Walpack Center

The story

Walpack Center is a farm village the federal government emptied for a dam it never built. It grew in the mid-1800s as the service hub of Walpack Township, a farming valley along the Delaware River in far northwestern New Jersey — a church, a store, a post office, a schoolhouse, and the farms around them.

In 1962 Congress authorized the Tocks Island Dam to control Delaware River flooding, and the Army Corps of Engineers began condemning some 72,000 acres for the reservoir it would create. About 8,000 people across the valley were bought out by eminent domain, and Walpack Center's residents were gone by the mid-1960s. Then the dam was cancelled — killed by cost, geology, and opposition — leaving the land empty for nothing.

The condemned valley became the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, and Walpack Center survived as a preserved cluster of nineteenth-century buildings. The Walpack Historical Society keeps the village and offers tours in the warm months, and Walpack Township remains one of the least-populated municipalities in New Jersey.

What remains today

About eleven 19th-century buildings — the church, the store, the post office, and the schoolhouse — kept up within the national recreation area.