Where Three States Meet the River: The Upper Delaware Valley's Story

Four miles from your front door

Drive four miles north of Port Jervis on Route 97 and the road does something extraordinary. It climbs 300 feet up a cliff face and clings there, winding above the Delaware River with nothing between you and the valley but a stone retaining wall and a very long way down. This is the Hawk's Nest — named for the birds of prey that nest in the crags — and it is one of the most famous stretches of road in America. Cycle World devoted a feature to it in 1991; RoadRUNNER named it a top-ten touring destination; Porsche, BMW, Saab, Cadillac, and Honda have all shot car commercials on its curves.

And its origin story is pure 19th-century grit. In the spring of 1876, 124 men from nearby Sparrowbush were hired at a dollar a day to carve the road into the cliff, high above the Delaware & Hudson Canal. Within a week of finishing, the first vehicle rolled over it — driven by a man named H.H. Parnum. The road exists where it does because the Erie Railroad refused to sell the shoreline right-of-way, forcing the builders up the cliff instead. Dirt road in 1859, paved in 1931–33 (with two million dollars spent on the Hawk's Nest alone — a sixtieth of the route, most of it retaining wall), dedicated in 1939. Parts of that wall, by the way, are remnants of the old D&H Canal. You're driving on history, literally.

That is the kind of place Port Jervis sits in the middle of. The town itself is the railroad story — but cast a twenty-five-mile net around it and you catch the upper Delaware Valley at its most dramatic: a cliff road, the highest peak in New Jersey, the birthplace of American conservation, the oldest wire suspension bridge in the country, a Revolutionary War battlefield, and the flood that changed the river forever.

The railroad town at the center

Start with the town, because it earned its place. On the last night of 1847 — December 31, at 11:45 p.m. — the first train of the New York & Erie Railroad rolled into Port Jervis from Piermont, seventy-four miles east. The official opening, January 6, 1848, drew more than a hundred guests to what the railroad called "the limit of its extension on the Delaware." Port Jervis was, for a time, the end of the most ambitious railroad in America; the line pushed on to Binghamton in 1848 and reached Lake Erie in 1851, then the longest railroad in the world.

What made Port Jervis a great railroad town was the division point: the Erie's repair shops and roundhouse between Jersey City and Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, where, as a nineteenth-century account put it, "all trains running over the road stop to change engines." By 1922, twenty passenger trains passed through daily and more than 2,500 Erie employees called the town home. The Erie Depot (1892, on the National Register) still stands on Jersey Avenue, and down on Pike Street the Erie turntable — built by the railroad, restored in 1996, described as the largest operating turntable in the United States — still swings locomotives around at the Transportation History Center, opened in 2022 on the old railyard.

For 133 years, Port Jervis was a railroad city. An Erie president once quipped that if the railroad ever left, "grass would grow on Pike Street."

The mountain with three states on top

Five miles south, across the state line, rises High Point — at 1,803 feet, the highest peak in New Jersey and the crown of the Kittatinny Mountains. On a clear day you can see New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania from the summit, which is probably why Port Jervis is the closest city to it.

The summit wears a 220-foot granite obelisk, designed by Marion Sims Wyeth and dedicated in June 1930 as a memorial to New Jersey's war dead — 291 steps to the top. The land was a gift: Colonel Anthony R. Kuser and his wife Susie donated it, the park was dedicated in 1923, the Olmsted Brothers laid out the landscaping, and in 1927 Kuser gave half a million dollars for the monument. Fifteen thousand acres of ridgeline, preserved because one family decided the highest ground in the state should belong to everyone.

The house that saved the forests

Seven miles upriver, in Milford, Pennsylvania — laid out in 1793, a resort mecca by the late nineteenth century — stands a French château that changed America. Grey Towers, completed in 1886 by James Pinchot and designed by Richard Morris Hunt, was the home of his son Gifford Pinchot: the first chief of the United States Forest Service (1905–1910), under whom the national forests grew from 56 million to 172 million acres, and twice governor of Pennsylvania.

Congress has called Grey Towers "one of the primary birthplaces of the American conservation movement." It is the only National Historic Site run by the Forest Service itself, and in 1963 President Kennedy dedicated the Pinchot Institute of Conservation there. Walk the grounds and you're walking where the idea of conserving the American landscape — rather than just consuming it — was first given a home.

