Lackawanna

The Lackawanna River flows through a long valley in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania before joining the Susquehanna. Its name comes from a Lenape expression for a stream that forks. Lenape communities lived in the valley before settlers from Connecticut and Pennsylvania advanced competing claims to the country, disputes that erupted in the Yankee-Pennamite wars.

Beneath the valley lay deposits of anthracite. In the 1820s the Wurts brothers developed mines on the upper Lackawanna and sought a route to markets on the Hudson. A canal could not easily cross the Moosic Mountains, so the Delaware and Hudson company built a gravity railroad to carry coal over them to Honesdale. There it could be loaded onto boats for the journey along the Lackawaxen and Delaware.