Arboretums have much in common with botanical gardens, but are defined by their emphasis on woody plants, including trees, shrubs, and vines. Both botanic gardens and arboretums, however, are distinguished by an educational or scientific purpose along with aesthetic and recreational functions.

A complex network of Quaker botanists and dendrologists (those who study wooded plants) were at the heart of early arboretums in the Philadelphia area. In 1773, Humphry Marshall (1722-1801) established the first arboretum in the United States on his Marshallton, Pennsylvania, estate. A Quaker stonemason by trade, he was cousin to fellow Quaker John Bartram (1699-1777), founder of the first botanical garden in America. While Marshall’s arboretum showcased both native and European plants, his focus was on North American flora. In 1785, Marshall published Arbustrum  Americanum, the first treatise on woody plants published in the United States. Some scholarship suggests this early and persistent Quaker affinity for native flora over transplanted exotics can be traced to religious beliefs about stewardship over God’s creation.

Quaker Arboretums, a Family Affair

A surprising number of these early Quaker arboretums were family affairs. In 1798, Quaker twins Joshua and Samuel Pierce began an arboretum known as Pierce Park. This arboretum was notable for how it epitomized early arboretums as scientific collections; the trees were laid out in straight rows by taxonomy. Humphry Marshall advised the brothers in their collecting. Some Pierce trees survived into the twentieth century at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, through the intervention of Pierre S. du Pont, who purchased the property in 1906 to save it from timber companies. In 1825, two more Quaker brothers founded what would become the Tyler Arboretum: Jacob (b. 1814) and Minshall Painter (b. 1801). The two brothers, networking with Marshall, Bartram, and other Quaker dendrophiles, quickly gathered more than a thousand tree types. By the early twenty-first century the arboretum, the oldest extant arboretum on the East Coast, still held twenty original “Painter” trees, including the largest giant sequoia in Pennsylvania. In 1944, descendant Laura Tyler bequeathed Painter Arboretum to a board of directors and the property became the nonprofit Tyler Aboretum.

In the mid-nineteenth century, as the United States suffered anxiety over its cultural relationship with Europe, English garden designers became viewed as necessary to validate the aesthetic and scientific worth of an arboretum. No wonder, then, that the English gardener William Carvill was hired to design the (Quaker) Haverford College Arboretum in 1834. He incorporated sweeping vistas, while also expressing Quaker values of community and individuality within his English-style designs. The arboretum boasts a descendant of the American elm under which, by tradition, William Penn signed a treaty with the Native Americans. Likewise, the English-trained William Saunders (1822-1900) consulted on the master plans of Awbury Arboretum in the 1870s, before going on to design Gettysburg Cemetery and the Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C. Awbury also shared Quaker roots with Haverford’s arboretum; Quaker businessman Henry Cope, inspired by visiting the Woodlands estate in West Philadelphia, founded Awbury in 1852 in Germantown. After housing eight generations of Copes, Awbury became a formal public arboretum in 1916 and turned nonprofit in 1984.

Distinct from the Philadelphian lineage of Quaker botanists, another slightly later thread of arboriculture focused on international collections and global diversity. Closely following Humphry Marshall’s seminal publication on local fauna, William Hamilton (1749-1813) began planting trees at the Woodlands in 1786. Hamilton was an aristocratic Anglophile in his tastes and arboricultural practices. He introduced the Norway maple to North America, gave John Bartram a ginkgo sapling that became the oldest ginkgo on the continent, and voraciously collected globally diverse trees. He also shared a Quaker passion for North American plants, successfully petitioning for seeds from the Lewis and Clark expedition, although he displayed them in English naturalistic-style landscapes, with sweeping vistas punctuated by clusters of trees. In 1840, the Woodlands became a public cemetery to preserve his arboricultural legacy.

This non-Quaker strain of international dendrology was revived and brought to prominence in the 1876 Centennial Arboretum, still standing in Fairmount Park in the early twenty-first century. The Centennial Arboretum picked up where the international collector William Hamilton left off, showcasing trees from all over the globe, to much acclaim and imitation. Shofosu, the Japanese teahouse and garden at the Centennial Arboretum, influenced Western arboretum design and collections, arguably up to the addition of two Japanese gardens to Haverford College Arboretum in 1990 and 2004.

Barnes Foundation Arboretum

International collecting also became the focus of the Barnes Foundation Arboretum, initially developed by Captain Joseph Lapsley Wilson (1844-1928) beginning in 1880. Purchased by the Barnes Foundation in 1922, the arboretum boasts over 3,000 varieties of woody plants, including katsura trees, European beeches, Japanese raisin trees, and ginkgos. Also influenced by the Centennial Arboretum, in 1887 Quaker siblings John and Lydia Morris broke with the dominant Quaker precedent and began planting exotic trees. Their Compton estate grew in 1912 with the addition of “English Park,” made up almost exclusively of Chinese specimens, and a “Japanese Overlook” rock garden installed following the “Japanese Hill and Water Garden” addition of 1905. Known as Morris Arboretum since the University of Pennsylvania purchased it in 1932, the siblings’ estate became the official arboretum of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

More recent arboretums, informed by restoration ecology, have renewed emphases on native plants. The Jenkins Arboretum, founded in 1976 in Devon, took the southeastern Pennsylvania hardwood forest as its starting palette and specializes in eastern North American trees together with thousands of azaleas and rhododendrons. Similarly, the Lewis W. Barton Arboretum and Nature Preserve at Medford Leas, founded in 1981 in Medford, New Jersey, features New Jersey flood plain natives as well as global specimens. Tellingly, Medford Leas is a Quaker senior living community and receives guidance from the Quaker-founded Morris Arboretum. The Quaker strain of native gardening never died; even at the height of the exoticism craze in 1929, the Scott Arboretum of the Quaker Swarthmore College was designed to emphasize Eastern Pennsylvanian climate and ecology.

The roots of Greater Philadelphia’s arboretums run deep. In the region, arboretums display the influence of Quaker reverence toward nature, late nineteenth-century Anglophilia, Centennial celebrations of international collections, and an ever-growing focus on public education.

Anastasia Day is a Ph.D.-track fellow in the Hagley Program in the History of Industrialization at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include gender, consumption, technology, and environmental history. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Originally part of a thousand-acre tract of land in Kingsessing Township first settled by the Swedish in the mid-seventeenth century, Bartram’s Garden began in 1728 when John Bartram purchased a 102-acre tract for his family farm. Bartram was a self-taught naturalist who sought out the company of other like-minded individuals, both at home and abroad. Bartram’s friendships with Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) and James Logan (1674–1751) led to his introduction to London and Royal Society Fellow Peter Collinson (1694–1768), with whom he began a correspondence in 1731. Bartram and Collinson soon began to exchange plants along with botanical notes on experiments and other discoveries. By 1750, Bartram was sending regular shipments of North American seeds to a wide variety of European collectors, including Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) and Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), and advertising his seeds for sale in London periodicals. Bartram expanded his garden to keep up with his growing plant trade business and performed experiments on the lychnis dioica that corroborated Logan’s experiments on Indian corn. As Bartram’s fame grew, so did his garden. He traveled farther and farther afield to collect new plants and seeds, and he recreated their environments at home by constructing ponds and swamps for aquatic plants, areas of forest and grassland, as well as sections for nursery seeds and greenhouses for more tropical specimens. By the turn of the century, Bartram’s Garden boasted the most varied collection of North American plants in the world.

When John Bartram died in 1777, his sons, John Bartram Jr. (1743–1812) and William Bartram (1739–1823), continued the business. They expanded the grounds as well as the garden’s reputation in national and international circles through their commercial and educational activities. William Bartram’s growing renown as a botanical illustrator and plant collector attracted botanical enthusiasts from near and far who came to exchange both plants and knowledge. French botanist André Michaux (1746–1802) visited Bartram’s Garden during his North American sojourn, as did botanists from closer to home, such as Benjamin Smith Barton (1766–1815), Thomas Say (1787–1834), Thomas Nuttall (1786–1859), and Frederick Pursh (1774–1820).

Both George Washington (1732–99) and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) visited and purchased plants from Bartram’s Garden for their own estates in Virginia, and near neighbor William Hamilton (1745–1813) exchanged many plants with the Bartrams, even sending William Bartram one of the three ginkgo trees he introduced to America from England in 1785. Bartram’s Garden’s reputation as a destination grew, especially among the delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. In 1784, the congress ended a session early to allow several delegates to indulge their curiosity about Bartram’s Garden and venture across the Schuylkill River for an afternoon visit with the family in their garden.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Bartram’s Garden expanded again under the third generation of Bartrams. Ann Bartram Carr (1779–1858) and her husband, Colonel Robert Carr (1778–1866), took over the business from Ann’s father, John Bartram Jr., and expanded both the commercial business and the garden itself. At its largest, Bartram’s Garden comprised twelve acres of gardens and ten greenhouses filled with over fourteen hundred native plant species and as many as one thousand varieties of more far-flung exotics. In 1844 and 1845, the Carrs added another dimension to Bartram’s Garden when they opened the grounds as a summer pleasure garden, selling ice cream and other refreshments to visitors and offering steamboat trips three days a week from the Delaware River wharves.

By midcentury, however, increasing financial difficulties forced the Carrs to sell Bartram’s Garden. Railroad magnate and industrialist Andrew Eastwick (1811–79) purchased the house and grounds in 1850. Eastwick planned to construct a villa near the original Bartram house. Recognizing the historic significance and aesthetic appeal of the site, he preserved the original house and grounds as part of his private estate and even lived in the Bartram house during construction of his villa, “Bartram Hall.”

After Eastwick’s death, Bartram’s Garden fell into neglect until Eastwick’s former gardener, Thomas Meehan (1826–1901), aided by Boston botanist and head of the Arnold Arboretum Charles S. Sargent (1841–1927), conceived a plan to purchase the acres of Bartram’s Garden for the city as part of Meehan’s campaign to create parks in Philadelphia. After a prolonged campaign by Meehan, who was a member of Philadelphia’s Common Council, and others, in 1888 the city added a portion of the original Bartram’s Garden to the city plan and marked it for preservation. Bartram’s Garden finally came under the control of the City of Philadelphia in 1891.

Two years later, in 1893, descendants of John Bartram organized the John Bartram Association and reasserted their influence over the direction of the garden. With the aid of University of Pennsylvania botany professor and director of the university’s botanic garden John Muirhead Macfarlane (1855–1943), the association established a library and archives relating to the Bartram family and their botanic activities at Bartram’s Garden. In 1923, the Fairmount Park Commission assumed control of the property and worked to preserve and restore the gardens and buildings while continuing to operate the garden as a city park.

