Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
tide, and to it the anglers and hunters take their families and enjoy
the pleasures of the virgin woods.
The Wallenpaupack Creek, coming out of the Pocono plateau and the
Moosic Mountain, makes the boundary between Pike and Wayne Counties,
and flows into the Lackawaxen at Hawley. For most of the distance its
course is deep and sluggish, but approaching the edge of the terrace,
within a couple of miles of the Lackawaxen, it tumbles over cataracts
and down rapids through a magnificent gorge, so that, from its
alternating characteristics, the Indians rightly called it the
Walink-papeek, or "the slow and swift water." It descends a cascade of
seventy feet, and then goes down the Sliding Fall, a series of rapids
interspersed with several small cataracts. Farther down are two
cascades of thirty feet each, and then the main plunge, the Paupack
falls of sixty-one feet, almost at its mouth, the whole descent being
about two hundred and fifty feet. Hawley has thriving mills, whose
wheels are turned by this admirable water-power, and it is also a
railway centre for coal shipping. Its people are noted makers of
silks, and of cut and decorated glassware. Judge James Wilson, one of
the signers of the Declaration of Independence, was an early settler
on the Wallenpaupack.
Above Hawley, in a broadened intervale of the Lackawaxen, was the
famous "Indian Orchard," where the first settlement, made in 1760,
grew afterwards into Honesdale, now the county-seat of Wayne. This was
a tract of land in the valley upon which the lofty Irving Cliff looks
down; and it was named from a row of one hundred apple trees which the
Indians had planted at regular intervals along the river bank. The
tradition was that ninety-nine trees bore sweet fruit, while one every
alternate year had a crop of sour apples. Upon a large clearing at the
water's edge, paved with flat stones, the Indians held their feasts
and performed their religious rites. The orchard and stones have
disappeared, but the plow still turns up Indian relics. This place was
selected by the Delaware and Hudson Company for the head of their now
abandoned canal, at the base of the Moosic Mountain, and it was named
Honesdale, in honor of the first president of the canal company,
Philip Hone, described as "the courtliest Mayor New York ever saw."
Within the town the two pretty streams unite which form the
Lackawaxen, making lakelets on the plain, and from the shore of one of
these the rocks rise almost perpendicularly nearly four hundred feet.
In 1841 Washington Irving came here with some friends, making the
journey on the canal, and climbed these rocks to overlook the lovely
intervale, and thus the Irving Cliff was named. Writing of his visit,
he spoke in wonder of the beautiful scenery and romantic route of the
Delaware and Hudson Canal, saying: "For many miles it is built up
along the face of perpendicular precipices, rising into stupendous
cliffs, with overhanging forests, or jutting out into vast
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