Honesdale
"Honesdale ran America's first steam locomotive once, cracked a rail, and quietly went back to canal boats."
A Wayne County canal town in the Pocono foothills where America's first commercial steam locomotive made its brief, disastrous debut before the town settled into a quieter life of coal barges and covered bridges. Lia and I paddled a canoe down the Lackawaxen River past herons and old canal locks slowly being reclaimed by the forest.
Honesdale sits where the Lackawaxen and Dyberry rivers meet in Pennsylvania’s northeastern Pocono foothills, a town built in the 1820s as the terminus of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, which once floated Pennsylvania coal all the way to the Hudson River and New York City. What most visitors don’t expect is that this small, unassuming town also hosted a genuine historic first — in 1829, the imported English locomotive Stourbridge Lion made America’s inaugural run of a steam engine on commercial rails here, promptly cracked a trestle under its own weight, and was retired from active service almost immediately after.
The Stourbridge Lion’s brief, glorious run
A full-size replica of the Stourbridge Lion sits on display near the old canal basin downtown, and a local historian we got talking to outside a coffee shop delighted in telling us the full story — how the locomotive was too heavy for the wooden trestles built to carry it, how its single triumphant run covered barely three miles before engineers judged it too risky to continue. Honesdale doesn’t oversell the moment; there’s a modest museum and a plaque, nothing more, which somehow made the whole slightly-failed-experiment feel more honest than a grander monument would have.
Paddling the Lackawaxen
We rented a canoe from an outfitter just outside town and spent an afternoon on the Lackawaxen River, slow and green beneath overhanging hemlocks, passing the crumbling stone remains of old canal locks now half-swallowed by moss and rhododendron. A great blue heron tracked ahead of us for nearly a mile, lifting off each time we got close and resettling just around the next bend, as if it were personally escorting us downstream. It’s a quiet, unglamorous stretch of river, and that was exactly the appeal after weeks of busier destinations.
Getting There
The nearest airport is Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International (AVP), about an hour southwest via PA-247 and PA-191. From New York City, it’s roughly a two-and-a-half-hour drive via I-84. A car is essential — there’s no rail or bus service into this stretch of Wayne County — but the drive up through the Pocono foothills is scenic enough to be worth the time on its own.
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