In October 1960, the secretary of the Interior designated Bartram’s Garden a National Historic Landmark in acknowledgement of the importance of the garden to John Bartram’s career as a botanist and to the history of American botany. Through restoration and interpretation of the site, The John Bartram Association continued to preserve the historical and contemporary gardens for visitors into the twenty-first century, including the original ginkgo tree (1785), a yellowwood tree sent by Michaux (1784), the Franklinia alatamaha from which all current examples descend, and the Bartram oak. Since the third decade of the eighteenth century, Bartram’s Garden served as a repository of North American plants of national and international importance, bringing together the commercial, public, and educational aspects of Philadelphia’s botanical legacy.

Sarah Chesney is a historical archaeologist who earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the College of William and Mary in 2014. She has worked on several landscape archaeology projects in Philadelphia, exploring the intersection of archaeology, landscape, and early modern science. Her publications include “The Root of the Matter: Searching for William Hamilton’s Greenhouse at The Woodlands Estate, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” in Historical Archaeology of the Delaware Valley, 1600–1850, edited by Richard F. Veit and David G. Orr (University of Tennessee Press, 2014). (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Philadelphia region’s history as a botanical paradise and center of discovery began in the eighteenth century with the work of individual collectors and enthusiasts such as John Bartram (1699–1777), who used his home at Bartram’s Garden to cultivate and sell native plants to an international group of botanists and collectors, including Peter Collinson (1694–1768), Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), and Carl Linnaeus (1707–78). Linnaeus even named a variety of moss after Bartram in recognition of his botanical efforts. Bartram introduced as many as two hundred North American plant species into Europe, including the magnolia, mountain laurel, azalea, and rhododendron, and by the nineteenth century the botanic collection at Bartram’s Garden was the most extensive and varied collection of North American plants in the world.

Another eighteenth-century botanist operating in Philadelphia was Bartram’s neighbor, William Hamilton (1745–1813), who turned his country estate on the west bank of the Schuylkill River, The Woodlands, into a botanical paradise with a collection of native and exotic plants said to number ten thousand. The Woodlands and Bartram’s Garden drew plant enthusiasts of all kinds to Philadelphia, from medical students studying botany and materia medica at the University of Pennsylvania to such international luminaries as André Michaux (1746–1802), Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), and Peter Kalm (1716–79).

Hamilton, John Bartram’s son William (1739–1823), and other area botanists ensured that later generations of botanists would continue to make their mark in the science by establishing Philadelphia as a training ground: Hamilton employed several gardeners who went on to international careers, such as nurseryman John Lyon (1765–1814) and botanist Frederick Pursh (1774–1820). Benjamin Smith Barton (1766–1815), professor of botany and materia medica at the University of Pennsylvania, sent his student and protégé Thomas Nuttall (1786–1859) to both The Woodlands and Bartram’s Garden for training.

Philadelphia continued to dominate the botanical scene in the nineteenth century. When, as president, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) sought to expand the sciences on a national level, he sent Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) to study with Barton, Hamilton, and William Bartram before he headed west to explore the recently acquired lands of the Louisiana Purchase. As there was yet no national botanic garden or arboretum, both Jefferson and John Adams (1735–1826) saw Bartram’s Garden as the appropriate substitute.

Botanical practice underwent a number of changes in the nineteenth century, both in Philadelphia and farther afield. As the century wore on, reliance on individual botanists gave way to various new institutions focused around the promotion and propagation of scientific discovery. The American Philosophical Society begun by Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) had long been a promoter of enterprising individuals working to advance understanding of science, medicine, and literature, as had other, more narrowly focused Philadelphia institutions. The Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, the oldest agricultural society in the United States, had been sponsoring scientific farming experiments and developments since 1785 and included among its early members Benjamin Franklin, George Washington (1732–99), and George Logan (1753–1821), a politician and gentleman farmer whom Thomas Jefferson considered the best farmer in Pennsylvania. However, it was not until 1812, when the Academy of Natural Sciences was founded, that Philadelphia—and the entire Western Hemisphere—had an institution specifically and explicitly devoted to the study of the “natural sciences.”

The Academy of Natural Sciences promoted botanists and other scientists through the publication and dissemination of their work. It provided an alternative for young researchers who had plenty of ambition but lacked a wealthy elite patron or an independent income that would allow them to pursue botany as more than a hobby. The academy, which sponsored public lectures on botany for women beginning in 1814, popularized the discipline and made it accessible. It also funded increasingly ambitious collecting expeditions to the Arctic, Central America, Africa, and Asia. Other institutions soon followed, including the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, founded in 1827, which brought together botanical and horticultural enthusiasts; the Wagner Free Institute of Science, formally established in 1855, with the goal of bringing free science education to the wider public; and the Philadelphia Botanical Club (1891), which counted among its members several prominent naturalists such as Thomas Meehan (1826–1901) and John Harshberger (1869–1929). Institutional support of botanical and other scientific activities in Philadelphia contributed to the founding of the first college of pharmacy in North America in 1821, the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, which drew broadly on Philadelphia’s reputation as a center for botanical and medical science.

The later nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw even more expansion in botanical activities in Philadelphia and beyond as interest in new areas of study including conservation, evolutionary biology, and ecology grew along with a devotion to a more general public audience. In 1907 Pierre S. DuPont (1870–1954) established Longwood Gardens in Chester County as a botanical conservation and horticultural sanctuary outside the city, which grew into an extensive landscape devoted to public education in horticulture and ecological conservation. Other institutions furthered interest in botanical activities by capitalizing on the public’s interest in horticultural displays revived by the 1876 Centennial Exhibition and the construction of Horticultural Hall. A century later, the modern Horticultural Center in Fairmount Park replaced Horticultural Hall and brought visitors to the display and demonstration gardens all year round. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society built on this interest with its annual Philadelphia Flower Show (first established in 1829), which drew an estimated 250,000 visitors annually by the early twenty-first century, and its locally targeted efforts coordinated through the Philly Green program (established in 1974).

In the later twentieth century, institutional support for botanical activities expanded through consolidation as Philadelphia-area universities formed partnerships with other local institutions including the Morris Arboretum (University of Pennsylvania) and the Academy of Natural Sciences (Drexel University) to further ecological, horticultural, and biological research across multiple platforms. Botanical activities, consolidated under the larger umbrella of biology and life science departments and medical research programs, continued to expand our understanding of the natural world.

The story of botany in the Philadelphia region is a story of individuals and institutions that, from the eighteenth century forward, established Philadelphia as a city of botanical discovery and abundance as well as a destination for botanical enthusiasts from around the world.

Sarah Chesney is a historical archaeologist who earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the College of William and Mary in 2014. She has worked on several landscape archaeology projects in Philadelphia exploring the intersection of archaeology, landscape, and early modern science. Her publications include “The Root of the Matter: Searching for William Hamilton’s Greenhouse at The Woodlands Estate, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” in Historical Archaeology of the Delaware Valley, 1600–1850, edited by Richard F. Veit and David G. Orr (University of Tennessee Press, 2014). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Although a relatively small place geographically, the Brandywine Valley enjoyed an outsized reputation, having often been celebrated by writers and artists, many of them based in Philadelphia (once called “The Athens of America”), who spread its fame widely. Brandywine Creek is only about sixty miles long, less than half the length of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River, and its watershed of 330 square miles is dwarfed by the Schuylkill’s 1,700 miles. 85 percent of the Brandywine watershed is confined to a single county in Pennsylvania, Chester County. Flowing south, it briefly skirts Delaware County at historic Chadds Ford before reaching its terminus in New Castle County, Delaware.

Only in its last few yards does the Brandywine reach the coastal plain; otherwise, it is the quintessential piedmont stream, rapidly falling over boulders of Wissahickon schist or Brandywine blue rock, at times twisting through rolling agricultural landscapes but then slipping into steep-sided valleys thickly wooded with some of the largest hardwood trees in the northeastern United States. Ecologically, the valley abounds with flora and fauna. This owes to a surprising variety of habitats from freshwater marshes to old-growth forests, and to the region’s felicitous location at the junction of North and South (surveyors Mason and Dixon wintered on the Brandywine during the years they surveyed their famous regional borderline, 1763-67). For example, northeastern plants such as hemlock trees mingle here with southeastern species such as umbrella magnolia.

The Swedes Arrive

Before European settlement, abundant ecological riches made the Brandywine a congenial place for Lenni-Lenape Indians, who hunted game in the hardwood forests or caught shad in the creek, long before dam-building interrupted the migration of fish upriver. The Indians watched in dismay as Swedes arrived in 1638 and built Fort Christina on a gentle rocky outcrop where it could guard the lower reaches of both the Christina River and Brandywine Creek—the first Swedish settlement in the New World. A successful Dutch campaign to seize the fort in 1655 was one of the first military encounters by rival European armies on American soil. The name “Brandywine Creek” is Dutch, of uncertain origin; perhaps it refers to the honey-brown color, similar to brandy, of the stream during one of its frequent floods, in visual contrast to the gray and placid Christina. Other theories abound. Nor is there agreement about whether the Brandywine is a “creek” (the typical usage for centuries) or the more recent “river.”

When William Penn’s Quakers arrived in 1682, Brandywine Creek formed the western boundary of the settled parts of Pennsylvania, with the junction of civilization and wilderness sharply demarcated at “Brumadgam” on the Thomas Holme map of 1687, subsequently Birmingham Township, Chester County. Wilmington, Delaware, was located on a hilltop between the Christina and the Brandywine in 1731, virtually a miniature replica of Philadelphia in layout, and it thrived because of the exceptionally prosperous milling that the Brandywine afforded. With its rapid drop in elevation, this piedmont river was ideally configured for the construction of water-powered mills, as the Swedes had been the first to recognize, establishing a mill-seat in what would become Wilmington’s Brandywine Park, where traces of the ancient dam survived into the twenty-first century.

By the late eighteenth century, the Brandywine Valley had become a crucible of the Industrial Revolution in America, with a proliferation of mills (more than 100 on just the Delaware section of the creek by 1793) that used increasingly advanced technology. The main north-south road in early America, linking Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., crossed the Brandywine at Wilmington, where tourists and travelers (among them George Washington) marveled at the fully automated milling technology on display by Market Street Bridge in Brandywine Village, an enclave of expensive Quaker millers’ homes.

Gunpowder and Iron Works

The Brandywine witnessed the American debut of the mechanical production of paper just upstream from Wilmington at Gilpin’s Mill in 1817, triggering a revolution in the production of books, magazines, and newspapers in the young republic. The ability of the fledgling nation to defend itself against menacing European powers was dependent upon the production of gunpowder on the Brandywine by the du Pont family, which arrived in Delaware from France in 1802 in time to supply powder to fight the Barbary pirates at Tripoli (1801-05) and the British in the War of 1812. On the eve of the Civil War, half of the national output of gunpowder came from duPont mills on the Brandywine, including the sturdy stone facilities preserved at Hagley Museum & Library. If industry faded long ago from the Brandywine in Delaware, it continued to thrive upstream at Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where the successor firm to Brandywine Iron Works (1810) remains the oldest steel mill in America. In the twenty-first century, countless local families of Italian and Irish descent could trace their ancestry to the early Brandywine mill workers, some of whose memories were preserved in an ambitious campaign of oral histories undertaken in the 1950s by the Hagley Museum. Millworker housing in dense rows remained a defining characteristic of many neighborhoods in Wilmington.

