You keep hearing that the road along the Jersey side of the river, the Old Mine Road, is the oldest road in America — that Dutch miners cut it back in the sixteen hundreds to haul copper a hundred miles up to the Hudson. It's a wonderful story. Let me tell it to you properly — the legend, and then the truth, because the truth is actually better.
The legend goes like this: way back in the early sixteen hundreds, Dutch prospectors found copper in the mountains here at a place called Pahaquarry, and to get it out they built a road — a hundred miles of it, all the way north to Kingston on the Hudson River — making it, so the tale says, the oldest continuously used road in the whole country, older than the United States by a century and more. It's carved on markers and printed in guidebooks all over this valley.
And here's the honest reckoning. Historians have gone looking hard, and the romantic version mostly falls apart: they can't find the seventeenth-century Dutch mining camps; the copper ore here was too poor to be worth hauling anywhere; and the old maps don't show the road running the way the legend claims. The real mining here didn't amount to much until the seventeen-hundreds — after the road already existed.
But now the truth. The road IS genuinely, deeply old — one of the oldest routes in the region — because it follows something far older than any Dutchman: the footpaths of the Lenape people, worn into this river valley over thousands of years of walking. Long before wheels, before Europeans, this was the trail up the Minisink, the way the people moved along their own river. So the Old Mine Road isn't old because of a copper scheme that barely happened. It's old because it's laid right on top of an Indian trail that's older than history. Which, if you ask me, is a whole lot more worth remembering than a few tons of bad copper.
Photo: Kether83 · CC BY-SA 4.0
