Hickory Run State Park History: The Floods, Fires, and People Behind the Boulder Field

I went to Hickory Run for the Boulder Field and stayed for the ghosts. That is the honest version. I am usually knee deep in Colorado trailheads, so this Pennsylvania park was a bit of a detour, but I started reading about it one night and did not come up for air until I had a browser full of tabs about a bankrupt Founding Father, a temperance train wreck, and a herd of bison that one of this park's characters pulled back from extinction. If you have ever stood on that flat carpet of gray rock in the Poconos and wondered what happened here, this one is for you.

The short answer is that this quiet park has buried a lost town, a couple of catastrophic floods, a rail disaster that made national headlines, and the fingerprints of some genuinely famous people. Here is the long answer.

Hickory Run State Park history at a glance

If you just want the timeline before the deep dives, here is the whole arc:

• 20,000+ years ago: Ice Age cold and periglacial freeze and thaw shape the land and build the Boulder Field.

• 1794: Robert Morris, financier of the American Revolution, buys land here during the speculation binge that later ruins him.

• 1830s to 1860s: The Gould family sets off a logging boom. Mills, tanneries, and the little town of Hickory Run spring up.

• 1849: Dams break and a flood wipes out Saylorsville and much of Hickory Run.

• 1862: A second, separate flood destroys the Lehigh Canal's Upper Grand section, and the state bans rebuilding it.

• 1875: The Great Fire burns through the mills and forest and the town starts to die.

• 1888: The Mud Run train disaster kills dozens on the rails at the edge of the park.

• 1918: General Harry Trexler starts buying the land that becomes the park.

• 1935: The National Park Service takes over. The CCC and WPA build the park you walk today.

• 1941: Camp Daddy Allen opens for children affected by polio.

• 1945: Hickory Run officially becomes a Pennsylvania state park.

The land before the park: ice, boulders, and the Shades of Death

Start with the rock, because the rock came first. About 20,000 years ago a sheet of ice sat over the western half of what is now the park, while the higher ground to the east escaped the glacier itself but got hammered by the cold around it. That cold is the whole story of the Boulder Field. Water crept into the bedrock, froze, expanded, and cracked it apart, over and over, for a very long time. Then the freeze and thaw crept the broken pieces slowly downslope, grinding their edges round as they went. What is left is a field of boulders roughly 1,800 feet long and 400 feet wide, some of them 26 feet across, sitting almost perfectly flat with a stream running somewhere underneath it. It earned National Natural Landmark status in 1967, one of only a couple dozen places in Pennsylvania to hold that designation.

A quick word of advice from someone who respects an ankle: wear real shoes out there. The park says it plainly, and it is right, because a lot of those rocks wobble when you step on them. A sturdy pair of hiking boots is worth it, and please do not stack the rocks into cairns. Staff have to take them back down, and the balancing towers are a hazard for the next person picking their way across.

The first European colonists were not charmed by any of this. They found dark evergreen forests, bottomless swamps, and soil you could not farm, and they named the a rea Shades of Death. There is a trail by that name in the park now, which is a very good name for a trail. Before them, the land was claimed at various points by the Lenape, the Susquehannock, and the Iroquois, though no permanent Indigenous settlement is known here.

Robert Morris, the broke millionaire who owned it first

Here is the twist most people walk right past. In 1794, the land that became this park was bought by Robert Morris, and Robert Morris was a big deal. He was often called the financier of the American Revolution. He was one of only two men to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. During the war he smuggled gunpowder past the British blockade, put up three of his own ships for the Navy, and backed so much of the effort on his personal credit that Congress paid troops with IOUs that were basically his word. For a while, the scale of his wealth was staggering.

And then he lost all of it. After the war, Morris went all in on land speculation, and 1794 was right in the thick of it. That was the year he and a partner formed a venture to buy a million acres of Pennsylvania, including land in the county where Hickory Run sits. His plan depended on waves of European buyers showing up to purchase lots. They never came, in large part because the French Revolution and the wars that followed kept people home. The loans came due, the buyers did not, and Morris ended up owing something close to three million dollars, which was an almost unimaginable number at the time.

In 1798 he went to debtors' prison in Philadelphia and stayed there for about three years. George Washington, his old friend, came to visit him there. Congress passed the country's first bankruptcy law in 1800, partly to get Morris out, and he was released in 1801 to live quietly on a small stipend until he died in 1806, mostly forgotten. His warrant for the wild land up in the Shades of Death was a footnote in the spree that ruined him. He almost certainly never saw it.

