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Sunday, August 12, 2001 Page: 2B
TO DRIVERS OF AREA byways and highways, they are like soda machines. A part
of the landscape almost beyond notice. Ubiquitous cobalt poles, a broad plaque
covered with yellow print detailing an official history of events.
History passing.
Another state historical marker sprouted on the landscape this past week,
joining the ranks of nearly 2,000 across the state. The latest popped up on
Honey Hole Road in Nescopeck State Park, near White Haven. There, the Lehigh
Path was commemorated.
Not a battleground or mine disaster, not for a governor or pioneer. A path.
A track through the woods.
In a time when our essential duties are multi-tasked into a
moment-to-moment blur, it’s so easy to dismiss the roadside history lesson.
Henry Hoyt this, Jesse Fell that. The past had its time, right? We have things
to do.
But to stop and read is to carry across time and space, to touch an era
before interstate or turnpike, before paved road or even cut road.
American Indians traversed the Lehigh Path, and later, trappers, Moravian
missionaries and settlers. From the Delaware River at Easton, the Lehigh Path
went through Bethlehem over Blue Mountain paralleling the Lehigh River until
it traced a curving line through what is now the Mountaintop area, between
routes 309 and 437, then down into the Wyoming Valley.
It was not easy going. “When we ascended the great Mountain,” wrote
Christian Frederick Post in his journal of 1760 of the climb up Broad
Mountain, “… all my Limbs trembled as if I had a fit of the Auge & in
descending the same it made both Man & Beast tremble.”
The American Indians managed. Travelers reported encountering groups of
Indians, and even the chief, Teedyuscung, along the path.
Imagine that, scouts and father-daughter teams and others at the YMCA Camp
Kresge, as you scramble up Mount Yeager to the rocky crown. The path winds
nearby.
At the summit, breathless and sweaty, look northwest to the Wyoming Valley
to a “prospect as dreary as naked rocks and shrub oaks and stunted pines and
a death-like solitude can make,” wrote William L. Stone in 1839 in his
“Poetry and History of Wyoming.” The terrain is largely unchanged but the
perspective is sunnier for campers who can retreat to a hot mess and warm
bunks.
The traveler of two centuries ago had rough going on the path leading to
Solomon’s Gap, through scrubby thickets of yellow and white pine and hills and
hollows of linden, hickory, birch and ash. At that gap flows Solomon’s Creek,
called Moses Creek on the plot of the Manor of Stoke. That was the plan made
by the Pennamites, the southern Pennsylvania settlers who held a concurrent
claim to the Wyoming Valley along with Connecticut settlers, already camped
here in 1770.
Think of that now as you steer your car to or from Mountaintop. Think of
Solomon’s Gap, along the Lehigh Path in 1770, where Nathan Ogden and 140 men
from Northampton County camped “kindling no fires, creating no smoke, giving
no alarm,” according to Harvey-Smith’s “A History of Wilkes-Barre and the
Wyoming Valley.”
The next day, those Pennamites captured many of the Yankees in the valley,
including Major John Durkee, the man credited with giving Wilkes-Barre its
name.
History, traced along a line on an old warranty map, traced along a breach
in the forest. Stories alive through centuries, there for us as we pass by,
ubiquitous in our cars and the hurry of our lives.