Old Mine Road, Delaware Water Gap

The road beneath your wheels has a long memory. Old Mine Road is one of the oldest continuously used roads in the country. Legend says Dutch miners built it in the sixteen hundreds to connect copper mines at Pahaquarry, in what is now the Delaware Water Gap, with the Hudson River port at Esopus, which we now call Kingston.

The route runs roughly one hundred four miles through the Kittatinny Mountains. Dutch settlers worked the Pahaquarry mines, and the road they cut became a lifeline for frontier settlement in this corner of New Jersey. During the French and Indian War, a Shapanack fort stood on a hill just north of here.

The Isaac Van Campen House, built in seventeen fifty, still stands nearby, and John Adams himself once spent a night along this corridor. It is a road with a very long history, older than the United States.