With nineteenth-century industry came wealth, as the Brandywine became nationally synonymous with technological revolutions in milling. Just outside Wilmington, handsome estates were built overlooking the stream, and poets and writers sang the praises of the valley, with its appealing mix of water-powered industry, picturesque riparian scenery, and tales of lore from Indian days and the Battle of the Brandywine, where the romantic young Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834) had been wounded. The culmination of these literary efforts was eventually The Brandywine, a book in the popular Rivers of America series (1941) by Wilmington-born critic Henry Seidel Canby (1878-1961), with illustrations by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009).

But industry also brought pollution of the creek, and by the 1860s there were calls to preserve land along its banks to safeguard the health of Wilmingtonians, who drank the foul-smelling water. Brandywine Park was established in the 1880s, laced with curving roadways that followed, rather imperfectly, a plan provided by the leading landscape architect of the day, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903). The park was the beginning of a conservation tradition that made the valley a recognized role model in watershed preservation nationwide. Headquartered at Chadds Ford, the Brandywine Conservancy, begun in 1967, expanded to hold more than 500 conservation easements over 12 percent of the watershed.

Preserving the Scenic Valley

As the du Pont family amassed extraordinary wealth—as late as the 1980s, they were one of the richest families in America—they played the key role in preserving the scenic Brandywine Valley against the looming threat of heavy industry, such as that which engulfed the lower Schuylkill, or the piecemeal suburban sprawl that jostled against Darby Creek, fifteen miles north. The Brandywine Conservancy, for example, was the brainchild of a boisterously enthusiastic du Pont descendant, George A. “Frolic” Weymouth (1936-2016). The unspoiled flavor of the region—as seen, for example, from the twelve-mile Brandywine Valley National Scenic Byway designated in 2005—owed much to the du Pont family’s traditional concern with large-scale estate agriculture, their cultivation of a pleasing landscape aesthetic, and the cherishing of historic sites.

Their special passion was gardening. America’s premier French-style formal garden flourished at the Nemours estate (1910) of Alfred I. du Pont (1864-1935), an elaborate homage to his French ancestors. A woodland garden underplanted with colorful azaleas flowed over the hillsides at Winterthur (“March Bank” garden, 1902), home of Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969), whose collection of American antiques remains unparalleled. Under the creative eye of Pierre S. du Pont (1870-1954), the nation’s largest-ever display garden took shape at Longwood (Main Conservatory, 1921) and later became the flagship cultural attraction of the Brandywine Valley, with more than 1.5 million visitors annually. All these gardens (and associated estates of sprawling size and sumptuous elegance) were funded by industry in places far distant and especially benefited from the windfall profits that the DuPont Company enjoyed from providing gunpowder to the western front in World War I.

As the estates of what contemporaries have nicknamed “Chateau Country” were being laid out and embellished, there simultaneously flourished the Brandywine School of Art, a movement centered on Howard Pyle (1853-1911), the Wilmington-born artist who revolutionized American illustration starting in the 1880s. Pyle moved to Philadelphia to be near the leading publishing houses of the day but eventually returned to the Brandywine Valley, which he regarded as the wellspring of his art, inspiring him deeply with its historical relics, from crumbling colonial houses and mills, to rustic “worm” fences lining dirt roads through the cornfields of the unspoiled countryside, to venerable Old Swedes Church (1698-99) near the Brandywine’s mouth. A teacher at Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, Pyle brought his best students to the Brandywine Valley, founding a summer art school on the Brandywine Battlefield at Chadds Ford. His star student arrived in 1902, N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), who shared Pyle’s near-religious devotion to the relics of America’s colonial past and settled permanently in Chadds Ford when he began his own, legendary career as the dean of American illustration.

Wyeth Tourism

N.C. Wyeth and other former students of Pyle became known as proponents of the “Brandywine school” of illustration, with a strong emphasis on rural life, the colonial heritage, and meticulously researched historical themes. His son Andrew extended the tradition right up to the twenty-first century, living and painting exclusively on the Brandywine all his life, except for summers in Maine, and developing a brooding, rather bleak style deliberately different from his father’s. The immense fame of Andrew Wyeth continued to draw tourists and plein-air painters to “Wyeth country” in the Brandywine Valley, where the Brandywine River Museum of Art amassed the world’s largest collection of Wyeth paintings, from N. C. right down to Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946), who lived and painted in the area into the twenty-first century.

First State National Historical Park promised to bring ever-more attention to the Brandywine, as an area hailed as “the Most Famous Small River in America.” But the modern Brandywine Valley’s widespread popularity also fed a surge in population growth, with upscale suburban developments peppering the hilltops and threatening to change the rural character of this historic place forever. The warnings of urbanist William H. “Holly” Whyte (1917-99) about the costs of sprawl came to pass in his native valley: traffic clogged twisty colonial roads, scenic viewsheds were violated, and invasive plants proliferated. As Chester County transformed rapidly, one encouraging sign was its open-space program, launched in 1989 and ultimately responsible for setting aside 28 percent of the county’s land. Nonetheless, a worrying symptom of overdevelopment was the markedly increased flooding of the Brandywine, culminating in a record-shattering rise of twenty feet at Chadds Ford following Hurricane Ida in September 2021. The village was inundated beneath brown water, and the Brandywine River Museum of Art suffered damage. The future brings new challenges to this famous valley that has long been loved and celebrated but has proved to be ecologically fragile in the face of modern development pressures.

W. Barksdale Maynard is the author of eight books on American history, art, and architecture, including Buildings of Delaware in the Buildings of the United States series (University of Virginia Press, 2008), The Brandywine: An Intimate Portrait (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), and Artists of Wyeth Country: Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth, and Andrew Wyeth (Temple University Press, 2021).  He lives in Wilmington, Delaware. (Author information current at time of publication.)

As defined by the EPA, brownfields are a category of sites with real or perceived contamination less severe than those with Superfund designation. Following an assessment process, sites may qualify for federal, state, and/or local funding for cleanup and redevelopment. Because each site is unique, federal and state brownfield programs also assist in selecting the proper remediation method. By 2015, the EPA estimated that nearly 500,000 brownfields existed nationwide, with the majority located in older urban areas.

Remediation addresses environmental hazards. While many brownfields contain crumbling structures, empty fuel tanks, or construction debris, others may harbor dioxins, arsenic, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), asbestos, petroleum, or heavy metal residue, substances to which exposure has been linked to cancer and other ailments. If soil or groundwater contamination is detected, an extensive extraction process, similar to those used for Superfund sites, may be required. Following removal, contaminated materials are transferred to hazardous waste landfills with elaborate capping systems.

Valuable Land for Redevelopment

Many brownfields in Greater Philadelphia lay in close proximity to rail, highway, and mass transit corridors, making them, while defiled, potentially valuable for redevelopment. The area’s highest concentrations appeared in New Castle County, Delaware (an estimated 105 sites); Trenton, New Jersey, (est. seventy); Camden, New Jersey (est. 150); Chester, Pennsylvania (much of its riverfront); and Philadelphia County. Philadelphia, which contained 5,000 acres of brownfields and roughly thirteen sites per square mile, was rated (with additional factors) in 2014 the second-most polluted county in the United States, after St. Louis County, Mo.

Brownfields also appeared in smaller cities, including Bridgeton, New Jersey;  Newark, Delaware; and Bensalem, Pennsylvania. Regardless of location, brownfields involved complicated legal and financial hurdles that in some cases delayed remediation for several years. While the EPA assessed the properties, their purchase, cleanup, and reuse relied on lenders, developers, architects, elected officials, and citizens who at times failed to reach consensus over a site’s expense and future use. Moreover, critics of brownfield programs have stressed that an area’s socioeconomic fortunes can dictate the rate or extent of redevelopment. PPL Park, a major league soccer stadium and concert venue that opened in 2010 on reclaimed brownfields in Chester, was to anchor a new complex of office, retail, and convention space. In 2015, Chester Mayor John A. Linder (b. 1947) complained that in addition to not meeting goals of further redevelopment (nearly twenty-five acres of barren brownfields), PPL Park and its owners failed to improve the impoverished city, one with a long history of environmental injustices.

Even with such obstacles, brownfield remediation since the late 1990s achieved a degree of success, with many projects reflecting the region’s shift from a manufacturing-based to a service-oriented economy. Nowhere was this more visible than in Philadelphia, which by 2015 had received more federal brownfield support than any other area municipality. Notable projects ranged from luxury apartments in Center City (Locust on the Park, once the National Book Publishing Co.) and senior housing in Frankford (Meadow House, formerly underground oil storage) to Temple University’s movieplex (Avenue North AMC Theaters, previously a gas station) and Northern Liberties’ greensward (Liberty Lands Park, site of a former tannery). Perhaps the city’s most anticipated brownfield cleanup was the Reading Viaduct, a rusting, elevated railway trestle that in 2015 received $11 million in federal money for conversion into a park similar to New York City’s High Line.

Justison Landing in Wilmington

On a broader scale, brownfield redevelopment altered riverfronts in many of the region’s cities. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, projects along the Delaware River in Philadelphia such as Waterfront Square and the Dockside (condominium complexes), SugarHouse Casino, Race Street Pier (a landscaped park), Spruce Street Harbor Park (a “pop up” seasonal park), and Pier 70 (a big box retail center) reinvigorated acres long dormant or used for industrial purposes. In Wilmington, the Riverfront Development Corporation of Delaware (RDCD) in the late 1990s purchased thirty-three acres of contaminated land along the Christina River once populated with tanneries and shipyards. By 2005 the site, renamed Justison Landing, was home to apartments, offices, restaurants, and a minor league baseball stadium. Delaware’s largest completed brownfield remediation to date, it also was Wilmington’s largest urban renewal project since the 1940s. Bensalem’s Riverfront South, a mixed-use development, occupied more than forty acres formerly home to aluminum refining and cryolite production. Trenton’s Waterfront Park, also home to minor league baseball, was constructed on reclaimed brownfields.

