America's Honeymoon Hideaway: The True Story of the Poconos Resort Era

A stream between two mountains

The name itself is older than any hotel. "Pocono" comes from the Munsee word Pokawachne — "Creek Between Two Hills," commonly rendered as "a stream between two mountains." The Lenape were here first, and the mountains still carry their name the way the Little Pigeon carries the passenger pigeon's.

But the Poconos' second identity — the one the whole country knows — began with a Frenchman, a hotel, and a gap in the mountains.

The Frenchman at the Water Gap

In 1829, Antoine Dutot began building the Kittatinny House at the Delaware Water Gap — the dramatic notch where the Delaware River slices through the Kittatinny Ridge. The National Park Service calls Dutot the "father" of the resort industry here. He sold the unfinished hotel to Samuel Snyder, who rented it to capacity its very first season. The idea was simple and eternal: city people will pay to breathe mountain air.

The railroad made it a stampede. After the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western arrived in 1856, the Gap filled every summer with vacationers from New York City and Philadelphia. The Kittatinny grew from twenty-five guests to two hundred and fifty by 1866. The Water Gap House, built in 1872 atop Mount Minsi for 275 guests, crowned the ridge until it burned in 1915 in one of the county's largest fires. The Kittatinny burned in 1931; its foundations are still visible at Resort Point Overlook on Route 611 — the ruins of the first dream.

By 1900, summer vacationers from New York and Philadelphia were arriving "en masse," and in 1927 the Monroe County Publicity Bureau gave the region its brand: "Pennsylvania's Playground."

The Quaker grand hotels

The Poconos' golden age wore a plain Quaker bonnet. In 1901, Hicksite Quakers from Philadelphia opened the Inn at Buck Hill Falls — eighteen rooms that grew to more than four hundred. Before World War I it forbade liquor, dancing, and cards, and didn't allow automobiles on the grounds until 1916. By 1914, 125 cottages stood on the property. In 1902, orthodox Quakers established Pocono Manor, whose inn was built in nine sections between 1902 and 1949. And in June 1928, Skytop Lodge opened on 5,500 acres — a $750,000 Dutch Colonial Revival palace with grounds by the Olmsted Brothers, built by founders who'd grown tired of Buck Hill's stuffiness and wanted a grander, more worldly escape.

These weren't hotels; they were summer civilizations, where Philadelphia and New York families returned to the same porch chairs year after year, generation after generation. Farming families took in summer boarders. The mountains hummed with the particular industry of leisure.

The heart-shaped tub

Then came the war, the veterans, and the brides — and the Poconos' strangest and most famous chapter.

Rudolf Von Hoevenberg's Farm on the Hill, opened in 1945, was the first resort built for honeymoon couples. By 1960 the Poconos rivaled Niagara Falls, drawing more than 100,000 couples a year. And then a Stroudsburg-born World War II Navy submarine electrician named Morris Wilkins had an idea.

In 1958, Wilkins and Harold O'Brien bought the eighteen-room Hotel Pocopaupack on Lake Wallenpaupack and renamed it Cove Haven, a couples-only resort. Five years later, in 1963, Wilkins invented the heart-shaped bathtub — hand-poured concrete, red tile, $3,000 apiece for the first six — specifically to generate honeymoon business. He never patented it. When Life magazine ran a two-page photograph of a couple in a Cove Haven "sweetheart tub" in 1971, business exploded. Cove Haven grew to more than 230 rooms. Rivals installed heart-shaped tubs of their own. Wilkins followed with the seven-foot champagne-glass whirlpool, still a signature at Cove Haven and its sister resorts Paradise Stream and Pocono Palace.

The Pocono Record called Wilkins "an icon who helped make the Poconos the Honeymoon Capital of the World." Life called the era "affluent vulgarity." Both were right, and the tubs outlasted the judgment — the heart-shaped tub remains the single most recognizable symbol of the American honeymoon.

Snow, water, and the dam that never was

The Poconos were never just about romance. Big Boulder, opened in 1947, became one of Pennsylvania's pioneering ski areas — and its employee John Guresh is credited with developing the first usable snowmaking equipment in the 1950s, the technology that made Southern skiing possible. Camelback followed in December 1963, and Jack Frost in 1972.

The mountains nearly changed forever in the 1960s. After devastating floods in 1955, Congress authorized the Tocks Island Dam in 1962 — a 3,200-foot dam that would have flooded a 37-mile reservoir reaching all the way to Port Jervis, displacing some 4,000 families by eminent domain. The project was effectively killed when its lands were folded into the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in 1978 (formally deauthorized in 1992). The Delaware through the Gap remains the longest undammed river east of the Mississippi — a wild corridor the dam would have drowned.

Water shaped the northern Poconos too. Lake Wallenpaupack — the Lenape's "stream of swift and slow water" — was dammed by Pennsylvania Power & Light between 1924 and 1926: 2,700 men, eight million dollars, a hundred farms and the town of Wilsonville submerged beneath 5,700 acres, all to feed a 44-megawatt hydroelectric plant. It opened to the public on July 31, 1926, and PP&L had the foresight to plan for recreation from the start — the lake became a vacation spot

Write your own chapter

Every era of the Poconos has had its hideaway — the boarding houses of the Gap, the Quaker inns, the honeymoon suites, the lake cottages. The newest chapter belongs to the second-home age, and it's quieter, more private, more yours.

Poconos Hideout — Zara's Getaways' A-frame in Lake Ariel — sits in the heart of the country this whole story unfolded in: minutes from Lake Wallenpaupack, where 2,700 men built a lake in the 1920s; from the lake that once had its own roller coaster; from the forests the Quakers summered in. Come for the history — the Gap, the old hotel sites, the dam that never was. Stay for what the Poconos have always really sold: the air, the water, the quiet, and a hideaway that's entirely your own.