The Gould family and the logging boom that ate the forest

The land sat mostly untouched until the 1820s, when a canal changed everything. The Lehigh Canal reached completion in 1829 to haul newly discovered anthracite coal down to Philadelphia, and suddenly the giant old growth white pine and eastern hemlock up here, some of them 150 feet tall, had a way to get to market. Men like David Saylor and the Gould brothers, Isaac and Stephen, bought up the land and put up mills. By 1839 there were six mills on Hickory Run alone and two more on Mud Run.

A whole town grew along the creek. It was called Hickory Run, and it had the only post office for miles. The Goulds employed around 150 workers and ran a cluster of sawmills, and one of them lived in a white pillared house on the hill that everyone called the Manor. A stagecoach road connecting Allentown and Wilkes-Barre ran through, and a second little settlement, Saylorsville, sat just upstream. The loggers took the trees for lumber and also stripped the bark, because the tannin in hemlock and pine bark was used to tan leather.

That bark fed a place worth its own stop in this story: the town of Lehigh Tannery, down along the Lehigh River. By 1860 the tannery there ran to about 680 feet long and worked through something like 80,000 hides a year. In its day it was known as the second-largest tannery in the country. A company town grew up around it, more than a hundred families, plus a store, a hotel, a school, and a post office that opened in 1866. Men called peelers went into the woods every day to strip hemlock bark for the tannin that cured the leather, and the bare trunks were usually left to rot where they fell. The cost showed up fast. The river below the tannery ran black with waste, and the hemlock forest that fed it thinned out year by year. The foundation of the main building is still down there near the Tannery Bridge if you know where to look.

The forest paid for all of it. The clear cutting was close to total, and there was no thought given to replanting, which set the stage for what came next.

The 1849 flood that wiped out Saylorsville and Hickory Run

Trees slow water down. Take away the trees and you take away the brakes, and Hickory Run flooded again and again. The 1849 flood is the one that still has a ghost attached to it. The dam that failed sat a few miles below White Haven and belonged to Mahlon K. Taylor. That is almost certainly the same wealthy Bucks County merchant who founded Taylorsville on the Delaware, the village later renamed Washington Crossing, where George Washington made his famous river crossing in 1776. Taylor's dam up here covered around 70 acres and ran as deep as 30 feet in places.

Isaac Gould, who ran several sawmills along the run, saw the danger before it happened. He went to Taylor, warned him the foundation was bad, and even served him legal notice. He was brushed off, and the dam got built anyway. Then came the last week of October, when it rained for days and every dam on the creek filled past its limit. The waste gates on Taylor's dam were never raised, so the water topped it and it let go around midnight, tearing everything below it to pieces.

We know what that night was like inside one of those houses because Isaac's daughter Joanna wrote it down years later, and it is hard to read. Her father was away on business, so her mother, Susan, sat up alone in the dark with the youngest children while two mill hands kept watch. At dusk her eleven year old sister, Lizzie, had come home carrying the warning the whole town was passing around, that the dam would not hold. Around four in the morning Susan heard a low rumble build into a roar, threw open the window, and barely had time to cry out before the water lifted the house off its foundation and carried it 500 feet downstream, fully submerged, with sawn lumber shooting over the top. Most of the family lived only because of the air trapped inside as it went under. Lizzie did not. When Susan counted heads in the wreckage her daughter was gone, and the men later dug Lizzie's body out from under a heap of floodwood. A few weeks later the baby of the family, Winfield, died from the exposure of that night. Isaac and Susan lost two children to one badly built dam.

The town blacksmith, Jacob West, was found alive under a log, senseless but breathing, after the water took his wife, Elizabeth, and four of his children. He lived another forty years and was buried beside them in the end. Thomas Crawford and his wife died too. About twenty people went missing that night, and only seven bodies were ever recovered. The outside world first heard about all of it from the conductor of the afternoon train out of White Haven, who carried the news down the line to a paper called the Tioga Eagle. I tracked down that 1849 write up, and the detail that sticks with me is how ordinary the cause was: some gates left down, on a dam a man had been warned not to build.

You can find the graves up on the hill in the little cemetery near the park office, among the pioneers who settled the Shades of Death. And this being an old park with an old cemetery, it has a ghost, and now you know whose. Local legend says Lizzie Gould never settled. People report seeing a young girl playing along the banks of Hickory Run, drifting through the woods near the cemetery, and walking Route 534 at dusk. I am not going to tell you what to believe. I will just say that once you know what happened to her, it is not hard to understand why the story refuses to die.