As important sectors of Greater Philadelphia’s postindustrial economy, sustainable (or “green”) industries and education interests figured prominently in brownfields revitalization. Photovoltaic plants for power generation were built in the 2010s along Christina River brownfields at Swedes Landing and Newport, Delaware. To combat blight and “food deserts” in Philadelphia’s low-income neighborhoods, residents and church groups, from Walnut Hill and Francisville to Kensington’s Greensgrow Farms, reclaimed brownfield lots for community gardens and commercial nurseries. The area’s universities, such as Temple and Delaware, underwent large expansions in the early 2000s, repurposing shuttered factories into dormitories and science campuses, respectively. Atop Camden’s former Harrison Avenue Landfill the Kroc Salvation Army Corps Community Center, a twenty-four-acre complex with a fitness center, athletic fields, waterpark, and a chapel, opened in October 2014, providing city residents with much-needed recreational opportunities.

In addition to improving the environment and creating new amenities for residents and visitors, Greater Philadelphia’s brownfields programs increased property values and tax revenue. In 1998 Newark’s Del Chapel Chemical and Textile Factory, which lay vacant for sixteen years, was sold to a private developer for $5.8 million. After a lengthy remediation process and erection of an apartment complex catering to University of Delaware students, the land’s assessed value in 2008 stood at $42 million. That same year, taxes collected from reused brownfields delivered $2.7 million into New Castle County’s coffers and $950,000 to the city of Wilmington.

Brownfield cataloging and remediation since the mid-1990s breathed new life into dozens of Greater Philadelphia’s abandoned buildings and their contaminated grounds. In 2014, the EPA calculated that one acre of redeveloped brownfield land in the region preserved 4.25 acres of “greenfields” (undeveloped land), helping to curtail metropolitan sprawl. Ranging in size from gas station parcels to swaths of riverfront, and in origin from backyard dumps to factories, the refashioning of brownfields created thousands of jobs (some 1,400 in Philadelphia alone), millions in much-needed revenue, and in urban and suburban neighborhoods alike, civic pride in addressing the toxic legacies of the past.

Stephen Nepa received his M.A. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his Ph.D. from Temple University and has appeared in the Emmy Award-winning documentary series Philadelphia: the Great Experiment. He wrote this essay while an associate historian at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities at Rutgers University-Camden in 2015. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Grounded in landscape and European architecture and shaped by the politics of the Progressive Era, the City Beautiful Movement emerged in reaction to the physical decay and social congestion that burdened America’s industrial centers at the turn of the twentieth century. Considered the “mother” of urban planning, its promoters and practitioners sought to reorder the built environment in the cause of “civic uplift.” While expressions of City Beautiful appeared nationwide, cities in Greater Philadelphia also were shaped by the movement. From Camden and Trenton, New Jersey, to Wilmington, Delaware, and especially Philadelphia, from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s the region’s urban areas were graced with new civic spaces and associated monumental buildings designed to improve in public consciousness the very idea of the city.

In the 1880s, rising rates of immigration and industrialization brought high levels of congestion and pollution to urban areas. While early park planners brought some physical relief to city dwellers, a new generation of reformers sought further to instill a sense of pride and belonging to residents, especially immigrants with only tenuous ties to established institutions, by creating wide boulevards, ennobling buildings, and manicured parklands to allow people of all backgrounds spaces for reflection and recreation. Such inspiring spaces, they argued, could uplift city dwellers weighed down by low pay, long hours, and inadequate housing. Influenced by projects in Europe such as Vienna’s Ringstrasse, Baron Haussmann’s (1809-91) redesign of Paris, and Ildefons Cerdá’s (1815-76) work in Barcelona as well as American figures such as landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-52), Central Park creator Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), and architect Daniel Burnham (1846-1912), dozens of examples, from museums and municipal buildings to new street grids, were proposed and completed. The movement got its initial boost from Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. Laid out by Olmsted, Burnham, and other leading designers, the fair’s “White City,” a model (comprised of plaster of Paris) of lagoons, fountains, promenades, statues, and neoclassical buildings showcased how comprehensive planning might relieve urban problems. Subsequent fairs at Buffalo (1901), St. Louis (1904), San Francisco (1915), and Philadelphia (1926) similarly formed as grand civic spaces under the influence of the White City.

In the region, Philadelphia contained the most significant projects aligned with City Beautiful. After the Civil War, the city’s population neared seven hundred thousand and its industrial base of factories, refineries, and shipyards polluted the environment. In response, calls emerged for beautification plans and civic improvements. Emerging environmental groups including the City Parks Association, the Fairmount Park Art Association, and the women’s Garden Club of Philadelphia as well as reform-minded citizens such as Peter A.B. Widener (1834-1915) and financier Edward T. Stotesbury (1849-1938) pushed for grand Beaux-Arts architecture, boulevards in North Philadelphia, a citywide playground system, a park along the Schuylkill River’s western bank, and a new plan for South Philadelphia mimicking Washington, D.C’s planned system of radial boulevards. During WWI, local architects Albert Kelsey (1870-1950) and David K. Boyd (1872-1944) proposed the clearing of two square blocks from Chestnut Street north to Ludlow Street so as to increase the visibility of Independence Hall, one of Philadelphia’s most iconic and patriotic structures, though it was not until after WWII when their vision, known as Independence Mall, came to fruition.

Most prominently, a number of Philadelphia’s art and civic groups championed a grand parkway to connect Center City to Fairmount Park. Based on a plan by Jacques Gréber (1882-1962) and Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945), work on the Parisian-style project commenced in 1907. Ten years later, Gréber proposed a system of diagonal parkways radiating outward from central Philadelphia’s five squares. While this plan never fully materialized, by 1930 much of the Fairmount Parkway (renamed Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 1937), including the Free Library, Rodin Museum, the Municipal Court, Logan Circle, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art was completed or under construction. Across town, Washington Square, graced with new statuary, refurbished fountains (care of the Philadelphia Fountain Society), and two high-rises designed by Edgar Seeler (1867-1929) (the Penn Mutual and Curtis Buildings), reflected City Beautiful sensibilities. In 1933 architect Alfred P. Shaw’s (1895-1970) 30th Street Station, the city’s last “grand depot,” opened for service as a monumental gateway to the city. The Neoclassical/Art Deco station, commissioned by the Pennsylvania Railroad, replaced the company’s Gothic Broad Street Station, which was demolished in 1952.

In 1913, Cret received a commission to redesign Rittenhouse Square. Influenced by Paris’ Parc Monceau, his Beaux-Arts plan for Philadelphia’s wealthiest neighborhood included diagonal walkways, new sculptures and fountains, and tree plantings. Prior to the completion of Cret’s Delaware River (renamed Benjamin Franklin) Bridge, which linked Philadelphia with Camden, New Jersey, architect Charles Wellford Leavitt (1871-1928) conceived in 1925 a system of parklands and thoroughfares to remake central Camden as the gateway to South Jersey. Echoing Gréber’s Philadelphia street plan, much of Leavitt’s blueprint was never built. Yet the city’s Admiral Wilson Boulevard, running from the bridge into the suburbs to the east, opened in 1926 and became Camden’s main traffic artery, later attracting the Sears and Roebuck Company to erect a new store in the neoclassical tradition.

In 1888 the city of Trenton, New Jersey, began accumulating land for a grand park, a process aided considerably three years later through a donation of seven additional acres from lawyer John L. Cadwalader (1836-1914). With Olmsted as chief designer, Cadwalader Park (Trenton’s largest and Olmsted’s only one in New Jersey) included a restaurant, amusement midway, concert gazebo, and a zoological garden with lions, deer, monkeys, and black bears. Gracing the park were circular foot paths, picnic areas, ornate entryways, and statues of George Washington (1732-99) and John A. Roebling (1806-69). To offer a counterweight to urban congestion, the city submerged the Pennsylvania Railroad’s track along the park’s eastern edge. John H. Duncan (1855-1929) designed the Trenton Battle Monument, a towering Roman-Doric column graced with bas-reliefs and a surrounding plaza, which opened in 1893 and commemorating the Continental Army’s 1776 victory.

To the south, Wilmington, Delaware, also initiated projects shaped by the City Beautiful Movement. With the city growing into a mercantile and chemical manufacturing center, the DuPont Company in 1905 began construction of its new twelve-story downtown headquarters. To complement the building, in 1917 vice president Pierre S. DuPont (1870-1954), who had personally financed road improvements between Wilmington and Chester County, retained architect John Jacob Raskob (1879-1950) to redesign the one-and-a-half-acre green space across the street. Completed in 1921, the new Rodney Square included paved walkways, cast stone stairs and balustrades, and a gleaming bronze statue of Caesar Rodney (1728-84), the state’s signer of the Declaration of Independence. Further committed to the Progressive ethos of the City Beautiful, DuPont in the late 1920s opened to the public the gardens and grounds of his Longwood estate in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

Amidst changes brought by industrialization, population growth, and environmental concerns, the City Beautiful Movement provided for greater Philadelphia’s residents and visitors new spaces for work, recreation, and reflection. From industrial riverfronts to cramped older neighborhoods, many urban areas were demolished to promote arts and culture as well as entertainment and consumption. Yet the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s spelled the end of the movement as the regional economy adapted to financial collapse and high rates of unemployment. And while many local cities underwent large-scale renewal programs in the decades after World War II, nearly all of the projects shaped by the City Beautiful Movement remained intact well into the twenty-first century, attesting to their enduring importance.

Stephen Nepa teaches history at Temple University, Moore College of Art and Design, and the Pennsylvania State University-Abington. A contributor to numerous books and journals, he is currently at work on a project about the history of Puerto Rico’s Levittown community. He received his M.A. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his Ph.D. from Temple University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

To mine anthracite, or “hard coal,” on a large scale required extensive access to capital, much of which was drawn from Philadelphia. Before the Civil War, transportation firms led the way. The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, founded in 1822 by Josiah White (1781-1850) and Erskine Hazard (1789-1865), by 1840 had constructed thirty-six miles of canal, joining ten miles of navigable river down the Lehigh River to Philadelphia. In 1825, investors led by Philadelphia bankers and merchants founded the Schuylkill Navigation Company, which by the 1840s boasted a transportation network of 108 miles of canal and passable river, along with 450 tunnels and 120 locks for a capitalization of $2.2 million, all fed by annual coal shipments of 500,000 tons. In 1828 the North Branch Canal opened, reaching all the way to Nanticoke, and in 1831 it was extended to Pittston, connecting Luzerne County to the Philadelphia market. In 1829 the northern field opened to the New York market with the completion of the Delaware & Hudson Canal, which equaled the Erie Canal in capital outlay. This transportation artery included an inclined-plane railroad and a 110-lock canal system linking Honesdale, Pennsylvania, to Rondout, New York, on the Hudson.

