In support of rational and compassionate public policy at all levels of government which affect the residents of Newtown Township and Bucks County
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” ~ John Adams
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I was drawn to visit Honesdale by the remnants of its railroad history, and by a nearby model train show. What I got was so much more than a railfan weekend.
Several weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit Honesdale, PA. Phone camera in hand, I took as deep a dive as several days' stay in a nearby campground allowed.
The county seat of Wayne County, Honesdale is tucked into the far northeast corner of PA (NEPA). A railroad town through and through, which now lacks a railroad (save for a heritage excursion train), Honesdale is fighting to establish a new economic identity—to my mind, more vigorously than many Pennsylvania towns in a similar predicament.
Credit: Wayne County Historical Society
Credit: Cornell University Library
Honesdale owes its existence to coal and its name to a New Yorker. In the 1820s the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company set out to get anthracite from the Wurts brothers’ mines near Carbondale to the hungry furnaces and hearths of New York City. The plan was a canal running from here to the Hudson, but Moosic Mountain stood between the mines and the canal’s head. Engineer John B. Jervis—also the namesake of a town along the route, Port Jervis—proposed a series of gravity inclines connected by level sections to move the coal from the mines to the canal at Honesdale. Stationary steam engines hauled the cars up the inclines, and gravity did much of the rest, sending loaded cars rolling down toward the canal basin. The town that grew up around that basin took the name of Philip Hone, the company’s president and onetime mayor of New York. The Wayne County Historical Society now occupies the company’s old offices, the Delaware and Hudson Canal Offices built in 1860 at 810 Main Street.
For the level stretches, the company wanted something new: a locomotive. Horatio Allen went to England and brought back the Stourbridge Lion, named for the lion’s face painted on its front and for the English town where Foster, Rastrick & Company built it in 1828.
On August 8, 1829, the Lion left Honesdale, ran three miles to Seelyville, and came back, which is why Honesdale calls itself the birthplace of the American railroad. It was a triumph and a failure on the same afternoon. The engine performed well. But the track built for it couldn’t handle its weight, and the bridges along the route were too low to clear the stack. The Lion never entered regular service. By 1845 it had been disassembled to make use of its boiler. The Smithsonian acquired it in 1890, and it is now on loan to the B&O Railroad Museum.
The engine in this photo is a stand-in. The D&H built the replica in 1932 from plans and surviving parts of the original. It appeared at the 1933–34 Chicago World’s Fair and the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair before moving to Honesdale in 1941.
The Stourbridge Lion replica shares the floor with the Eclipse, a D&H passenger gravity car with a hand-stenciled ceiling and carved wood interior. Visitors can sit inside the Eclipse to view a video history of Honesdale and its role in transporting coal and passengers across NEPA.
My exploration of Honesdale started with a ride on the Stourbridge Line excursion train, an out-and-back trip that hugs the Lackawaxen River for about 8 miles, 3/4 of the way or so from Honesdale to Hawley, PA.
Long before it carried leaf-peepers, the Stourbridge Line carried anthracite coal. Its oldest stretch dates to 1860, when the Pennsylvania Coal Company built a line from Hawley down to the Erie Railroad’s main line at Lackawaxen. A few years later the rails reached Honesdale. Backers dreamed of pushing on to Carbondale, but that never happened. The Erie, and later the Erie Lackawanna, ran the line for the next century as a modest branch. Modest became marginal. When the bankrupt Erie Lackawanna was folded into Conrail in 1976, the Honesdale Branch didn’t make the cut. But local people refused to let it die. Wayne County and a group of shippers bought it in 1977, and two years later the Chamber of Commerce had the idea that saved its soul: put passengers on it. For three decades a succession of contract operators kept the trains running, until money ran out in 2011 and the line went quiet. Tom Myles and his Delaware, Lackawaxen & Stourbridge brought it back in May 2015, and it has run ever since.
Knowing that I would nutrition to fuel setting up my campsite in the chill air, I chose to enjoy a meal on the train, catered by Sidel’s Restaurant of Scranton, and served shortly after our 1 pm departure from Honesdale. I enjoyed the crabmeat-stuffed flounder, along with salad, dessert and a beverage or two. The meal was prepared in an old postal train car converted to meal service. Sidel's insisted that their train-borne meals should be hot and fresh. The plan worked; the food tasted as good as any I have had in a fine restaurant.
The rest of the excursion consist demands attention in its own right. The head unit is an old FP7 built in 1951, which worked passenger trains in Canada. The unit at the rear is an EMD BL2 built in 1949 for the Bangor and Aroostook in Maine. The rear unit becomes the head unit when the excursion reverses direction for the trip back to Honesdale. (Eyes are needed at the front of the train.)
Railroad buffs will notice the paint. Engine and coaches wear the colors of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which never ran here. Some of the cars aren’t really Pennsy either. One, lettered PRR and named for Horatio Allen, started out hauling New Jersey commuters. As far as I can tell, the look belongs to the new owners rather than to local history, a tribute to a great railroad on track that belonged to its rival. One more irony: the track where passengers board, in front of the Visitors Center, was once part of the Delaware & Hudson. So the company that brought the Lion here still gets the first word.
Sometimes it's worth setting words aside, and just listening to the story told by a train, its able crew, some old, crooked rails, and roadbed that could use a little attention.
Honesdale wears on its sleeve its history, its situation, and its aspiration to return to the prosperity it enjoyed in the coal era. "The pitch" wasn't long in coming. In brief remarks made on the train, an employee of the Stourbridge Line and resident of Honesdale since birth invited us to celebrate plans for a new hotel, to be located just across the street from the Stourbridge Line's station.
