Brodhead Creek

About

Brodhead Creek — Delaware Water Gap Tributary. Long before it had an English name, the Brodhead Creek valley was Lenape (Munsee) territory in the Pocono region. The creek's cold spring sources and abundant fish made it an important seasonal site for a people who read the water closely. The name that stuck came from Daniel Brodhead, the Revolutionary War general, who settled in the valley in the 1730s and lent the creek its English identity — a name that would later attach to a family prominent in the Minisink Valley and to the town of Stroudsburg that grew along the banks.

The 19th century turned the watershed into an engine of the timber trade. Brodhead Creek was logged from the 1830s through the 1920s to feed the regional timber industry and the railroad expansion that followed. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators, and the creek's flow made Stroudsburg a center of the trade — Pocono forests were harvested and floated down to sawmills near the Delaware Water Gap. The Stroudsburg Lumber Company ran sawmills along the creek from 1846 to 1923. Large-scale logging finally ended with the 1910 exhaustion of the old-growth stands, the 1915 start of state forestry conservation, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s.

Even as the axes fell, the Brodhead was becoming something else entirely: the cradle of American fly fishing. Henryville House, built on the upper Brodhead in 1836, became the gathering place of the country's earliest fly fishing pioneers. Theodore Gordon, Edward Hewitt, and George LaBranche all fished and taught there. The Brodhead, alongside the Beaverkill and Willowemoc, formed the cradle of American fly fishing tradition in the late 1800s. That heritage still shapes the water: the Upper Brodhead from Henryville to Analomink remains fly fishing heritage water, and the historic Brodhead Forest and Stream Association still holds its private club stretch on the creek.

The Delaware Water Gap gave the lower creek its scenery and its history. The Delaware River at the creek's mouth was the site of Fort Durham (1756), a British colonial fort in the French and Indian War, and of George Washington's 1782 camp at the Gap. In 1872 Luke W. Brodhead built a five-story hotel overlooking the Gap; it operated into the 1920s, drawing visitors to the same valley the loggers had stripped a generation earlier.

Then came the industrial reckoning. The coal gasification plant that operated from 1888 to 1944 left coal tar in the groundwater, and the resulting Superfund listing in 1983 marked the low point of the creek's fortunes. Removal from the National Priorities List in 2001 confirmed the cleanup had worked. In 2014 the Brodhead Creek Heritage Center at ForEvergreen Nature Preserve was established through the Keystone Recreation, Park & Conservation Fund, opening the waterway to public access and conservation education. Today the creek runs in three distinct characters — the fly fishing heritage water up top, the mixed wild and stocked middle from Analomink to Stroudsburg, and the wider valley below Stroudsburg to the Delaware confluence — watched over by the Brodhead Watershed Association and the Pocono fly fishing tradition it helped create.