The emergence of the railroad system connecting Philadelphia and other eastern cities to the anthracite region soon eclipsed canal building. Frederick List (1789-1846), a leading early-nineteenth-century German economist and political refugee in Philadelphia in the 1820s, purchased a mine in the Little Schuylkill Valley in Tamaqua and recruited one of the nation’s richest men, Stephen Girard (1750-1831) of Philadelphia, as an investor to develop railroad links connecting mines to market. The railroad eventually became the powerful Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, which opened in 1833. Philadelphian Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879), the leading American economist of the nineteenth century and a close adviser to Abraham Lincoln, and like List an advocate of protective tariffs, also held anthracite mining interests. The Lehigh Valley Railroad (LVRR) opened in 1855 connecting Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe) to Easton and then north through the Wyoming Valley into New York state and east into New Jersey and New York City. To the north, George Scranton’s Delaware, Lackawanna, & Western Railroad opened up the Northern Field to New York City and, via the Erie Canal, the Great Lakes. Everywhere railroads used their control of access to the market as leverage to dominate coal production.

Anthracite Boosts Steel Production

Railroads tied together the critical ingredients of the industrial economy of the nineteenth century: coal, iron, and steel. Once accessed, anthracite coal began to play an indispensable role in the industrial revolution. Prior to the use of anthracite in the smelting of iron, American industry lagged far behind its British counterpart, continuing to use charcoal through the 1830s that resulted in an inferior product unsuitable for rail manufacture. The intense heat unleashed in the burning of anthracite closed the gap. By the 1850s anthracite was fueling half of all iron production in the United States, much of it destined for rail building, much of the rest bound for the emerging field of metal machine making, an important industry in Greater Philadelphia. The city’s central entrepôt for the coal was the Reading Railroad’s massive Port Richmond Terminal, a sprawling complex of twenty-one wharfs on the Delaware River capable of loading scores of vessels. From here coal was shipped up and down the East Coast.

Growing demand before, during, and after the Civil War accelerated anthracite production. Regional coal production went from 910,000 tons in 1840 to 3,700,000 tons in 1850, to 9,200,000 tons in 1860, to 11,000,000 in 1865. Over the corresponding period, value of output increased from $1.3 million to $5.5 million in 1850, to $14 million in 1860, to $65 million in 1865, the final statistic suggestive of the enormous inflation and profits gained as a result of the Civil War. The anthracite region’s population—comprising Luzerne, Northumberland, Schuylkill, and what would become Carbon and Lackawanna Counties—grew rapidly, from 46,790 in 1820, to 66,256 in 1830, to 93,086 in 1840, to 155,743 in 1850, and to 248,655 in 1860. As the basis of the regional economy, mine employment went from 3,000 in 1840, to 10,000 in 1850, to 27,000 in 1860, to 39,000 in 1865. From the Civil War until 1900, anthracite production increased fivefold, from 10 million tons to 60 million tons annually. Tens of thousands of immigrants poured into the region, arriving first from Wales, England, and Scotland, then from Ireland, and finally Poland, Italy, Lithuania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Hungary, and many other lands. Workers unionized in bitter struggle against the mine owners in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) by the first decade of the twentieth century.

In the late nineteenth century coke processed from bituminous coal began to displace anthracite coal for industrial use, especially in steel production. Drawn from the nation’s vast deposits stretching from western Pennsylvania and West Virginia through Illinois, bituminous, or “soft coal,” was considerably cheaper to extract than anthracite coal. The coking industry developed first in western Pennsylvania, and with it the center of the American iron industry shifted from eastern Pennsylvania to the Pittsburgh region, eventually following the development of the iron mining industry in the Lake Superior region to the major cities of the Great Lakes. By 1905, the Pittsburgh area was producing 18 million tons of coke per year. Bituminous production in Pennsylvania alone reached 80 million tons by the turn of the century.

Oil Displaces Anthracite

Another development from western Pennsylvania in the late nineteenth century ultimately contributed to the displacement of anthracite for home heating use, a long decline that accelerated after World War II. This was the discovery of consumer and industrial uses for oil and then natural gas. An industry dominated by John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), oil was first shipped to Philadelphia via the Philadelphia and Erie Railroad, connecting with the Reading in Harrisburg. Beginning in the late nineteenth century oil and natural gas were shipped to refineries via pipelines from northwestern Pennsylvania. With the development of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century, petroleum began to displace both coke and anthracite in industrial production.

The Susquehanna River, whose canals provided the original mode of transportation of anthracite to Philadelphia, contributed to the ultimate decline of the anthracite coal industry. The completion of the Holtwood Dam on the lower Susquehanna in 1910 greatly increased the market for electricity consumption in Philadelphia and Baltimore. The introduction of electricity in industrial production allowed for the rapid development of light industry dependent upon small machines, as well as the development of continuous production methods like the assembly line. By 1930 electricity had become the leading energy source in American industry, and most Philadelphia homes had abandoned carbon-burning appliances. In the years after World War II, the burning of coal as a home heating source declined.

Coal nonetheless continued to play an important role in the production of electricity in the region for many decades. Coal-powered plants generated substantial environmental pollution, and according to 2010 research carried out by the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force investigating the remaining Pennsylvania and New Jersey power plants using coal for generation, fine particle air contamination consisting of soot, heavy metals, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides was associated with dozens of deaths. Most of these plants were slated to close by the end of 2015.

From the beginning, coal contributed to workplace and environmental problems. Tens of thousands of Pennsylvania workers died in the state’s mines, and tens of thousands more suffered and died from coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, or black lung. The rivers and soils near mines and beehive coke ovens were damaged. Air pollution, coal ash deposits, and one ongoing underground coal fire, at Centralia, Pennsylvania, continued to present environmental problems to the state into the twenty-first century. One of the prices of coal, despite its central role in boosting area industry, has been these long-term effects.

Thomas Mackaman is Assistant Professor of History, at King’s College, Wilkes-Barre. He is author of the forthcoming book, New Immigrants and American Industry, 1914-1924. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Delaware Bay does not often get the historical acknowledgement received by its estuarine neighbor, the Delaware River, but it exerted equal weight in shaping the Philadelphia region’s cultural and economic development. Over seven hundred square miles in size and bordered by New Jersey and Delaware, the Delaware Bay is one of America’s premier maritime gateways, connecting the Philadelphia region to both international and domestic trade. While the bay’s extensive salt marshes, along with limited sheltered harbors, prevented certain economic and military uses, its natural resources duly compensated for these environmental obstacles. The bay’s waters fostered an array of navigational skills among shoreline residents, a tradition that would later pay dividends when sail and steam transport expanded in the nineteenth century. Stands of timber lining the bay’s shoreline and tributaries facilitated the growth of shipbuilding, an industry that flourished until almost the end of the twentieth century. Most notable, the use of the bay’s marine resources—from its well-known oysters to salt hay—formed the backbone of its economic fortunes for the four centuries following European contact.

Taking note of what was already apparent to local Native American populations, colonial observers envisioned the bay’s far-reaching potential. Referring to the Delaware Bay as part of a “Terrestrial Canaan,” a 1676 promotional broadside for West New Jersey singled out the bay’s “great numbers of Sturgions, Lobsters, Oysters, and many other Sea-Fish,” as well as its capacity to serve as a gateway for natural resource use “a hundred Miles into the Country.” William Penn (1644–1718) cast the Delaware Bay and its resources as an organizing agent of Philadelphia’s regional dynamics and the city’s rise as an international entrepôt.

Following the pattern of the Dutch and Swedes who preceded them, English settlers continued the practice of harvesting the Delaware Bay’s rich stores of fur-bearing animals and coordinated these activities with trade among the Lenape Indians. But being intent on permanent settlement, the British instituted the commercial use of the bay’s waterborne and terrestrial resources. Wider consumption of shellfish (oysters, clams) and finfish (shad, sturgeon, rockfish) raised concern over the sustainability of these stocks enough to prompt New Jersey to enact in 1719 one of the first laws in America regulating the use of natural oyster beds.

Soils along the bay’s shore were not as fertile as those along the Delaware River, but some areas did produce profitable yields of grain crops and corn, and farmers working along the Delaware Bay and its tributaries during the colonial and early national periods availed themselves of vessel transport afforded by this estuarine system. The environs around Greenwich, New Jersey—which straddled the colony/state’s inner and outer coastal plains—was most notable in this regard, and Greenwich emerged as the Delaware Bay’s most prominent eighteenth-century port and supplier to Philadelphia..

Amid these agricultural developments, construction of earthen dikes and banks enabled farmers to reclaim tidal marshes and meadows, transforming the bay’s shoreline. Once drained, these banked meadows allowed efficient harvesting of cordgrass, provided grazing for livestock and sheep, and, when sufficiently relieved of prior salt water content, could be used to raise a variety of crops. The bay’s moderate climate allowed colonial settlers—particularly those who arrived from New England’s colder temperatures—to pasture animals at longer monthly intervals in salt meadows and reclaimed tidal lands.

Shallops and flatboats brought agricultural commodities from the bay shore to Philadelphia, as well as a variety of products derived from the region’s timber supply. Eighteenth-century newspaper accounts and wills from the Delaware Valley highlight the importance of woodlots, particularly important in bay shore areas where soil conditions hindered profitable agriculture. Among those who prepared timber for market were the area’s Swedish and Finnish settlers. Having brought their well-known woodman’s skills to the New World, they were conspicuous participants in the Delaware Bay region’s wood economy. Delaware Bay residents harvested merchantable cordwood for export to Philadelphia and provided other wood products such as barrel staves, ship planking, naval stores (tar, pitch), and charcoal. The bay region’s impressive stands of Atlantic white cedar provided valuable roof shingles and house sheathing as well as material for boatbuilding, a regional tradition that endured until the end of the twentieth century.

While agriculture and wood harvesting carried forward into the nineteenth century, joined by an increasing emphasis on truck farming that continued into the twentieth century, the economic ambitions gripping the Philadelphia region transformed the use of the bay’s waters. Central to these commercial and industrial goals was the need to move commodities, particularly in bulk, to and from Philadelphia through the Delaware Bay to points all along the East Coast of the United States. The Navigation Act of 1817 limited such shipping, known as the coastwise trade, to American-flagged vessels. Duly incentivized by shipping demand and legal protections, bay shore residents from New Jersey and Delaware built, crewed, and owned coastal schooners (principally two- and three-masted). Experienced in working the water, they seized on the opportunities presented by this emerging maritime economy.

Arguably the Delaware Bay’s most significant tributary, New Jersey’s Maurice River sported a robust schedule of coastal schooner and barkentine construction between the 1830s and 1880s. An important 1882 survey of U.S. shipbuilding by Henry Hall (1845–1920) showed the Maurice River towns of Mauricetown, Dorchester, and Leesburg were the beneficiaries of these activities and singled out Mauricetown as “being dependent on building [vessels] and navigation [coastwise trade]” with “50 to 60 sea captains living in the place, [where] almost everybody owns shares in vessels.”

