Once-Thriving Walpack Township Is Nearly a Ghost Town : Federal Park Service Swallows Tiny N.J. Community

The late afternoon sun casts long shadows over the clapboard houses that line Main Street in Walpack Center. It’s dead still, but that’s not unusual.

Walpack Township is dying.

And Walpack Center, the once-thriving hub of the community, is nearly a ghost town, having faded year by year since the federal government bought up the surrounding countryside to build a dam--and then changed its mind.

“There seems to be no trace of what was here, like it never happened,” Township Clerk Virginia E. Fuller said, as she and her husband, Mayor Raymond Fuller, settled into chairs on the glass-enclosed front porch of their home outside Walpack Center.

“It was an active community,” she recalled. “We had a fire department and a ladies’ auxiliary. We used to take the bus to the city every now and then.

“It’s like it was all erased,” she added.

Only the municipal building--an old one-room schoolhouse--and the rescue squad garage are still owned by the township.

The federal government owns the former Methodist church, which is now locked, along with six houses and a post office that make up the rest of Walpack Center.

The houses all are painted the same beige with green trim, lending an eerie quality to the silence. The post office is open only two hours, six days a week.

Spreading from the township center are acres of what once was pasture. But the farmhouses, the fences and barns are long gone.

The death knell for Walpack--then a community with several hundred full-time residents--sounded in 1962 when Congress authorized a plan to build a dam at Tocks Island, a few miles north up the Delaware River. The idea was to create a 12,000-acre lake along 37 miles of the Delaware River from Port Jervis, N.Y., to the Delaware Water Gap.

The federal government spent $9 million on engineering for the proposed dam between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. An additional $75 million bought land for the lake and a surrounding park. The lake was to be used for recreation and water supply, while the dam would provide hydroelectric power and flood control.

But Congress never appropriated money to build the dam because of environmental and economic objections. In 1978, it turned the project over from the Army Corps of Engineers to the National Park Service, which is turning the land and river into the 69,000-acre Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

The federal government now owns all but about 5,000 acres of the land it intends to incorporate into the park.

The Fullers, whose home is on a half-acre plot, are among about 90 residents left in Walpack Township, a 45-square-mile community that falls entirely within the recreation area.

The Fullers, both 62, say they intend to stay in Walpack. They won’t sell out to the government, as their neighbors did.

“People think we’re crazy for staying, but it’s great,” Virginia Fuller said, gazing across a deep ravine to the pines on a far ridge.

The government’s objective for the area is to “provide opportunities for outdoor recreation,” said Richard Ring, the park service’s assistant superintendent.

“Probably got just as much use before,” Virginia Fuller said.

“More,” said her husband.

But Ring says 2.5-million people visit the recreation area annually to hunt, fish, swim, ride bikes, hike and go boating and canoeing on the river. Officials expect the number to double in the next decade.