The Mud Run train disaster of 1888

Mud Run is the disaster people still bring up when they talk about this stretch of the Poconos, and there is a bitter irony baked right into it. On October 10, 1888, more than 20,000 members of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union gathered in Hazleton for a temperance rally. These were mostly Irish Catholic miners and workers, out in force with marching bands, partly to push back on the ugly stereotype that all Irishmen were drunkards. They spent the day proving they were sober and orderly, and then they went to catch their trains home.

The Lehigh Valley Railroad laid on eight special trains to move roughly 10,000 people back toward Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, running them at ten minute intervals up the steep, twisting grades through what is now Lehigh Gorge State Park. Around eight in the evening, one section stopped at Mud Run station, right at the edge of the park. The section behind it came around the curve and plowed straight into the back of it at full speed. The trains were wooden, so the rear cars telescoped, one crumpling up into the next, and 64 people died. Newspapers up and down the East Coast covered it as a national tragedy.

The rumors flew that the crew had been drinking, which would have been a grim twist for a temperance excursion, but the investigation found it was not true. The likelier cause was heartbreakingly small: an inexperienced crewman saw the red danger flag on the back of the stopped train and did not fully understand what it meant, so he said nothing. A coroner's jury found gross negligence, and the crew stood trial the next spring. Every one of them was acquitted. One town, Pleasant Valley, lost about 23 of its roughly 300 residents that night, and the story goes that it renamed itself Avoca afterward, a name some say means vale of mourning. The one lasting reform was that railroads began switching to steel passenger cars, so those wooden cars would stop folding up like matchsticks.

Mud Run keeps showing up in this park's story, by the way. It is the stream, it is the wreck, and as you will see next, it is where the fire started too.

The Great Fire of 1875 and how Hickory Run became a ghost town

No single disaster killed these towns. It happened in stages, and the water came back first. In June 1862, thirteen years after Taylor's dam let go, a second and separate flood tore down the Lehigh River. A wet spring overfilled the reservoirs until the dam above White Haven failed, which set off a chain of breaking dams. Somewhere between 100 and 200 people died along the river, and the flood destroyed the Upper Grand section of the Lehigh Canal, the run of locks and dams that carried coal and lumber through the gorge. The state legislature refused to let the canal company rebuild it. Traffic moved to the railroads for good, and the old canal economy up here started to dry up.

Then came the fire. By the 1870s the loggers had clear cut most of the saleable timber and left thousands of acres of dried treetops and slash on the ground, perfect fuel for a burn. On May 14, 1875, a spark from a passing coal-fired locomotive caught near Mud Run, and the fire ran for eight days. It ate the dry slash, then the standing timber, then the sawmills and their stacked lumber, and it pushed north toward Monroe County. It took the Lehigh Tannery too. By then the hemlock bark was mostly stripped out anyway, so there was little reason to rebuild anything.

Between the floods carrying off the soil, the canal that never came back, and the fire taking the rest, the place was gutted down to bare ground. The towns did not recover. Today the only buildings left from old Hickory Run are the Manor House and the little chapel, plus that cemetery, some stone foundations, and a few roads that are now trails. When you walk Stage Trail, you are walking the old stagecoach road, and the foundations along it are all that is left of Saylorsville.

General Harry Trexler's park that almost was not

This is where a genuinely fascinating character walks in. In 1918, an Allentown millionaire named General Harry Trexler started buying up this land, and eventually his boundaries became the park's boundaries. Trexler had made fortunes in lumber, cement, utilities, and streetcars, and he had a very specific dream for this place. He was watching the coal region nearby, where, as he put it, there was scarcely a blade of grass, and he wanted a park where working families could come for a real outdoors instead of, in his words, loafing in saloons. He opened the land to hunting and fishing, fenced off a thousand acres to raise game, started a fish hatchery, and fixed up the Goulds' old Manor House as his own residence, where he entertained politicians and business leaders.

Here is what I love about Trexler, and it has nothing to do with Hickory Run. Around 1911, he took it on himself to help save the American bison from vanishing. He bought up farmland in Lehigh County and built a preserve, brought in buffalo from out west when the species was in real danger, then added elk and deer. That preserve survived him and is now the Trexler Nature Preserve, home to the Lehigh Valley Zoo, and the buffalo are still there. The trust he left behind has given away well over 170 million dollars to Allentown's parks and Lehigh County charities. The man planted trees and saved species on purpose.

