How did Lower Black Eddy, Pennsylvania get its name? This page provides a brief history about the naming of Lower Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, the people who settled it, and the industry rising within it.
Lower Black Eddy is a village in southeastern Plumstead Township on Delaware River Road (Route 32), so near Point Pleasant as to seem today a part of that village. The high river hills approach the Delaware closely at this point, leaving only space enough for the canal, the road, a hotel, and a cluster of houses. The scenery along this part of the river is extremely attractive.
Lower Black Eddy is much older than Point Pleasant and centuries ago was the site of an important Indian village. Dr. Henry C. Mercer, in his archaeological explorations, made extensive excavations on the river bank there for evidences of early man.1 The old hotel abutting the rock hill is at least 200 years old and has been very little altered in appearance since it was first built. It enjoyed its greatest patronage in the old rafting days. Upon occasions in early spring, the huge log rafts, each 40 feet wide and 200 feet long, tied up side by side, filled the entire Eddy, extending from shore to shore. Freshets had borne the rafts from the lumbering regions farther up the river, and most of them were destined for the Philadelphia markets. The rafting industry subsided gradually and ended forty years ago.
Lower Black Eddy was named for the Black family, who were proprietors of the hotel and sometimes operators of the river ferry, established in 1739 and continuously operated until the river bridge was opened for travel in 1853. On the Reading Howell draft of 1792, the ferry is marked “Black’s Ferry” on the Pennsylvania side of the river and “Reading’s Ferry” on the New Jersey side. There are people still living who remember the genial Andrew Black, last of the old inn’s landlords of that name.
Two canal locks at the Eddy fifty years ago kept the lock tenders busy during boating season from dawn until 9 o’clock at night. Canal boat drivers were America’s most accomplished linguists in cuss words, and the language they handed to their stolid mule teams as the boats were locked through the Eddy was lurid in the extreme—another picturesque feature gone with the wind.
Before the Delaware became a polluted stream, the Eddy was reputed to be one of the best fishing resorts on the river for rockfish, white perch, several kinds of bass, catfish, and sunfish, and in the spring for river suckers and shad. Shad from this place were relished for their exceptionally fine flavor and commanded a premium over average market prices. The last sturgeon to ascend the river to the Eddy was seen in August 1890. It was fully seven feet in length. During daytime, it sulked in deep water, but at night it wakened up and sought the swiftest part of the current. While disporting itself near the surface, it would occasionally leap eight to twelve feet into the air, falling back on the water with a splash that could be plainly heard from the shore. Every old Eddy fisherman tried his skill at spearing it from a boat, but it easily eluded capture.
Dr. Fackenthal2 states that a post office was established at Lower Black Eddy in 1821 and removed to Point Pleasant in 1828.
- I discovered after digging a deep trench that there was a lower village layer below the well-known surface village at Lower Black Eddy. But these levels are entirely at the mercy of freshets that build and unbuild banks, and that fact destroys their value as tests of age. This underplaced village-site at Lower Black Eddy is the oldest human trace that I have been able to find in the Delaware Valley, and if I give up the Trenton gravel specimens it is all I have left. Who inhabited it? Was the denizen a predecessor of the Indian, was he the Trenton gravel man himself, or was he only the first Lenape immigrant? To these questions I can say that no extinct animal bones were found to give date to the lower hearths. The lower village man made pottery. which the ice men were not supposed to be able to do. He used more argillite than jasper. His arrows and spears were very narrow and long, but that does not seem evidence enough to me to prove, as has been urged, that he was an Eskimo. Until other evidence is in, the reasonable supposition seems that he was the first coming Lenape pioneer of the 15th century.”-Dr. Henry C. Mercer in “The Red Man’s Bucks County,” in A Collection of Papers Read before The Bucks County Historical Society, Vol. II, pp. 279, 280. [↩]
- Dr. B. F. Fackenthal, Jr., in Improving Navigation in the Delaware River, 1932, p. 46. [↩]