Honesdale is home to no fewer than eleven Christian houses of worship and one synagogue. Six of them line the appropriately named Church Street.
Beyond the houses of faith, it took little time to notice that Honesdale is a caring place. Striving, and caring. Honesdale's urge to help, and its willingness to accept help, cut across demographic and political lines. It's all right there on the signs. At the clothing giveaway, there appeared to be a run on sweatshirts and coats. The air was unusually brisk on this fall day.
On a Saturday just a few weeks before the midterm elections, some caring broke down along partisan lines. Democratic and Republican headquarters are mere steps away from each other on the same side of Main Street, and both parties had representatives out greeting folks who walked by. It occurred to me that door-knocking might be an inefficient means of garnering support in a rural county; better to go where people naturally congregate.
Since 2018, blue Scranton has been part of Wayne County's congressional district, giving Wayne County Democrats hope; their previous district was deep red. The Democratic candidate for US Congress, Paige Cognetti, had won her first race for mayor of Scranton as an Independent, earning a plurality of the vote. Scranton residents were happy enough with her emphasis on municipal infrastructure and services that she earned 72% of the vote while running as a Democrat in 2021. The Democrats' approach was to ask if folks were registered to vote and had a plan to vote, leaving discussions about policy or ideology to be initiated by passers-by if they chose to do so.
As it happened, there was a "No Kings" rally taking place in a public space directly across from the Republican storefront. As I approached, two of the Republican greeters were expressing their displeasure with the protest. The progressives across the street put the Republicans' concerns about what they perceived as encroaching socialism front and center as our discussion began. "The Nazis were socialists, it's right in their name." Eager to change the subject, the Republicans pivoted to make note of incumbent Representative Rob Bresnahan's help in securing housing for veterans and other financial supports for Wayne County.
It seemed everyone on the street, including the protestors, was interested in what politicians could do to mitigate strife and help Wayne County thrive.
On November 3rd, Paige Cognetti defeated Rob Bresnahan. In an interview on MS NOW after the election, as she stated her opposition to data centers, Cognetti said that outsiders had come to NEPA before, taken what they want, and left behind giant environmental and economic messes permanent residents had to clean up. Her take on how the past informs the present, while good enough to help her win with 54% of the vote districtwide, wasn't enough in Wayne County. Cognetti earned only 38% of the vote.
I encountered some caring totally by accident, when I ducked into an art gallery. Mainly I was trying to take a break from wind and cold I had not dressed to endure for a full day. The Halloween-themed exhibit, "Haunted," hit me square in the face. Its demons were not the stylized figures of conventional Halloween lore. They were all too real. Abusive parents. Child molesters in religious garb.
(The Wayne County Arts Alliance gave permission for me to display these photos. N.B., it prohibits submittal of images of its art to AI.)
"I was not alone in my closet. Neither are you." Artist: Sonya Gregory
"Hell is empty and all the devils are here." Artist: Heather Hogan-Spencer
“Put me as a seal on your heart… for love is strong as death.” Artist: Hillary Korn Fontana
For the better part of a century, resource-rich Pennsylvania was the industrial center and transportation hub of the United States. Its anthracite heated the cities, its mills rolled the steel, and the Pennsylvania Railroad was for a time the largest corporation in the world. Then most of the industry moved on, and the railroads that remained pruned the lines that no longer paid.
When the mill closes or the trains stop running, a town has to decide what it will become next. It makes what it can of the buildings, the skills and the people left behind, and it looks for new reasons for the world to come calling. Perhaps most importantly, it looks after its own. In these respects, there is nothing unique about Honesdale. But after a couple of days there, I felt I had never been to a place quite like it.
What made Honesdale special was its intensity. The pace of speaking, the directness, the ease with a stranger, all of it reminded me more of a big city than a small Pennsylvania town. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised. The town was named for a mayor of New York, built by a New York company, and for decades everything it dug or shipped was headed for New York. Some of that seems to have stayed. But the faith and the helping hand we associate with small towns are here in abundance too. It seems Honesdale turned up the volume on those as well.
Residents would probably laugh at an outsider’s verdict after two days. Still, that’s how it felt to me: a small town that talks like a city, welcomes a stranger, and makes that person want to go back, if only to discover what he might have missed.
I had some concerns at the outset. But Bob Harvie has grown as a candidate. His platform sits squarely within mainstream Democratic values and right on top of this cycle's voter concerns.
The controversy over the death of a newborn in Lancaster County has revealed the extent to which our politics and our public health are broken.
Check out the full blog:
Fact: Climate change is real. Promoting clean energy is an urgent matter of national security.
Fact: Transgender persons exist, and cannot be legislated out of existence.
Fact: Students need a factual account of our history, including slavery and its residual effects on the rights and freedoms of all Americans.
Me Imperturbe
Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature, Master of all, or mistress of all—aplomb in the midst of irrational things, Imbued as they—passive, receptive, silent as they, Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles, crimes, less important than I thought;
Me private, or public, or menial, or solitary—all these subordinate, (I am eternally equal with the best—I am not subordinate;) Me toward the Mexican Sea, or in the Mannahatta, or the Tennessee, or far north, or inland, A river-man, or a man of the woods, or of any farm-life of These States, or of the coast, or the lakes, or Kanada,
Me, wherever my life is lived, O to be self-balanced for contingencies!
O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.
~ Walt Whitman
Tired
I am so tired of waiting, Aren’t you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife And cut the world in two – And see what worms are eating At the rind.