These same economic ambitions ultimately impacted the Delaware Bay’s most valuable marine resource—the oyster. Well-established as a culinary staple throughout the Delaware Bay/River corridor—from Philadelphia’s finest dining rooms to an array of oyster bars and cellars serving ordinary citizens—New Jersey stood ready to exploit the market potential of its rich oyster beds. Legislation in the mid-nineteenth century authorized the transplanting of seed oysters from natural spawning areas to barren bay bottoms privately leased from the state. Oystermen found that transplanting oysters to the higher salinity levels of Maurice River Cove improved growth, enhanced the quality of their meats, and offered greater control in cultivating their product for market.  When ready for market, schooners and sloops transported oysters to Philadelphia.

The arrival and improvement of rail connections along New Jersey’s Delaware Bay shoreline, from the 1870s through the early 1900s, dramatically transformed the oyster industry and attracted unprecedented levels of investment from throughout the region. The West Jersey and Seashore Railroad (WJSR), a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Central Railroad of New Jersey (CRRNJ) financed the construction of modern shipping facilities at, respectively, “Maurice River” on the eastern side of the Maurice River and at “Bivalve” on the river’s western side. Servicing far-flung markets from rail connections in Philadelphia and New York City, these facilities helped drive an ever-increasing volume of oyster harvests. Each of these multiunit facilities teemed with activity as workers bagged, barreled, and shipped oysters and, eventually, removed them from their shells and canned them in new shucking houses. This work linked Philadelphia’s commission merchants and restaurateurs—many of whom operated from the city’s Dock Street Market—to vessel captains, policy makers, and scientists, as well as to African Americans who arrived from the Chesapeake to work on oyster boats and as shuckers. All this activity reflected the oyster industry’s one-time status as the economic bedrock of the Delaware Bay region with its inextricable ties to Philadelphia.

New transportation methods also transformed the Delaware Bay’s shad and sturgeon fisheries. Each species returned to its natal grounds to spawn in the spring, a ritual that energized a number of small communities on the New Jersey and Delaware sides of the bay. Of all these fishing sites, Bayside—outside of Greenwich—was arguably the most prominent due to CRRNJ rail connections linking it to Philadelphia and New York markets. The combination of shad and sturgeon skiffs, floating cabins, and shoreside processing buildings defined this amphibious extension of Philadelphia’s economic sphere. But neither fishery was immune from overfishing and pollution. When sturgeon fishermen met in Philadelphia around 1900 to organize the Sturgeon Fishermen’s Protective Society, it was too late to stem the tide of depletion. The combined effect of pollution and fishermen unwilling to curb their catch meant that the sturgeon fishery—once plentiful enough to allow people to affordably purchase caviar sandwiches—was in the midst of its final days.

Rail and steamship service operating from Philadelphia opened the Delaware Bay to recreational activity during the second half of the nineteenth century, and this trend continued in the twentieth as automobiles further democratized leisure pursuits. Hotels, such as the Warner House at the confluence of the Delaware Bay and New Jersey’s Cohansey River, were emblematic of this enthusiasm and accommodated visitors from throughout the mid-Atlantic region and beyond. But smaller guesthouses and cottages were more the norm. By the late nineteenth century, Fortescue, New Jersey—centrally located on the Delaware Bay—epitomized the modest accommodations that typified vacation life along the bay. Some visitors swam, others engaged in recreational fishing and crabbing, while others simply sat on the beach and gazed at the bay’s glistening waters. The bay shore’s plentiful waterfowl and shore birds attracted hunters from Philadelphia’s most prominent social circles, and they frequented plush accommodations such as the Sora Gun Club on the Cohansey River. Thomas Eakins’s (1844–1916) paintings of hunting scenes on the bay brought national attention to these activities and, in turn, fostered interest from the Philadelphia Sketch Club, the Philadelphia Watercolor Society, and a host of documentary photographers and writers motivated by the region’s local color. The Delaware Bay inspired participants of the nature study movement, including writer Dallas Lore Sharp (1870–1929), a Delaware Bay native whose rise to national prominence was grounded in experiencing the bay’s natural endowments. The cumulative effect of cultural and environmental commentary laid the foundation for conservation of the bay’s tidal marshes throughout the twentieth century, as well as promoting the roots of ecotourism at birding sites whose reputation garnered international fame.

When, in the early nineteenth century, federal and state authorities began planning the implementation of modern navigational aids in the Delaware Bay and along its shorelines, they unabashedly signaled this estuarine system’s critical role in advancing the fortunes of the greater Philadelphia area. The city’s status as America’s largest freshwater port underscored the urgency of these measures, and the Delaware Bay became a crucible for some of the nation’s most important developments in lighthouse technology and a focal point of work conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Anchored to the bay’s floor, channel lights at Brandywine Shoals (1850), Fourteen Foot Bank (1885), Cross Ledge (1877/78), Miah Maull Shoal (1909), and Ship John Shoal (1877) epitomized the environmental dominion and economic ambition that drove these engineering measures. Joining these channel lights were a collection of shoreline lighthouses whose appearance conformed to regional vernacular building idioms in New Jersey and Delaware. These navigational aids form a technological backdrop of longstanding challenges that have confronted the Delaware Bay, such as biological invasions—most notably oyster diseases MSX (haplosporidium nelsoni) and dermo (Perkinsus marinus).

This technological context has been central to historical debates over the effects of water diversion farther up the Delaware Estuary and ecological concerns surrounding the dredging of a deeper ship channel and barge traffic on the bay’s tributaries. Passage of federal legislation in the 1880s made dredging a focal point of efforts to improve the navigability of the Delaware Bay and River. While deepening the channel allowed larger vessels greater access to Philadelphia, it also punctuated the environmental cost of accidents (oil spillage, fires) involved in such shipping. Deepening the bay and river channel also raised the possibility of elevated salinity levels farther up the estuary and the potential ecological toll of changes in its water chemistry.

Starting in the 1950s, modern environmentalism reframed the utopic vision of the Delaware Bay cast by European settlers four centuries earlier. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Delaware Bay was still an ever-present backdrop of economic ambitions driving redevelopment of the Port of Philadelphia, along with similar initiatives at ports in Salem, Paulsboro, Gloucester, and Camden, New Jersey, and Wilmington, Delaware. With intermodal shipping now firmly ensconced in Philadelphia’s economy, the Delaware Bay’s shipping lanes assumed renewed importance in regional planning. But greater environmental consciousness contributed to revised perspectives on the bay’s future. Operation of the Salem and Hope Creek Nuclear Generating Station (construction started in 1968) in Lower Alloways Creek, New Jersey, did not go unchallenged. Studies in the 1980s documented the generating station’s role in Delaware Bay fish mortality. Environmentalism’s most conspicuous impact led to unprecedented emphasis on recreational uses of the Delaware Bay and the rise of ecotourism in the region. These priorities led to renewed interest in the Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge (1937) in Delaware and the creation of the Cape May National Wildlife Refuge (1989) in New Jersey. Complementing these federal measures was the active acquisition of shoreline areas by the states of New Jersey and Delaware for public use. In the twenty-first century, the bay’s present and future remained immersed in contested perspectives over how its human use and ecological health could best be sustained.

Michael J. Chiarappa is Professor of History at Quinnipiac University and co-editor (with Brian C. Black) of Nature’s Entrepot: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds (Pittsburgh University Press, 2012). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Issuing from two neighboring locations in the Catskills region of New York state, the Delaware flows for 330 miles to the Atlantic Ocean. The West Branch of the river starts in the town of Jefferson southwest of Albany, New York, while the East Branch springs from a small pond nearby in the village of Grand Gorge. Those two headwaters join together to flow southward, picking up additional water from tributaries, including the Lehigh River, the Schuylkill River, and the Brandywine Creek, before finally emptying into the Delaware Bay.

The river’s massive watershed—covering 13,539 square miles of territory within the states of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware—was once the homeland of the Lenape, who based their collective identity as a people on the fact that they all fished in its waters, drank from its feeder streams, and relied on its currents to transport their canoes over long distances. They called it “Lenape Wihittuck,” meaning the rapid stream of the Lenape. So closely did the early Europeans identify the indigenous people with the great river that, once they had renamed the river for the English Lord De La Warr (1577-1618) in the mid-1600s, the newcomers began referring to the native inhabitants as the Delaware people.

Henry Hudson Arrives

Among the first Europeans to encounter the Lenape, the English navigator Henry Hudson (c. 1565-c. 1611) arrived at Delaware Bay while sailing up the coast of North America for the Dutch. In 1640 the Dutch established their first trading post at Fort Nassau (near present-day Gloucester City, New Jersey), exchanging Dutch cloth and goods for beaver pelts.

When in 1682 the English Quaker William Penn arrived with his charter from Charles II (1630-85), making him sole proprietor of the colonial territory, he deliberately sited his commercial center of Philadelphia where it could serve the needs of settlements up and down the river, but also connect the colony to more distant markets. Early settlers quickly began to produce commodities, not just to support their own needs, but also for export.

They built ferries across the river to enable easy travel over large stretches of the province. The Quaker village of Bristol was established in 1697 as a market town for Bucks County farmers. The ferry there took passengers from the Pennsylvania side to Burlington, New Jersey. Eventually, Bristol grew into an important commercial and ship-building center. Farther north on the New Jersey side of the river, the town of Lambertville began as the site where in 1733 Coryell’s Ferry connected New Jersey travelers to the Pennsylvania village of New Hope. Lambertville gradually developed across the centuries into a manufacturing center for paper, rubber, spokes, and wheels.

Undoubtedly, the most famous crossing was George Washington‘s (1732-99) daring decision to transport his troops across the river at McConkey’s Ferry on Christmas night 1776 and lead them to a successful surprise attack against the Hessian troops quartered at Trenton, New Jersey, the morning of December 26.

The River Underpins Industrialization

The creeks that fed into the Delaware River spawned some of the earliest water-powered mills in the area. Where the city of Trenton now stands, a gristmill was built in 1679 to process the grain produced by local farmers. Once milled, the grain was sent downriver to Philadelphia for export. In the eighteenth century iron mills and forges sprang up along the river, and by 1760 there was a thriving colonial iron industry that exploited the ore, wood, and water power found there. By the 1840s, sawmills were located at most of the major tributaries in the upper Delaware River Valley, rafting their lumber down the river.

To transport other commodities from the Upper Delaware, however, producers needed more than the swift flow of the river. Riverboats, barges, and rafts carrying lumber, produce, and other commodities to market had to make their way through a succession of rapids, falls, and shallows impassable during large parts of the year. The steep waterfall located at Trenton discouraged large boats from traveling from the Upper Delaware all the way south to Philadelphia.

