Visioning

The Upper Delaware
River Corridor

The importance of planning for
Wayne County’s future

By ANN O’HARA

The lessons the history of Wayne County teaches are endlessly fascinating. Time and again, our county has faced economic decline and divisive issues, and each time men and women armed with foresight have created new opportunities, not all of them positive for all citizens but all resulting from the ability to see and plan ahead.

Lumbering was the very first industry in the county and, along with its companion industry, tanning, was the backbone of the rural economy. Farmland, then as now, was rocky and suitable only for subsistence farming, and trees were the primary cash crop. With hindsight, we can say that the forests should have been used more wisely, but at the time they seemed an endless resource. By 1890, when the O&W Railroad’s Scranton Division pushed into Northern Wayne, the countryside had been stripped bare. With no access to markets for farm products, families grew what they needed and sold excess dairy products and produce to the limited local market. The abundant rock could be quarried locally but not shipped to areas of greater demand. The Scranton Division was seen by the railroad as a means to ship coal from Carbondale to new markets, but to the farmers of Northern Wayne, it was an opportunity to ship large quantities of dairy products, ice and produce safely and quickly. The O&W planned purely for profit, but it benefited the county’s economy enormously.

In 1826, Jason Torrey owned 259 acres at the “Forks of the Dyberry,” which he had been trying to sell for 20 years. In that year, news that the site would become the western terminus of the proposed Delaware & Hudson Canal made the real estate immensely more valuable. But Jason Torrey was more than a wealthy landowner; he was a man with a vision for the future. He saw that the workers on the canal would need services. He built sawmills and gristmills and general stores and even a boarding house to accommodate the laborers who arrived the next year. Jason Torrey could have retired on his real estate profits, but he impelled himself, his family and his community into the future by identifying needs and filling them. Honesdale became a hard drinking, brawling, polluting boomtown, but the community was young, and hugely successful.

When Wayne County’s badly needed new courthouse was begun in 1876, the excavation ignited the famed “courthouse war,” leading to years of bitter controversy and the impeachment of Judge George C. Waller because he favored the construction. By 1879, the courthouse was finally finished (for $130,000) despite bitter opposition and still stands and performs its function 122 years later, the controversy long forgotten.

The point? Citizens of vision have always planned ahead—sometimes to suit their own purposes and sometimes for the good of the community. There have been changes, disappointments and opportunities in every era, and those men, women, businesses, and institutions with the ability to visualize and work toward a better future have always been the winners.

[Ann O’Hara is the president of the Wayne County Historical Society.]

This bi-weekly feature is part of a visioning initiative to develop and encourage smart growth as a means of enhancing and preserving the Upper Delaware River corridor. If you are interested in contributing to this column email editor@riverreporter.com or call 845/252-7414.