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“Falling leaves are nature’s way of showing us how beautiful it is to let things go.” ― Unknown
Pocono Living Magazine’s 2025 Photography Contest
> This woodcut by John Warner Barber (1798–1885) shows Durham boats carrying Continental Army soldiers across the Delaware River in 1776 prior to their attack on Trenton. General Washington valued the boats because “one such boat would transport a regiment of men.”
By John L. Moore
In 1911, an elderly man, Thaddeus S. Kenderdine, reminisced about living along the Delaware River as a youngster.
The septuagenarian told about seeing the river “whitened by the sails of Durham boats” that carried commercial cargoes. These boats, 60 feet long and eight feet wide, were the tractor-trailers of their day.
Born in 1836, Kenderdine was the son of a lumberman. He also described watching the river as “raft after raft passed down its waters,” taking huge logs to downriver markets. These rafts consisted of logs cut from trees felled in the forested mountains through which the upper Delaware passed.
“Durham boats … were being extensively used for hauling flour and whiskey from the upper Delaware,” Kenderdine said.
The boats originated during the first half of the 18th century at the Durham Furnace and Iron Works, a Pennsylvania industrial complex located along the Delaware about a dozen miles south of Easton.
They were designed and used by the furnace operators to ship pig iron and other iron products some 70 miles downriver to Philadelphia. It was only natural that they became known as Durham boats.
In time, millers, farmers, and other commercial operators also began using them to haul various commodities up and down the Delaware.
The Durham boats are remembered today mainly because General George Washington used them to ferry his soldiers across the Delaware on their December 1776 march to Trenton. Washington liked these boats because each was large enough to carry an entire regiment.
During the weeks prior to Christmas that year, Washington had had the New Jersey militia collect all the Durham boats and other craft along the river's eastern shore. The boats were then moved to the Pennsylvania side so the British couldn't use them. On December 19, Washington had 16 Durham boats and four flatboats moved to McConkey's Ferry at the present-day village
of Washington Crossing. When the soldiers made the famous crossing on Christmas night, they had to stand because the boats didn't have seats.
Reenactors use replicas of these boats to cross the Delaware at Washington Crossing Historic Park every December.
The Durham boats, which had peacetime uses before the American Revolution, played an instrumental role in the development of the Delaware Valley above the falls at Trenton.
According to the Durham Historical Society, “at one time … hundreds of Durham boats carried freight on the Delaware, giving employment to several thousand men whose job it was to move cargo down the river to Bristol and Philadelphia.”
These flat-bottomed vessels were capable of carrying heavy cargo in shallow water. They were especially plentiful along the river between Easton and Philadelphia, but they were also used on the upper river as far north as Port Jervis and other towns in Upstate New York.
Fully loaded, a typical Durham boat was 60 feet long and eight feet wide. It “would carry, downstream, one hundred and fifty barrels of flour or about six hundred bushels of shelled corn,” J.A. Anderson wrote in his 1912 book, "Navigation on the Upper Delaware."
The typical boat carried cargo weighing between two and five tons, Anderson said. From gunwale to keel plank, the sides of the boat measured 42 inches— waist high for a man six feet tall.
To power a boat, crewmen used oars 18 feet long and poles 12 to 18 feet long. To steer, the captain used a steering oar that was 33 feet long.
The captain relied on the current to carry the boat downriver. A sail could supplement the current, and, when necessary, the crew could resort to the use of “a pair of eighteen-foot oars,” Anderson said.
Moving upstream was an entirely different matter. As Anderson described it, “The boat was usually propelled by setting poles, twelve to eighteen feet long and shod with iron.”
“Durham boats … were being extensively used for hauling flour and whiskey from the upper Delaware.”
“…Members of the crew, starting at the forward end, with poles on the river bottom and top ends to shoulders, walked to the stern, pushing the boat forward,” Anderson said. There were narrow wooden walkways on each side of the boat, only 12 inches wide, where the men walked. When they reached the stern, “they rapidly returned (to the bow) to repeat the process.”
In eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey, “the river was the main way of transportation, north and south,” during the 18th and early 19th centuries, said David Oleksa, president of the Durham Historical Society in northern Bucks County.
Oleksa explained that “there were very, very few roads” in Pennsylvania at the time the iron works was established at Durham in 1727. Muddy in wet weather, these roads became “deeply rutted,” and merchants and manufacturers found travel by wagon difficult and expensive.