The pressure to overcome these obstructions increased dramatically with the discovery of valuable anthracite coal in northeastern Pennsylvania. That motivated the Pennsylvania legislature to build a canal alongside the Delaware River. By 1830 anthracite coal mined in northeastern Pennsylvania was gaining a growing market in Philadelphia because it burned hotter than other coals in factory furnaces. To connect the coalfields of northern Pennsylvania to urban manufacturers, builders completed the Delaware Division of the Pennsylvania Canal in 1832. That sixty-mile-long Delaware Canal ran from Bristol in lower Bucks County all the way north to Easton, along the right bank of the Delaware River, connecting at its north end to the Lehigh Canal and opening the anthracite coalfields to markets in Philadelphia. In fact, anthracite made up more than 90 percent of the Delaware Canal’s cargo.

Early mills and lumberyards coexisted with abundant fish populations. During the colonial period, the river and bay boasted more than three hundred species of fish including catfish, lamprey, eel, trout, smelt, perch, and pike. Sturgeon and shad figured especially prominently in the diets of the colonists. For example, the shad was said to have saved George Washington’s troops from starvation. At the river’s southern extreme, Delaware Bay spawned a legendary oyster industry, which prospered until the end of the nineteenth century when harvests started shrinking. None of these aquatic populations remained as plentiful once the river became industrialized.

Railroads Arrive

Railroads gained popularity in the mid-1800s, reducing the waterway’s value for transporting goods and travelers. But at the same time, railroads enlarged the market area for the manufacturing plants that lined its banks. Gradually the stretch of river from Trenton south to the Delaware Bay became one of the most highly industrialized regions of the United States, producing textiles, rubber and leather goods, ships, railroad equipment, and steel. Early manufacturers clustered along the shore in industrial villages like Frankford, Kensington, and Bridesburg. In the 1870s Henry Disston developed the entire Tacony neighborhood surrounding his northeast Philadelphia saw works. In Camden, prior to the Civil War, factory owners built housing for workers close to their waterfront mills, sawmills, lumberyards, and railroad companies.

The industrial neighborhood of Frankford in Philadelphia offered a good example of the river’s role in Philadelphia’s industrial development. In the 1660s, Swedes built a gristmill on the northeast bank of Frankford Creek. Then in the early nineteenth century larger factories began to appear in Frankford, attracting more workers, which in turn led to the building of more housing, shops, and services. Like the majority of the factories in the rest of the city, many of those plants produced textiles. In the period just before World War I, Frankford boasted over 150 mills.

Many locations along the river developed industrial specialties. In 1848 German immigrant John Roebling (1806-69) built a plant in Trenton making wire rope that became one of New Jersey’s famed factories, building suspension bridges that included the Brooklyn Bridge. By 1904, when the business needed a larger site with access to the water, it built a new facility on the river at Kinkora, some ten miles from the Trenton plant. Bridesburg spawned a concentration of chemical companies during the Civil War that later became serious polluters.

Major shipyards along the Delaware River included the Cramp Yard in Kensington, the New York Shipbuilding Yard in Camden, and the Sun Shipyard in Chester. Other manufacturers on its banks included oil refineries, food-processing companies, and sugar refineries. In Wilmington, the DuPont Company chose to locate its heavily polluting Chambers Works in New Jersey across the Delaware River from Wilmington. There they produced dyes, petroleum chemicals, Freon, and other substances. Many of these companies chose the river location because it could supply large quantities of water used in production or to dispose of effluents easily and cheaply.

Recreation on the River

The coming of railroads served not only to transport goods, but also passengers, including some who rode the rails to enjoy the scenic beauty of the Delaware Water Gap, a notch that the Delaware River cut into the Kittatinny mountain ridge about seventy-five miles west of New York City. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, the Delaware Water Gap became one of the most popular summer resorts in the eastern United States. In 1856 the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railways opened a line from New York City when only one hotel served the water gap. Soon a dozen more hotels served visitors who came to enjoy the scenery, hiking, rafting and boating.

Closer to Philadelphia the river spawned an entirely different kind of recreation at the turn of the twentieth century when trolley companies invested in amusement parks as a way to increase their weekend traffic. The Delaware River became a favored spot for the popular new pastime, attracting many city dwellers. In Gloucester County, New Jersey, Lincoln Park opened in 1890, followed by Washington Park in 1895. For several decades, both attracted thousands of visitors. In Salem County, Riverview Beach Park opened in 1891 with picnic tables, a dance hall, carousel, and eventually a Ferris wheel; here, most visitors from Philadelphia and Wilmington came by river. In Burlington County, the owner of land on Burlington Island built a pier, pavilion, bathhouse for swimmers, and ice cream stand in 1900. This became the Island Beach Amusement Park whose roller coaster, “the Greyhound,” proved to be its most popular attraction.

Another popular recreation spot, the seventy-mile stretch of the Delaware and Raritan Canal, became a state park in 1974—a recreational corridor for canoeing, jogging, hiking, bicycling, fishing, and horseback riding. Built in the 1830s to connect the Delaware and Raritan Rivers in order to transport coal from Pennsylvania to New York City, the canal towpath ran from New Brunswick to Trenton; a canal towpath/rail trail from Trenton to Bull’s Island; and a rail trail from Bull’s Island to Frenchtown. Its wooden bridges and historic remnants of locks make this walkway an attraction for history lovers.

Environmental Degradation

From colonial days, run-off from tanneries and slaughterhouses contaminated the river. Down through several centuries, increasing numbers of people and enterprises along the river used it as a public sewer to carry untreated waste from their properties. With the growth of manufacturing, the danger to the river increased markedly. Sewers that mixed together stormwater and sewage in a single pipe emptied directly into the river, dumping industrial wastes. Waterborne diseases, particularly cholera and typhoid fever, sickened thousands of Philadelphians during the years between the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century. Especially deadly outbreaks of those diseases during the 1890s forced the city to open the Torresdale sand filtration plant in 1908 as a way to clean water taken from the Delaware. By 1912 the city was chlorinating all city water.

Despite such measures to treat the water taken out of the Delaware, the river itself remained an open sewer, filled with industrial and human wastes. In the early 1900s, Philadelphia’s sewers were dumping more than two hundred thousand tons of solids into the Delaware each year. A 1934 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer complained that the few remaining shad found in the river tasted like petroleum.

In 1948, Congress passed the federal Water Pollution Control Act making federal dollars available for river cleanup. That helped Philadelphia to construct three primary sewage treatment plants, the last of which was completed by 1953. Those plants removed solids from the city’s sewage going into the river, but did not eliminate the waterborne bacteria that continued to consume all the available oxygen, depriving fish of the oxygen they needed to thrive in the Delaware. Suburban growth during the 1950s and 1960s in popular riverside locations like the Levittown housing development and the nearby U.S. Steel Plant at Fairless Hills added to the load carried by the Delaware.

The largest water users were power plants. Other large water-using industries were steel, petroleum, chemicals, and paper. More water was used for cooling than for all other industrial purposes. And since warm water contains less dissolved oxygen than cooler water, fish and other aquatic life were suffering from rising water temperatures in addition to contaminants in the river water. Although the river’s defenders tried to mount clean-water campaigns in the early 1920s and late 1930s, industrial lobbyists resisted those efforts.

Managing Spillover Effects

Disputes arose when the actions taken in one state affected the citizens and enterprises located in other states. As the population of the basin increased over time, some of the most bitter disagreements involved droughts and floods. For example, in 1928 New York City started to draw water from several tributaries of the Delaware River, putting New York in direct conflict with villages and towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania that were using the Delaware for their water supply. In 1929 New Jersey initiated (and Pennsylvania joined) a bill of complaint asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stop New York City from diverting water from the Delaware River basin. In 1931, the Supreme Court ruled that the interests of each of the four river-basin states—Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania—should be given equal consideration in the management of the shared waterway. The court allowed New York City to draw 440 million gallons of water a day from the Delaware and its upstream. That decision, however, did not resolve the competition for river water.

To resolve such disputes over the river’s shared resources, in 1936 the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and New York formed the Interstate Commission on the Delaware River Basin (Incodel) to control and prevent water pollution, plan the conservation of water supply for the use of the cities, and plan development along the banks of the entire river.

Incodel proceeded aggressively to press all four state legislatures to pass pollution-control measures. To support its campaign it prevailed on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to conduct scientific water pollution studies and to work with regional companies on a new voluntary plan to reduce oil and refuse dumping. However, industrial production during World War II reversed the modest improvements achieved during the 1930s. During the war years companies were allowed to dump more waste than at any other time in history. Regulators were unwilling to restrain producers supporting the war effort. The Port of Philadelphia became so vile that a number of ships simply refused to dock at their scheduled destination. Tests indicated that the river water entering the city’s water treatment plants was the most polluted of any major U.S. city.

Delaware River Basin Compact

Seeking a new approach to shared management of this critical resource, the four states in 1961 joined with the federal government to create a successor organization. In that year President John Kennedy (1917-63) signed the Delaware River Basin Compact creating the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), which absorbed the staff and assets of Incodel. In addition to the basin’s four state governors, the compact also included the regional U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—becoming the first equal partnership between federal and state governments in river basin management. The DRBC was not intended to coerce participating jurisdictions to comply with the majority preference, but to serve as a framework for negotiating tensions and conflicts in the management of the river.

As the first ever federal-state watershed compact, the DRBC was the first agency to specify load allocations for river polluters in 1968, holding them to standards more stringent than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued years later. The DRBC’s efforts were strengthened in 1972 when Congress passed the Clean Water Act, making it illegal to dump pollutants into the nation’s rivers without a permit from EPA and required wastewater treatment plants to improve their standards. The key to that law’s success in the Delaware watershed, as elsewhere in the U.S., was that Congress supplied 75 percent of the money needed to upgrade local plants. Between 1972 and 1990, over $1.5 billion was spent on wastewater treatment plants along the Delaware between Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Trenton, noticeably improving levels of dissolved oxygen.

In the 1960s and again in the early 1980s, the DRBC focused much of its effort on mediating among the states during a series of punishing droughts. Then in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the river experienced three major floods in three years (2004–2006) that severely damaged homes and land along the river banks. Enraged residents of towns along the Delaware, mainly from the Water Gap south to the Lambertville/New Hope area, blamed the floods on New York City leaders who insisted on keeping the water levels too high in the reservoirs that served their city, as a hedge against shortages. In response to the standoff the DRBC crafted a Flexible Flow Management Program in 2007. The plan allowed a seasonal drawdown of a specific volume of water from the reservoirs, based on forecasts of likely snowpack buildup during the winter.

Although this approach to meeting the conflicting goals of the state governments did not satisfy all parties equally, local governments along the river worked in association with DRBC and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to implement the plan.

