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Be an outsider. The Upper Delaware River Cleaves Northeastern Pennsylvania from New York.

It's a quiet area flanked by a tree-covered rolling hills at the foot of the Catskill Mountains

that are protected by the National Park Service as a scenic and recreational river.

In the 1800s, the Lackawaxen region of the Upper Delaware River was a bustling area, punctuated by industrial transportation.

The Canal era provided access to water transport where there was no natural river or lake. It was much easier to move heavy goods along a

waterway on a barge that on horseback or pulled over land via carriages or wagons.

Opened in 1828 as the first privately financed canal in the United States,

the 108 mile long Delaware and Hudson Canal enabled transport of raw materials out from rural Pennsylvania through

over 100 locks with a 16-mile gravity railway added to scale the steep inclines of the Music Mountains.

Using mules to draw the canal barges along the man-made waterway dug parallel to the Lachowexin River,

the round trip could be completed in 7 to 10 days, with the mules

pulling at 1 to 3 miles per hour, assuming there were no delays or mishaps along the way. One such area that could cause significant delays

was where the canal crossed the Upper Delaware River via a pool of slow moving

water formed by a slackwater dam.

Loggers floated their timber rafts down the river through the busy intersection with the

Delaware and Hudson Canal, where barges brought anthracite coal from the coal mines of Pennsylvania

to the Hudson River in New York where it could be transported by steamship to

thriving industrial marketplaces. The mule-drawn barges cross the river in a centuries if not

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