So you would think Hickory Run would be his crowning gift. It nearly was not. Trexler let it be known that he planned to donate the land, and the moment he did, the state's game commission, fish commission, and forestry department all started jockeying over who would get to control it. He got fed up with the squabbling and quietly pulled the land back out of his will. Then, in 1933, he died suddenly in a car accident. His will handed millions to charity and never mentioned Hickory Run at all, which left his trustees holding a huge tract of Pocono wilderness and no instructions. The park he dreamed up did eventually happen, just not through his money, and not the way he pictured it.

The New Deal years: the CCC, the WPA, and Camp Daddy Allen

The door that finally opened was the federal government. In 1935 the National Park Service bought Hickory Run to build a National Recreation Demonstration Area, which was a Depression era idea about putting parkland near industrial cities so lower income families and city kids could actually reach the outdoors. Almost exactly what Trexler had wanted, arriving through a completely different door.

Then the New Deal work crews showed up and built the park you use now. The Works Progress Administration came in 1936 and laid the roads, trails, water lines, and group camps. The Civilian Conservation Corps set up Camp NP-6 in 1939, and 200 young men lived where a playground and open field sit today. The visitor center that opened in 2020 was deliberately built with timber trusses and wood paneling to nod back to that CCC era, which is a nice touch when you walk in.

One of those group camps carries a backstory I did not see coming. In 1941 a camp named Camp Daddy Allen opened here for children living with the effects of polio. The kids swam, took nature hikes, did crafts and music, and got physical, occupational, and speech therapy worked into their days, at a time when a disabled child was too often kept out of sight. In 1957 the campers even appeared as guests on Fred Waring's television show.

And the name is the part that got me. Camp Daddy Allen was named for Edgar Allen, an Ohio businessman. In 1907 Allen's son was killed in an interurban train crash, and there was no hospital nearby good enough to save him. Allen sold his business, built his town its first hospital, then built one of the country's first hospitals for children with physical disabilities, and in 1919 founded the organization that grew into Easter Seals. The nickname came from an orphaned boy at his hospital who started calling him Daddy. So a summer camp for disabled kids, tucked in a Pennsylvania forest, carried the name of a grieving father from Ohio whose loss turned into a national movement.

Sit with the symmetry for a second. Two of the heaviest threads in this park's story, the Mud Run wreck and Camp Daddy Allen, both trace back to trains, and to families losing children. They are the same coin. I did not expect a state park to hand me that.

Hickory Run becomes a state park

The last step happened without any drama. In 1945 the federal government transferred the Hickory Run National Recreation Demonstration Area to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and it became Hickory Run State Park. Almost 16,000 acres of reclaimed, regrown forest, sitting on top of a lost town, two floods, a fire, a train disaster, and one very stubborn general's change of heart.

How to visit Hickory Run State Park today

If all of that makes you want to go stand in it, here is the practical version. The Boulder Field is the headliner, reachable by a dirt loop road off Sand Spring Road or on foot by trail, though the road closes in winter when the ice sets in. Hawk Falls is a short, worthwhile walk to a 25 foot cascade, and the Shades of Death Trail lets you earn that dramatic name. The old chapel and the pioneer cemetery both sit right by the park office, so you can pay your respects to the West family and the rest without a long hike.

To make a real weekend of it, stay over. The campground sits in a beautiful stand of mature forest, and if the park sites are booked you can find a nearby cabin or campsite in the surrounding Poconos. A lot of people pair Hickory Run with the neighboring Lehigh Gorge for the rail trail and the whitewater, and you can book a site at the Lehigh Gorge Campground to base yourself between the two. If you want the region mapped out, I broke down the wider area in my Lehigh Gorge and Jim Thorpe guide.

If you would rather not build the route yourself, I already did it. I keep a Poconos itinerary in my trip planner that works Hickory Run into a full day-by-day trip through the region, and you can grab my day-by-day Poconos itinerary and preview the first day before you decide.

Black bears are common here, so keep a clean campsite, and remember the Boulder Field rule: look, wander, and leave every rock exactly where it has sat for 20,000 years.

Why this history sticks with me

I came for a weird flat field of rocks and left thinking about a bankrupt Founding Father, a blacksmith who outlived his whole family by forty years, a trainload of sober Irish miners, and two grieving fathers a century and a state apart. The Boulder Field will outlast all of us, unchanged and indifferent. But the people who passed through here did not get that kind of permanence, which is exactly why I think their stories are worth carrying out of the woods with you. Go see it. Then go read every name on those cemetery stones.