A Much Drier Washington Bridge Crossing

Actors re-creating George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware this Christmas will do what the Continental soldiers surely wished they could have done--walk across a steel bridge.

In 1776, Washington and his men poled through the ice floes in clumsy wooden boats. But this year, the drought-shrunken Delaware River is so low that the costumed actors’ 40-foot boats would quickly run aground.

“I’m very disappointed, of course,” Ward Vinson, 69, a history professor who will portray Washington, said Friday.

Where Washington crossed, 30 miles north of Philadelphia, the drought has exposed gravel, rocks and stumps that haven’t been seen in 100 years, said Eric Castle, site administrator at Washington Crossing Historic Park.

It is the first time since the reenactments began in 1953 that the boats had to be abandoned because of drought, said Bob Gerenser, who portrayed the Father of Our Country last year. But ice and flood have made use of the bridge necessary in the past, he said.