Old Mine Road seeped in history

Many historians will be glad to hear that The National Park Service has finally started legal action to reopen that section of the Old Mine Road in Sussex County that had been closed by the new owners of what was previously known as the Marker farm, the property of Enos “Cy” Marker. According to legend, and the many signs installed along the road from Kingston, New York to the Parhaquarry Copper Mine in New Jersey, a distance of 104 miles, this road since the mid-1600s was the longest and oldest road of its time in our country. It was built by Dutch miners to haul copper ore from the mine to Kingston, (known as Esopus at that time) for shipment to Holland for processing. Much controversy began in 1828, based on a letter written by Samuel Preston. It was entered in Hazards Pennsylvania Register of that year. There have been many books, mostly in contradiction of the Preston letter. Preston’s letter was questioned by writers Quinlan in 1873, Donald Teiran in 1969, Stephens in 1976, Quinn in 1977 and finally by the late Dr. Herbert Kraft in his book, “The Dutch, the Indians, and the Quest for Copper, Pahaquarry and the Old Mine Road,” released in 1996. All of these writers follow the theory the legend of the Old Mine Road is a myth. As one who has also done considerable research on the subject, I was attempting to prove the legend true. Some of what I have learned has not been revealed by any of the previous writers. A letter written in 1627 by Dirck Duyster, the Dutch “Comis” or manager of Fort Orange, (now Albany, N.Y.) indicates the Dutch took ore samples from the Pahaquarry area, as well as the length of the Wallkill River, as early as 1627. This would have included the Franklin area of Sussex County, known as the Mineral Capital of the World. Another discovery was that the J. Lukens (who accompanied Nicholas Scull on his surveying trip of 1730) and John Lukens, Surveyor General of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1778, were father and son, not the same person that the other writers seemed to think, even though they pointed out the discrepancy in their ages. Had any of them compared the handwriting on the James Lukens report of 1730 that was in the Perm files when I did my research in 1958, with that of John Lukens, they would never have made this mistake. But, with all my research, off and on, over some 60 odd-years, I have not been able to actually prove that the Dutch constructed the Old Mine Road specifically for the purpose of hauling copper ore. It gradually changed from an Indian trail to a road used for the first settlements in the Minisink area of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, starting sometime around 1700. This, in its own right, would still make the Old Mine Road one of the oldest roads in the country, with an established Right of Way for public use. Leonard R. Peck Newton