This led to the development of the Durham boats, which took their name from the iron works. Oleksa said that their design may have been inspired partly by the design of certain boats in Scandinavia and partly by the design of dugout canoes that the Lenni Lenape Indians made from logs.
Boats loaded with pig iron and other iron products made at Durham took a day to a day and a half to sail down the Delaware on the current and reach Philadelphia.
In Philadelphia, the boats were loaded with finished material that was brought upriver.
Traveling upstream took much longer, often about four days, because the crew, three men on a side, had to pole the boat against the current, Oleksa said.
The pilots who guided the boats needed a detailed knowledge of specific stretches of the river. “The Delaware has a lot of deep holes, but there are also very shallow places. There are lots of rocks,” Oleksa said. “Just south of Durham you can see them poking out during low water.”
Although most Durham boats plied the Delaware between Easton on the north and Philadelphia on the south, they were not uncommon sights above Easton.
Writing in his 1870 book, “The Delaware Water Gap, Its Scenery, Its Legends and Early History,” L.W. Brodhead said that by the mid-1700s, these boats “came into general use on the Delaware. They were used as early as 1758 by John Van Campen
for the transportation of flour to Philadelphia, manufactured from wheat grown in the Minisink. Mr. Van Campen's mill was at Shawnee …” This is a reference to present-day Shawnee on Delaware.
The operators of a gristmill in part of eastern Monroe County once known as Experiment Mills (now called Minisink Hills) “used the Durham boats extensively in their day, both in the transportation of flour to Philadelphia, and in bringing up supplies for the neighborhood,” Brodhead reported.
The mill was along Brodhead Creek near its junction with the Delaware.
Brodhead reported that the mill operators “at Experiment Mills … used the Durham boats extensively in their day, both in the transportation of flour to Philadelphia, and in bringing up supplies for the neighborhood.”
The semi-monthly arrival of these boats … in those days was an event of much greater interest to the people of the neighborhood than the landing of a steamer from Europe is to the citizens of Philadelphia at the present day,” Brodhead said.
He described the boatmen as “a strong, hardy set of men, and seemed to enjoy their laborious occupation. The captain, feeling the responsibility of his position, bore himself with great dignity, especially on his arrival at port, and the boys who collected about the wharf when the vessel hove in sight, were terror-stricken at the imperious manner of the captain, and the stentorian tones by which he commanded all alike, on board and on shore.”
Brodhead, incidentally, reported that members of the boat crews who used poles to move the oats upstream were called “pikemen.”
Brodhead gave another example of these boats on the river's northern reaches: “In 1786, one Jesse Dickinson came from Philadelphia, and laid out a city in Delaware County, New York, called Dickinson City. … Mr. Dickinson brought his men and building materials up the Delaware in Durham boats."
Dickinson City was some 75 miles above Port Jervis, N.Y., on the Delaware's West Branch.
As they toiled mightily on the Delaware River, the men who brought logging rafts down from the mountains of Pennsylvania, New York, and northern New Jersey, invariably worked up a powerful thirst. But not for water.
That's evident from an anecdote of river lore told by Benjamin F. Fackenthal, Jr., in his 1932 narrative, “Improving Navigation on the Delaware River with Some Account of Its Ferries, Bridges, Canals and Floods.”
“Some of the raftsmen, on their journeys downstream, well knew where liquor could be had, and, as they approached their favorite hostelries, they would call loudly to the innkeeper, who would gladly row out with an assortment of bottles,” Fackenthal said.
He reported that when he had lived along the river in Durham Township, he had “often witnessed the innkeeper, whose establishment was in New Jersey, opposite the Durham furnace, row out to meet the rafts.”
This happened during the late 1800s. The rafting crews “never seemed to be in a hurry, and by the time each had been served with his favorite tipple, the rafts with the innkeeper and his bateau had drifted down stream fully three-quarters of a mile.
“By the time he rowed back, another set of thirsty raftsmen would signal and yell at him, whereupon the operation was repeated, and thus kept up all day long during the rafting season.”
The logs were eventually sold for lumber at the downriver markets in and around Philadelphia. The rafting crews usually had to walk home.
> John A. Anderson made this sketch of a Durham boat in 1911. It appeared in his book, “Navigation on the Upper Delaware.”
In an 1856 history of New York's Delaware County, writer Jay Gould reported that Dickinson “erected a large three-story gristmill on Trout Creek near where it empties into the Delaware. On the side next the creek were rows of tackles projecting out over the water, for the purpose of unloading boats which should run between the two cities, Philadelphia and Dickinson.”