Milford keeps other treasures. At the Columns Museum, the Pike County Historical Society displays the Lincoln Flag — the blood-stained flag that cushioned President Lincoln's head at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865. The actress Jeannie Gourlay Struthers, twenty-one years old and onstage in Our American Cousin that night, took it home; her father had it, she brought it to Milford in 1888, and it was donated to the society in 1954. It is one of the most haunting artifacts of the Civil War in private hands anywhere.

And just outside Milford, Raymondskill Falls drops some 150 feet in three tiers — Pennsylvania's tallest waterfall, which the Park Service notes is "only a few feet shorter than Niagara Falls."

The bridge before the Brooklyn Bridge

Seventeen miles upriver at Minisink Ford, the Delaware is spanned by a bridge that predates its designer's fame. The Roebling Delaware Aqueduct — 535 feet of wire cable suspension, begun in 1847 and opened in 1849 — is the oldest existing wire suspension bridge in the United States. Its designer was John A. Roebling, later of the Brooklyn Bridge.

It was built for an unlikely purpose: to carry the Delaware & Hudson Canal over the river. Timber rafts kept smashing into the canal's rope ferry at Lackawaxen, so in 1847 Roebling's radical plan was approved — "build the canal above the river," floating 2,000 tons of water and coal boats in a flume thirty feet above the Delaware. It cut a full day off canal travel time. The canal itself ran 108 miles from Honesdale to Kingston from 1828 to 1898; the aqueduct, a National Historic Landmark since 1968, is preserved by the Park Service and still carries one lane of cars and pedestrians.

Nearby at Lackawaxen, the Zane Grey Museum preserves the home the great Western novelist built in 1905–06 and lived in until 1918 — he expanded it in 1912 after Riders of the Purple Sage made him famous. One river valley, and it holds the cradle of suspension-bridge engineering and the study where the Western was invented.

Revolution and flood

The valley's drama isn't all scenic. At Minisink Ford, fifteen miles northwest of Port Jervis, the Battle of Minisink was fought on July 22, 1779 — the only major Revolutionary War engagement in the upper Delaware valley. Joseph Brant's Iroquois force killed 46 American militiamen at the cost of 3 of their own; two days earlier, Brant's raiders had destroyed the settlements at Peenpack and Mahackamack — present-day Port Jervis and Deerpark — burning farms, a school, and a church. The American dead lay on the field for 43 years before being buried at Goshen in 1822. The battlefield is on the National Register.

And in August 1955, the river reminded everyone who's in charge. Hurricanes Connie and then Diane struck about a week apart; the Delaware Water Gap crested at 37.4 feet — 260,000 cubic feet per second — on August 19, 1955, still the record, while the Port Jervis gauge hit its period-of-record maximum of 233,000 cfs. Tributaries rose thirty feet in fifteen minutes. The flood killed roughly 99 people and directly led to the Tocks Island Dam proposal — a 37-mile reservoir that would have reached nearly to Port Jervis, condemning 72,000 acres before it was abandoned and the lands became the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area instead. Drive the valley today and you're driving through the landscape the dam would have drowned.

Twelve miles of tunnel

One more railroad relic, for the railfans: about a dozen miles east of Port Jervis, the Otisville Tunnel — built in 1908 at the Graham Line's highest point — runs 5,314 feet, the longest tunnel in the Metro-North system, and still carries Port Jervis Line trains through the mountain. It was dug with black-powder drama: fighting among the crews, a blast that collapsed the roof and killed a workman, wells run dry for a mile around.

Sleep at the center of it all

Here's the thing about this corner of the map: the Hawk's Nest, High Point, Milford and Grey Towers, Roebling's aqueduct, Zane Grey's study, the Minisink battlefield, the Lincoln Flag — they're all within a short drive of each other, strung along the Delaware like beads. And Port Jervis, the old railroad division point where three states meet, sits at the center of the string.

That's the history you'll be living inside at the Tri-State A-Frame — Zara's Getaways' retreat in Port Jervis. Spend a day driving Route 97: the Hawk's Nest, the Minisink Ford battle site, the Roebling Aqueduct, Zane Grey's home, Milford and Grey Towers. Spend another at High Point's monument, three states at your feet. Then come home to the A-frame as the sun drops behind the Kittatinny Ridge — the same ridgelines the Erie blasted through in 1847, the same river the raftsmen and canal boats worked. The valley has been making history for two and a half centuries. Now it's your turn to visit it.