Dutch Settlers
Middle Smithfield Township, Monroe County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
First European settlers in this region were Dutch who came over the "Old Mine Road," traveling from the Hudson to the Delaware. Crossing at Walpack Bend, they then used this road, oldest in Monroe County.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Long before Pennsylvania's roads and railroads, Dutch colonists pushed inland from the Hudson River valley toward the Delaware, following the rugged trace known as the Old Mine Road. Crossing at Walpack Bend, these early settlers opened up this corner of the Pocono region, making the route the oldest road in Monroe County. Their arrival marked the first sustained European presence in a landscape then largely shaped by Native peoples.
Why it matters
The Old Mine Road and its Dutch travelers trace one of the earliest European inland migrations in the mid-Atlantic, a small chapter in the long story of colonial expansion across America.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Long before Pennsylvania was crossed by highways and rail lines, this corner of what is now Monroe County was frontier country — a rugged, forested landscape in the region we know today as the Poconos. In the colonial era, moving through it at all meant following the hardest, oldest traces across the hills and along the rivers.
The earliest European push into the interior here came not from the south but from the northeast, out of the Dutch settlements of the Hudson River valley. The route these newcomers followed became known as the Old Mine Road, a corridor that linked the Hudson to the Delaware and opened a path into land that had, until then, seen no sustained European presence.
That land was not empty. It had long been shaped and inhabited by Native peoples, and the arrival of colonists marked the beginning of a new and consequential chapter in a place with a much deeper human history.
People & events
According to the marker, the first European settlers in this region were Dutch, and they came overland by way of the Old Mine Road, traveling from the Hudson toward the Delaware. Their journey took them to a crossing at Walpack Bend, where the river's course made passage possible, and from there onto the road remembered here.
That road holds a distinction worth pausing on: it is the oldest in Monroe County. In a landscape where a reliable route was the difference between reaching a new home and turning back, being first to establish such a path was no small thing. It became the thread along which settlement could follow.
The details of these early arrivals are the stuff of a frontier still thinly documented, but the essential story is clear — a movement of people, over difficult ground, following a road that outlasted them and gave the county its earliest overland link.
Its place in the American story
The familiar picture of colonial America hugs the Atlantic coast, with settlement creeping inland only slowly. The Old Mine Road and its Dutch travelers belong to the less-told story of early inland migration in the mid-Atlantic — the moment when Europeans began pressing away from the tidewater and into the valleys beyond.
It's a reminder, too, that colonial America was not solely an English project. The Dutch presence in the Hudson valley reached farther than many realize, and routes like this one carried that influence overland into new country, leaving a mark on where and how the interior was first settled.
Every great national migration is made of countless small, local beginnings like this one: a river crossing, a first road, a handful of families willing to follow it. This modest marker points to one of those beginnings, an early link in the long chain of expansion across the continent.
If you visit
You're in the Pocono region of northeastern Pennsylvania, and the landscape itself is part of the story — wooded ridges and river valleys that make it easy to picture just how demanding overland travel once was here.
Standing by the marker, think about the age of the ground beneath you. This is described as the oldest road in the county, a route in use since the earliest days of European settlement. Roads this old have a way of hiding in plain sight, folded into the ordinary map of a place.
For a road trip, the marker rewards a slower pace: let it anchor a drive through the Delaware River country, where the river, the crossings, and the old routes still shape how you get from place to place. It's a chance to trade the interstate mindset for something older, and to imagine the first travelers who made this way passable at all.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Themes & tags
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