. It was said that elections were won by the candidate who supplied the most free liquor. Milford also lacked churches, which were the taming, civilizing influence of the nineteenth century.
Before the s, not a single church member lived in Milford, but this was to change. By the s, both Methodists and Presbyterians were active. In other words, the Milford that featured resorts had fewer bars than the Milford that featured lumberjacks and rafters. In Stroudsburg, roughly thirty-five miles downstream from Milford, a population of seven hundred supported five churches during the s.
By , Monroe County had thirty-three churches and all that churchgoing implied: Although the Poconos would always have their share of crude people, the rules of proper behavior were now known. Gentility was necessary for a resort climate, since many guests were women. The spinster teachers, librarians, and housewives whose husbands worked in the city would frown upon bad habits. Along with a resort atmosphere, the residents of the Poconos had to be willing to accommodate vacationers.
At the very minimum, entrepreneurs were needed to start resorts; cooks, chambermaids, and laborers, to work in them. The world beyond the grounds of a resort was also important. An enjoyable vacation required guides to lead hunters, liveries to rent horses, and tradesmen to provide services and souvenirs. A workforce emerged because the urban demand for vacations came at a time when the Pocono economy needed renewal. Its primary industries were declining. Farming had become less profitable because the stony mountain soil of the Poconos could not compete with the fertile farms of the Midwest.
And lumberjacks were putting themselves out of work: Most Pocono tanneries started in the thirty years before the Civil War and lasted as long as the bark did. Since tanning a single hide required ten pounds of bark, the hemlocks eventually disappeared. By , nearly all the tanneries had shut down, and one can see the same pattern in the shoe peg and clothespin factories that used local wood.
They flourished as long as the wood lasted. Bluestone and flagstone quarries supplied city streets for a time, but they too ceased operating when the stone was exhausted. Aside from natural resource depletion, the Poconos had to cope with the national economy. The Panic of ruined many tanneries, preventing Pocono farmers from exchanging hemlock bark for food and dry goods at the general store. Farmers needed this source of income to supplement the meager returns from the soil.
In addition, the late nineteenth century was not the best of times for agriculture. Around the nation, low commodity prices ruined many farmers, even where the soil was rich and fertile. The census registered population declines in both Monroe and Pike Counties.
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They could give up and move elsewhere, or they could turn to new occupations. More than one farmer realized that city boarders would offer an income supplement, just as lumbering and tanning had done in the old days. Others sought work in the new economy. These were the more visible of a vast army of workers, ranging from plumbers to stableboys, who would make up the infrastructure of the resort industry.
The emergence of this labor pool meant that a major resort economy was possible. The birth of the resort economy can be seen in the expansion of the Kittatinny Hotel. William Brodhead bought the hotel from Isaac Bickley in , and increased its capacity to 65 guests. Two years later, the hotel held 75 guests. Business was so good that his brother, Luke Brodhead who joined William in , planned another large hotel. Stopped by the Panic of , he had to wait until the Civil War had ended before returning to this project—the future Water Gap House. By the eve of the Civil War, the Kittatinny Hotel had outgrown its original incarnation as a dualpurpose inn for vacationers and rafters.
The success of the Kittatinny—along with the new rail service—demonstrated the potential for a Pocono vacation trade. In the decades after the Civil War, the emerging labor and entrepreneurial pools, as well as a proper resort climate, allowed Pocono vacationing to reinvent itself. Although his initial venture failed, the tourist industry of the Poconos has been a long-term success, evolving and adapting to change. Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Preface 1.
The Antebellum Years 2. Here Come the Vacationers: The Poconos After the Civil War 3. Surviving the s 4. The Glory Days, to 5. City Meets Country 6. An Archipelago of Fun, to 7. The Rise of Ethnic Resorts 8. Surviving the Great Depression 9. The Poconos at Midcentury: The Last of the Good Old Days Prelude to Reinvention But in ads that appeared in the New York City press, the entire region was occasionally called "Pennsylvania Mountains. If Quakers kept the faith, wanting to remain a plain people who frowned upon ostentation, they would have to master the art of spending without being arrogant, of living well and being humble.
He addressed a fellow judge as "Bub" and occasionally held court barefoot and in shirtsleeves. The fish entered in the east corner of the mouth and emerged from the west corner, a perfect skeleton. Quaker Modesty—and Its Consequences Why eastern Pennsylvania produced a meager literature on the Poconos is difficult to explain. Our on-site trained counters report sightings in real-time that you can view online. Locations are open to the public.
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