NARROWSBURG, NY — In the olden days, the Delaware River served as a crucial highway of commerce, with timber logs felled from the great forests of the region and floated down as great rafts to the factories and the shipyards of Philadelphia. 

Those days may be gone, but those who want to remember them can find a festival in their honor still held by the banks of the Delaware River: Logging Days, Celebrating Our Heritage, an annual festival sponsored by the Narrowsburg Chamber of Commerce. 

This year, the event will take place on Saturday, October 10 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Fireman’s Field, 69 De Mauro Lane. There will be activities for lumberjacks big and small, boasts the event’s poster, which notes a vendor market to a firepit and s’mores kits to a beard-and-mustache contest. 

The highlight of the event will be a lumberjack contest, presented by Dark Horse Logging Shows. The show features axes flying and saws chomping at the bit, with lumber-jacks and -jills testing their speed, strength and accuracy. 

We’ll see you there! Wear your best flannel, and prepare for a wonderful day along the Delaware. 

Timber!

Logging in the Upper Delaware started (as legend has it) with Daniel Skinner, who floated a raft down the Delaware River to Philadelphia in 1764, a raft of pine logs carrying goods from his Cochecton, NY farm. When the logs themselves proved more valuable than the goods the raft carried, a new industry was formed.

For the next 150 years, lumberjacks felled trees along the river, lashed them together to form great rafts and floated them south, riding down with them to ensure their safe navigation. Some of the trees they felled went, ultimately, to serve as the masts of great ships; others served as the raw material for construction or for furniture. The rafts could range from 16 feet to 36 feet wide and 100 feet to 200 feet long, making the journey a formidable challenge.

As rafters made their way down the Delaware River, they stopped at hotels and boarding houses—individual houses with rooms for rent—that sprang up at convenient intervals to serve them. Stopovers in places like Hancock, Long Eddy and Narrowsburg all hosted traveling lumberjacks.

The industry peaked in the 1870s and declined thereafter, with the virgin forests of the Upper Delaware depleted. The forests that line the banks of the river today are second-growth forests, the descendents of those original stumps. The last raft sailed around 1920, bringing a period of industry along the Upper Delaware to a close.