Lackawaxen River

About

Lackawaxen River, Pennsylvania — 1828 Roebling Delaware Aqueduct, 1978 Upper Delaware Scenic, Zane Grey. The river's name predates every industrial claim on it. For the Lenape, the Lackawaxen was a major travel corridor in northeastern Pennsylvania, and its confluence with the Delaware served as a significant village site and trading point on north-south routes, documented by the Wayne County Historical Society and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The name itself descends from the Lenape word Lechauwekink — "where the roads part," or "forks of the road" — a reading that survives in the historical record alongside the more common gloss of "Swift Waters." Lackawaxen Township, designated in 1798, took its name from the river that runs twelve miles through it.

Timber came before coal. The Lackawaxen watershed was logged from the 1830s through the 1920s, feeding a regional timber industry and the railroad expansion that followed it. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations worked the valley until the old-growth stands were exhausted around 1910. State forestry conservation began in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s ended large-scale logging for good, leaving the hillsides to recover into the forest that shades the river today.

The canal era gave the river its most enduring monument. When the Delaware and Hudson Canal began operating in 1828, it moved anthracite coal from Honesdale to the Delaware River, and the Lackawaxen corridor was central to the route. Roebling's answer to carrying that traffic across the water was the 535-foot Delaware Aqueduct, completed in 1848 on wire-cable suspension. It is the oldest wire-cable suspension bridge in the United States and a direct predecessor to the Brooklyn Bridge, and it stands today at the river's mouth as part of the National Park Service's Upper Delaware corridor.

The valley drew storytellers as well as engineers. Zane Grey made his home in Lackawaxen in the early twentieth century and published his 1912 Western "Riders of the Purple Sage" during those years; he is buried in the Lackawaxen Cemetery. That literary residency, set against the surviving infrastructure of the canal, gives the lower river an unusual density of documented history for a stream of its size, and the river still anchors the Honesdale and Lackawaxen economies. The 1978 Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River designation includes the Lackawaxen as a tributary and established the modern management framework for the corridor; the river also carries a Pennsylvania Scenic River designation.

For paddlers and anglers, the Lackawaxen reads as three connected stretches. The upper river, from Hawley to Rowland, runs Class I riffles over trout water; the middle river, Rowland to Kimbles, mixes trout and bass; and the lower river, Kimbles to the Delaware confluence, is smallmouth country. USGS gauge 01431500 tracks discharge on the river, which averages roughly 480 cubic feet per second, with paddlers favoring flows between 200 and 800 cfs. Since 2014, the Lackawaxen River Conservancy has partnered with Trout Unlimited and the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission on water quality and habitat restoration; the upper reaches now hold a growing wild trout population, while the lower river remains one of the best smallmouth fisheries in northeastern Pennsylvania. Outfitters such as Kittatinny Canoes run Lackawaxen and Upper Delaware trips through the corridor.