Shared Governance of the Philadelphia Port

Like the river’s shared hazards, its infrastructure also called for coordinated management. Among the most important installations have been the bridges that connect Pennsylvania with New Jersey. In 1919 the two states created the Delaware River Bridge Joint Commission to build a bridge connecting central Philadelphia with downtown Camden and to collect tolls to maintain that bridge. To great fanfare, the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) opened in 1926 just days before Philadelphia celebrated the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Over the decades, the agency renamed itself the Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA) and constructed three more bridges across the river—the Walt Whitman, Commodore Barry, and Betsy Ross—along with a bistate rail line (PATCO) to carry riders from the New Jersey suburbs into and out of Philadelphia.

The mainly constructive relations between the two states within the DRPA hit a snag in the mid-1990s over a controversial plan to deepen the Delaware to forty-five feet by dredging the river bottom. Since 1941, the river’s main channel from Philadelphia and Camden southward to the mouth of the Delaware Bay had been maintained at a depth of forty feet. But in the final decade of the twentieth century, port planners recognized the ship channel needed to be deeper if Philadelphia’s port wanted to compete against other East Coast ports like Baltimore and Norfolk, Virginia, that could accommodate larger ships coming from Asia through the Panama Canal.

Political leaders in both Delaware and New Jersey strenuously opposed digging up the riverbed for fear that toxic dredge materials from the river bottom would be disposed of in their states. Prominent environmental groups including the Sierra Club also worked to block the project. To meet those objections, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell (b. 1944), a champion of the project, agreed to allow those dredge spoils to be deposited in abandoned coal mines in Pennsylvania. Ultimately, the federal government made the decision, based on the principle of federal supremacy over navigable waterways. In October 2009 the Army Corps of Engineers decided to allow the project, and dredging began in March 2010. The project to deepen the Delaware River main channel to forty-five feet was completed in February 2020.

Despite periodic disagreements about how the river’s assets should be preserved, examples of regional cooperation like the Delaware River Basin Commission and the Delaware River Port Authority showed that broad consensus existed about the river’s value to all parts of the region.

However, government alone, even when working across jurisdictional boundaries, could not carry the entire burden of protecting the river. In 2014 the William Penn Foundation launched a Delaware River Watershed Initiative committing $100 million to coordinate the work of over sixty community associations and nonprofit organizations. All these nongovernmental groups agreed to work on land preservation and restoration projects on the river’s banks as a way to reduce runoff from farm fields, stem the loss of forests, and prevent the depletion of groundwater. The partners agreed to monitor water quality at five hundred sites in the watershed and share information.

In the Supreme Court decision of 1931 allocating rights to the waters of the great Delaware River to the four states comprising its watershed, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935) remarked, “A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.” As a treasure held in common, the Delaware River provided those living on its banks with countless opportunities to make use of its bounty. In so doing, this treasure that crosses local, county, and state boundaries, tested the region’s capacity to cooperate in preserving its waters from overuse and even destruction. Through a combination of local initiative and federal resources, the region’s inhabitants largely proved themselves capable of meeting that challenge.

Carolyn T. Adams is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University and associate editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Delaware River is a key regional water resource spanning the boundaries of four states in the northeastern United States: Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Established October 27, 1961, through concurrent legislation ratified by the four basin states and the federal government, the DRBC was formed to address the often contentious planning, development, regulatory, and allocation issues posed by the expanse of the Delaware River watershed (the area drained by the river). Among the issues prompting its founding were water supply shortages, pollution of the tidal Delaware in the urbanized stretch below Trenton, New Jersey, and flooding spawned by the hurricanes of 1955. The first such federal-state partnership in the United States, the DRBC subsequently served as a national and international model.

The DRBC oversees the longest undammed river in the United States east of the Mississippi; the Delaware flows 330 miles from Hancock, in upstate New York, to the mouth of the Delaware Bay. As of 2016, more than thirteen million people (about 4 percent of the nation’s population) relied on the waters of the Delaware River Basin for drinking, agricultural, commercial, and industrial use, although the river drains only 0.4 percent of the nation’s continental land mass. A powerhouse of the regional economy, the basin supported the largest freshwater port in the world along with six hundred thousand jobs generating $10 billion in annual wages, according to a 2011 study.

Interstate wrangling over Delaware River water rights began in earnest as early as the 1920s, driven in large part by the water needs of the region’s two largest cities, New York and Philadelphia. New York City, situated just outside the Delaware Basin, sought to tap Delaware tributaries within New York State to fill its reservoirs, while Philadelphia, within the basin, was counting on the river’s waters to meet its present and future needs. Efforts to reconcile competing demands for water resulted in multiple failed attempts at an interstate compact, as well as litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court, as the three downstream states opposed New York City’s efforts to divert water from the Delaware. Representatives of both New York City and Philadelphia took part in the negotiations that led to the creation of the DRBC.

Fear of Centralization

At the same time, efforts by the federal government to establish national or regional water planning agencies had been rebuffed by states concerned that their water rights might be abridged. During the New Deal, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) created a National Resources Planning Board, but Congress quashed it in 1943 for fear of excessive centralization of power. Legislation establishing the DRBC compact was forged during the administration of President John F. Kennedy (1917-63) after months of fine-tuning to craft an agreement that would allow coordinated federal and state action in the river basin, while addressing federal concerns about constitutionality and potential threats to jurisdiction, and protecting state prerogatives in managing water and related land resources within their borders.

The pioneering interjurisdictional compact replaced a patchwork of forty-three state agencies, fourteen interstate agencies, and nineteen federal agencies that an article in the magazine of the American Water Resources Association termed “a regional body with the force of law to oversee a unified approach to managing a river system without regard to political boundaries.” Under the water law doctrine of equitable apportionment, states have the right to a share of river water that originates within or flows through their terrain. Recognizing the need to manage resources throughout the entire Delaware watershed—the area drained by the river—the compact empowered the DRBC to allocate water supply, protect water quality, regulate water withdrawals and discharges, develop water conservation initiatives, create flow management policy, plan for water needs and recreation, and finance capital projects, programs, and operations through bond issuance and cost sharing.

Headquartered in West Trenton, New Jersey, the commission was one of the few basin management agencies to have regulatory, as well as planning and monitoring responsibilities. Key successes included improved water quality, implementation of an effective drought management policy, and comprehensive watershed planning. Much of the river was afforded special protection status, to preserve water quality, and was enrolled in the National Wild and Scenic River System, to maintain its scenic nature.

The commission’s membership, as defined by the compact, consisted of the governor of each of the basin states, plus a presidentially appointed federal representative (in 2016, the North Atlantic Division Engineer of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers). Decisions were to be made by majority vote except for drought declarations or member funding quotas, which required unanimity. The initial term of the compact was one hundred years, renewable for a second century, unless any of the partners gave advance notice of intention to leave.

Tocks Island Dam Project

Along with interstate water rights litigation, a second prime impetus for creation of the DRBC was the planned implementation of the multimillion-dollar Tocks Island Dam project. The dam would have been built on the main stem of the river six miles upstream from New Jersey’s Delaware Water Gap, on the northern tip of an island owned by the State of New Jersey, creating a lake forty miles long and up to 140 feet deep. It was ultimately rendered unbuildable by its scope and cost.

The multistate impacts of flooding spawned by two hurricanes in 1955 had cleared the way for federal involvement in Delaware River water affairs.  The Senate directed the Army Corps of Engineers to prepare a comprehensive basin-wide resource management plan, which was funded by Congress as part of a massive public works bill, the Flood Control Act of 1962 (P.L. 87-874).

The plan included the Tocks Island Dam as the centerpiece of a multipurpose reservoir project that had flood control, recreation, and hydropower generating components, initially estimated at a cost of $122.4 million. Almost 250 billion gallons of water were to be stored behind the dam. Another ten dams would have been built on Delaware River tributaries. A recreation area, later enlarged and known as the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, was proposed to develop the recreation opportunities promised by the project.

Project costs began escalating almost as soon as the dam was approved, due to inflation, land acquisition prices, and construction issues. The DRBC was intended to serve as the local sponsor of the project in behalf of the four river states and would have owned most of the water behind the dam. Construction was supposed to start in 1967, with project completion scheduled for 1975, but the schedule was delayed by litigation and design problems.

The dam drew resistance first from residents whose property was taken by eminent domain and then from an environmental movement that steadily gathered force after the first Earth Day in April 1970. The plan foundered amid concerns about stagnant reservoir water, unstable geology, cost overruns, budget cuts due to spending on the Vietnam War, and the enactment of new, more stringent environmental regulations. The DRBC, long a proponent of the dam, in July 1975 voted 3-1 against starting construction, with Pennsylvania the only vote in favor. The federal government representative abstained.

But the dam remained nominally viable as a component of the DRBC Comprehensive Plan, for complex reasons related to land earmarked for the national recreation area, as well as the water supply and flood control issues the dam was supposed to address. Federal legislation to remove the project from the books failed several times during the mid- to late 1970s.  It was not until 1992 that Congress formally deauthorized the Tocks Island project.

The Rise of Hydraulic Fracturing

The DRBC’s regulatory responsibilities again placed it in a key regional role in the early twenty-first-century controversy surrounding the practice of hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, the process of drilling into rock and injecting a pressurized liquid to extract gas or oil. About one-third of the Delaware Basin, in Pennsylvania and New York, overlies the Marcellus Shale formation, which contains rich deposits of natural gas. Concentrated in southwestern and northeastern Pennsylvania, the state’s fracking industry mushroomed, bringing with it revenue and jobs, but also environmental impacts that included noise, concrete well pads, pipelines, wastewater disposal, and deforestation. Faced with the looming expansion of fracking into the Delaware River watershed, the potential construction of gas transport pipeline under the river, and opposition to fracking by compact member states Delaware and New York (the New Jersey legislature and the state’s governor were at odds on the issue), the DRBC in 2010 issued a temporary stay on fracking, pending its enactment of regulations for gas production activities. In 2016, a federal lawsuit filed against the DRBC by landowners in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, who held fracking leases, claimed the agency lacked the power to regulate gas drilling. The suit was joined by three Republican Pennsylvania state senators, who claimed the DRBC had usurped authority already addressed under state regulations.

Born in litigation and political horse-trading, the DRBC more than a half-century after its creation continued to struggle with its mandate of managing an essential natural resource transcending multiple state boundaries. Often a source of technical expertise and mediation in the ongoing process of maintaining adequate water quality and supply throughout the watershed, the DRBC’s interjurisdictional regulatory and administrative powers nevertheless thrust it into the foreground in high-profile regional controversies with multiple constituencies, such as those surrounding Tocks Island and fracking. Despite the intent of those who intended the DRBC as a strong advocate and mediator for the river and its resources, the agency found its powers checked by the complexity of the environmental regulatory system in which it operated, the often conflicting interests of the many public and private stakeholders in the Delaware Basin, and financial constraints stemming from the reluctance of its membership to fully fund its work.

Gail Friedman holds a Master’s Degree in Public History from Temple University. She worked as a community planner for Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from 1999 to 2015. (Author information current at time of publication.)