Stoddartsville History

Stoddartsville is a National Historic District located in Buck Township, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. It is situated on the Lehigh River in the foothills of the Pocono Mountains in the Allegheny Range. The Lehigh River breaks into the Great Falls at Stoddartsville, flows southwest 19 miles to White Haven, then northeast 47 miles to Easton, and eventually empties into the Delaware, which flows past Philadelphia. The Lehigh receives two tributaries below Stoddartsville – the Tobyhanna Creek from the southeast which begins at Pocono Lake and Bear Creek from the northeast which originates below Wilkes-Barre.

The town was a product of the speculative ventures of the canal era. It owes its initial development directly to two Philadelphia merchants: Josiah White, who sought to develop slackwater navigation on the Lehigh up to the Great Falls, and John Stoddart, who established the community bearing his name.

Josiah White and his partner, Erskin Hazard, had a prosperous hardware business, by which they manufactured nails and wire at their ironworks on the Schuylkill Falls and sold their products in Philadelphia. White wanted to develop slackwater navigation further up the Schuylkill in order to tap new coal deposits for his forge. When he was met with opposition to his plan, he turned his attention to the Lehigh River to accomplish his goal. Coal had been discovered in the Panther Valley near Wilkes-Barre in 1792; and, the Lehigh Coal Mine Company was organized in 1795 to exploit these deposits but with little success. In 1818, White and Hazard bought the struggling company and organized the Lehigh Navigation Company. They obtained a charter from the State Legislature for the development of slackwater navigation on the Lehigh River. The two companies were merged in 1820, incorporated in 1822, and began operations in 1824. It was a thriving company at the time the Lehigh Canal was completed in 1828.

John Stoddart was a wealthy Philadelphia merchant who was born in England in 1777. He emigrated to America and built his fortune through real estate and stock market speculation. He was engaged in Luzerne County land speculations as early as 1803, when he acquired from John Taylor three tracts around the Great Falls of the Lehigh. These tracts were originally land warrants issued to John Hartung in 1766, Andrew Bray in 1769 and Thomas Miflin in 1773. These parcels all passed through several hands before Taylor conveyed them to Stoddart. Stoddart further purchased a large tract from Thomas Armat, a business associate and relation to Miflin by marriage, in 1812.

This gave Stoddart ownership of most of the land surrounding the Lehigh headwaters, including the Great Falls and the “Shades of Death”. White’s plan would provide canal transportation from the Falls to points south, including Philadelphia, which was necessary for the settlement and development of this area of wilderness.

In anticipation of the construction of the Lehigh Canal by White’s company, Stoddart developed the community which took his name. At the Falls he built a large stone grist mill, said to be the largest in the state at the time, a smaller stone and timber saw mill, and a row of several stone cottages to house mill hands and their families. On the hill above the Falls, he constructed a large, two-story Georgian style mansion known later as “The Maples.” He also built a large storehouse, a barn, which also served as a wagon shop and cooperage, and several other support buildings. He envisioned Stoddartsville as a thriving commercial community center for the farming and lumbering industries of the region.

Unfortunately for Stoddart, the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company extended their canal only as far as White Haven 19 miles below Stoddartsville. Two-way travel on the canal was never completed upstream to the Great Falls due to the prohibitive costs of its construction on the shallow river bottoms of the upper Lehigh. The company’s decision strangled Stoddart’s project in its infancy and left the community isolated in the wilderness. Stoddart attempted to save his endeavor by hauling goods overland by wagon to Easton, but his plan failed. Stoddart never recovered from the financial losses of his project at the Great Falls and spent his remaining days as a clerk under modest circumstances.

Despite Stoddart’s failure, his community grew into a thriving hamlet. Stoddart assigned all of his land to his creditors for the sum of$600,000 in 1828, except for a few parcels which he granted to family and settlers.

These lands, in turn, passed to settlers who engaged in farming and lumbering. The Isaac Stoddart House, later known as “The Maples,” was acquired by Daniel Trump and, after 1851, it changed hands a number of times. In 1862, Lewis Stull purchased from William Luckenback and several others of Bethlehem, 400 acres of land, including The Maples, barn, storehouse, the two stone mills, and other buildings surrounding the Falls for $2500. Stull established The Maples as his family domicile, built the Methodist Episcopal Church nearby, and took over the general store which later served as the town post office. He engaged in farming and conducted logging operations. Leonard Stoddart occupied land across the river which was granted to him by his brother, John. His descendants operated a tavern on the Easton-Wilkes- Barre Turnpike which accommodated travelers and transient workers, including the lumbermen who worked in Stull’s logging camps. Stoddartsville, in its heyday between 1835 and 1870, comprised some 200 residents and 40 buildings.

Logging operations were the biggest activity in the area. Between 1848 and 1870, Lewis Stull acquired land in and around Stoddartsville for this end. Logging camps were maintained by Lewis Stull, John Winter, Sam Hayes, and Jacob Blakeslee who evidently had contractual arrangements with Albert Lewis, the lumber king of the area. Timber was cut in the fall, and logs were hauled to the Lehigh by horse teams in winter and floated down the river to the mills after the ice broke in the spring. The lumber camps were communities in their own right where the men elected representatives to manage public affairs and constables to keep order. There were also women in the camps who cooked and looked after the men. Life in the camps was robust and colorful, punctuated by rough fighting and hard-drinking after a long day’s work. The big event was breaking the log jams, a dangerous but exciting undertaking that sometimes cost men their lives. The fires of the 1870s destroyed much of the virgin pine forests of the area. Logging operations came to a practical standstill thereafter.

Stoddartsville came to an untimely demise from a combination of catastrophic events. The completion of the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad in 1856 bisected Luzerne County in such a way as to leave Stoddartsville more apart from the main thoroughfares of commerce and trade. The flood of 1862 washed out the millworks at Stoddartsville and nearly all of the bear trap locks and dams downstream. Almost all that remained of Stoddartsville was destroyed in the fires of the 1870s. The “Great Inferno of 1875” swept down onto Stoddartsville from all directions and destroyed much of the timber in the area. The Maples was saved when water-soaked carpets were laid upon its roof but the tavern and a number of houses were burned to the ground. The fire of 1878 centered around Blakeslee Corners but many homes and timberlands were also reduced to ash. Thereafter, > many families moved away although the Stulls, Blakeslees, Kerricks, and a few others continued to maintain their farms. By 1895 Stoddartsville was referred to in one local account as a “deserted village.”

In recent years, Stoddartsville has enjoyed a renaissance as a summer resort. Beginning at the turn of the century, people from New York City, Philadelphia, and other metropolitan areas traveled to the Poconos for their summer vacations. This summer trade gave rise to the communities of Pocono Lake (1898), Pocono Manor (1902), and Pocono Preserve (1910). Stoddartsville also participated in this boom. After 1903, The Maples, then under the ownership of the unmarried children of Lewis Stull, began accepting “paying guests” who traveled to Stoddartsville with their families on vacations and holidays.

These were lively years for two generations of Stull and Stoddart descendants who maintained their summer homes here. Notable in their activities were swimming in the Falls, walks to “Lovers’ rocks” and “The Shades,” as well as hikes down the Lehigh through the forest. Much of this life came to pass with the outbreak of World War Two, when many of the Stulls and Stoddarts scattered to other areas and a few of the “old-timers” went on to their rewards. The destruction of The Maples by fire on December 21, 1951, marked the passing of the old landmark that distinguished this aging hamlet.

Today, Stoddartsville is a small settlement that still attracts summer visitors and vacationers. It retains much of the romance and charm from bygone days.