Gould added that “before the erection of Dickinson's mill, the settlers were obliged to go to Minisink, distant nearly one hundred miles, to get their grain ground. The river was for many years the only highway, and people and produce were conveyed up and down the same on Durham boats, or batteaux.”
The site of Dickinson City was flooded in the mid-1900s when the Cannonsville Reservoir was constructed along the upper Delaware as a source of water for New York City.
Commercial shippers lost interest in Durham boats after the Pennsylvania Canal opened a canal along the Delaware between Easton and Bristol, about 20 miles above Philadelphia, during the 1830s. The number of these boats had decreased significantly by 1870, when a new edition of Brodhead's book was released.
“Now one is seldom seen on the waters of the Delaware,” the author remarked.
John L. Moore continues to pursue his lifelong interests in Pennsylvania’s colonial history and archaeology. The Northumberland writer has published 15 nonfiction books about Pennsylvania during the 17th and 18th centuries.
His most recent book, “Border War,” is the seventh volume in his ongoing Revolutionary Pennsylvania Series. It is available in bookstores and online at the Sunbury Press Bookstore. Over the years John has participated in archaeological excavations of Native American sites along the Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers. A professional storyteller, he specializes in telling historically-accurate stories about real people and actual events in Pennsylvania history. These include the true story of Frances Slocum, a 5-year-old girl who lived as a Native American after being kidnapped by Indians during the American Revolution. Frances Slocum State Park near WilkesBarre was named for her.
Few anecdotes have survived the centuries about the colorful Durham boats, their crews, their cargoes, and their passengers. Two that have were recounted by J.A. Anderson in his 1913 book, "Navigation of the Upper Delaware."
A New Jersey miller, Jonathan Pidcock, and his sons owned and operated several Durham boats out of present-day Lambertville, N.J., during the late 1700s and early 1800s. Their boats ran between Lambertville and Philadelphia.
"In the year 1809," Anderson said, "the Hon. John Lambert, United States Senator from New Jersey, writes to his wife, living near Lambertville, that the table fare at his Washington boarding house was 'pretty fair' but that the table drink was beer, which he did not fancy ...
"As he did not like spirits, he wished her to send him a barrel of cider, by Pidcock's boat, to the Philadelphia Navy Yard, from which place it would be forwarded."
Mrs. Lambert sent the cider as her husband had requested, but the senator never got it. "Some further correspondence indicates that the cider went astray," Anderson said.
Did the cider wind up in somebody else's mug? The answer remains unknown.
Anderson's second anecdote featured two young men from New Hope who in 1825 walked to Philadelphia to see the Fourth of July festivties.
They left New Hope, which is across the river from Lambertville, on the afternoon of Sunday, July 3. The 40-mile trek took them the rest of the day and most of the night.
They reached the city "a little before breakfast time and pretty tired," Anderson said, citing his source as Martin Coryell of Lambertville's Coryell family.
"At Watson's hotel, where they proposed stopping, the landlord was not seen when they arrived, and one of them found an inner room in which to rest awhile. After a time he was aroused by a passing band, with a military company."
Still drowsy, he got up, left the room to look for the landlord. When he found him, he "inquired of him when breakfast would be ready. The landlord accused him of being crazy and informed him that it was about supper time."
Without intending to, the man had slept all day.
The other chap worked as a hatter. While his friend napped, he "took the opportunity to go out and buy some furs which he needed, and took them to the river to forward by Pidcock's boat, which happened to be lying at the wharf," Anderson said.
The crew wasn't aboard. Feeling tired, "he crawled into the sleeping cabin to wait until someone should come who could take charge of the furs."
Without meaning to, the young man fell fast asleep. He was still sleeping when the crew returned, cast off, and headed up the Delaware toward Lambertville. None of the crew members checked the sleeping cabin before leaving the city, because the young man slept a good part of the trip upriver.
The captain was using the vessel's sail to power the homeward trip. When the boat reached Trenton, 25 miles north of Philadelphia, the crew took the mast down in order to pass under a bridge across the river. The noise from this activity roused the man.
As Anderson said, "His amazement and that of the boatmen may be better imagined than described. Some breakfast and reflection brought resignation to the conditions, and the furs and their owner reached New Hope before night, the boat making one of the quickest trips on record, owing to a favorable wind all the way."
> This replica of a Durham boat is on permanent display by the Durham Historical Society at Durham, south of Easton.
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