Wyoming-Minisink Path
Palmyra Township, Pike County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Here the path from Minisink Island to Wyoming descended the hill to ford Wallenpaupack Creek, before the valley was flooded to make the present lake. Crossing the mts. to Capoose (Scranton), it descended the Lackawanna Valley to the Susquehanna.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Long before highways crossed the Poconos, a well-worn Indian path linked Minisink Island on the Delaware to the Wyoming Valley on the Susquehanna. Here it dropped down the hillside to ford Wallenpaupack Creek—a crossing later drowned when the valley was dammed to form today's lake—then climbed the mountains toward Capoose, near present-day Scranton, before following the Lackawanna down to the Susquehanna. These trails were the highways of their day, carrying trade, diplomacy, and news across the eastern woodlands.
Why it matters
Native footpaths like this one shaped where colonists later built roads and towns, making them the hidden skeleton beneath Pennsylvania's modern map.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Wyoming-Minisink Path
Blooming Grove Township, PA · est. 1951
The modern highway here traces an old Delaware Indian path that ran from Minisink Island on the river to the Wyoming Valley. Along it, in July 1778, terrified refugees fled the Massacre of Wyoming — a bloody Revolutionary War raid by Loyalist and allied Iroquois forces — pausing to camp beside a bubbling spring still visible in the woods nearby. The path carried both ancient travelers and the human wreckage of the frontier war.
Wyoming-Minisink Path
Dingman Township, PA · est. 1949
This spot marks where an old Native trail climbed from the Delaware River toward Powwow Hill on its way to the Susquehanna, tying together two of Pennsylvania's great watersheds. The Delaware (Lenape) people traveled it during their westward movement toward the Wyoming Valley, pushed in part by colonial pressure on their eastern homelands. Later, Connecticut settlers hungry for land followed the same ridgeline path, layering a new chapter of migration atop an ancient one.
Lehigh Path
Dennison Township, PA · est. 2001
Long before roads crossed these mountains, a Native American footpath threaded through this rugged country, one strand in a network of trails linking villages of the Delaware and Susquehanna watersheds. The Lehigh Path ran from the Forks of the Delaware near present-day Easton northwestward to the Wyoming Valley on the Susquehanna near Wilkes-Barre. The Lenni-Lenape and Susquehannock traveled its steep grades until roughly 1800, when European settlement finally displaced the old ways of moving through the land.
Delaware & Hudson Canal
Honesdale, PA · est. 1947
Built between 1825 and 1828, the Delaware & Hudson Canal linked the Hudson and Delaware rivers to move northeastern Pennsylvania's anthracite coal to market. Honesdale served as its western terminus, fed by a gravity railroad reaching back to the mines at Carbondale. For some seventy years the canal was the region's lifeline, floating hard coal toward the cities that its clean heat helped to power.