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The Life-Giving Delaware
The role of the Delaware River, which borders the county’s eastern edge, is truly a defining one. It not only separates much of eastern Pennsylvania, including Bucks County, from New Jersey, it also has been a major factor in much of the county’s history and growth.
It is the longest free-flowing river east of the Mississippi; its waters travel 330 miles from their source in New York’s Catskill Mountains to the mouth of Delaware Bay where they disappear into the Atlantic Ocean. The Delaware provides water for more than 15 million people, including Pennsylvania and New York City residents.
Geologists tell us it is a young river working furiously to cut into the rock beneath. Sometimes its calm waters mirror its surroundings, but they can be angry and unruly, racing wildly up riverbanks, flooding whole towns and wiping out bridges.
The Delaware is not navigable north of the Falls of the Delaware, now Morrisville, where it tumbles down the rocky ledges from the Piedmont Plateau onto the lower coastal plain.
The falls helped to confine growth to the lower end of the county when the Industrial Revolution turned farms into factories. For industry, the river has been a source of both power and shipping. North of the falls, it offers excellent fishing and boating.
The early colonists turned to the river for water, for food—fish, especially shad, was plentiful—and even for shelter. Those early Quakers who had sailed from England only to arrive in cold weather often sought natural caves along the riverbank to shield them from winter’s wrath.
The river was the main source of transportation for the early colonists, just as it had always been for the Lenapes, who had lived here for thousands of years and called themselves the Original People.
The Lenapes traveled by dugout canoe and tended to build their villages along the river flats as well as on the banks of the larger tributaries such as the Neshaminy Creek.
It was far easier to navigate a boat through river and creek than it was to follow narrow native paths or cut a trail through the woodsy wilderness. Even William Penn, when he visited Pennsbury Manor, his country home in Bucks, traveled by barge from Philadelphia.
The Delaware also was the main source of water for the pioneers’ commercial use. The Quakers, the first to settle here, snatched up the fertile, best lands along the river. Early villages grew up along the banks of river and streams.
The Germans, who arrived 30 to 50 years after the English, were left with second-best land. Even so, that land west of the river still offered exceptionally good soils, and the settlers were wise and careful farmers. Their inland farms, which drew water from nearby creeks, the great river’s tributaries, prospered.
Settlers built mills along the creeks, and villages began to form around them in the eighteenth century. Sturdy Durham boats built in what is now the county’s northernmost riverside township took iron and produce to Philadelphia in the 1700s.
Two centuries later the process was reversed, when ocean-going vessels carried iron ore from other countries up the river to U.S. Steel’s giant Fairless Works just north of Pennsbury Manor.
In the 1800s, seeking the river’s beauty and its cooling breezes, wealthy Philadelphia families built their summer homes on the banks of the Delaware in Bensalem, the township closest to the city. Andalusia, home of the Biddle dynasty and now a house museum still owned by the family, had its own wharf where excursion steamboats deposited and retrieved their guests.
Passengers included the less privileged who would escape the city’s heat at nearby parks. The paddle wheel boats ran daily excursions from Philadelphia to Bristol, the county’s oldest town where Victorian mansions climbed the steep riverbank and pleasure boats sailed the river.
River islands, formed of rocks and soils deposited by glaciers, attract migrating waterfowl and songbirds as well as fishermen and boaters. Lewis Island, which lies between New Hope and Lambertville, New Jersey, is home to the only remaining licensed shad fishery on the Delaware.
During World War 1, a giant shipyard along the river at Bristol turned out ships at an amazing pace. In World War 2, the yard was converted to a plant that built airplane parts.
The portion of the river lying above the falls, while not navigable, has always offered recreation. Today, sightseers can cruise a scenic Delaware aboard the River Otter, a pontoon boat, based in Upper Black Eddy. The river still offers good fishing and fun for small boats and jet skis.
My grandfather, Daniel W. Gorman of Bristol, who died before I was born, was an engineer on the steamship, S.S.Columbia, one of the party boats that cruised the Delaware from Philadelphia to Bristol.
The paddle-wheeler was supposedly the most elegant of the steamships, had the most enclosed space, and offered the best moonlight cruises with a full orchestra on board. But it served the country as well. During World War 1, moored in Philadelphia, it was used as a floating boarding house for dockworkers.