I went to the Canal Day Music and Craft Festival at the Morris Canal in Wharton the other week. “Did you ever go to the canal when you were growing up in Rockaway?” I asked Barry as I grabbed my purse to head out to the festival. “I didn’t even know there was a canal,” he replied to my astonishment.
Rockaway, his hometown, is about ten minutes from the Morris Canal!
I knew that had to be our next day trip – to enjoy the beauty of the canal and to get my husband more familiar with his home turf.
We took our walking companion along with us – Paisley our St. Hubert’s (Madison, NJ) rescue brown lab/mutt mix. Paisley eagerly jumped in the car and just as eagerly jumped out when we arrived at Hugh Force Canal Park. h
The parking lot had fresh gravel replacing the areas swept away by Hurricane Ida two days prior. Barry, Paisley and I walked past a bull dozer and mounds of new gravel towards the well maintained trail sandwiched between the canal and the Rockaway River.
We did some research on the canal and found a lot of our information from the Canal Society of New Jersey and the Morris Canal Greenway websites. This section of the canal is one of the few remaining of the Morris Canal, once “considered an engineering marvel” when it opened in 1831. It utilized 23 locks and 23 inclined planes to ascend from sea level to Lake Hopatcong (914 feet high) and then descend to the Delaware River. But the advent of railroads quickly made the canal obsolete, and was abandoned in 1924 (somewhat ironically, the railroad itself became abandoned as well, and one of the sections of what was the roadbed was converted to the path we walked on).
The big treat is a short distance away, Lock 2 East. The lock has been restored, and now there is also active restoration of the Lock Tender’s House (occupied as late as the 1970s), with workers lifting stones to rebuild the exterior during our visit.
Getting hungry after our walk, we stopped at the SMP Sussex Market,
(SMP stands for Sussex Meat Packing), with all kinds of wonderful beef, pork and poultry selections. Be patient, because there is usually a crowd -but the wait is definitely worth it!
We brought home some buffalo chicken burgers and chicken sausage (we enjoyed the latter, featured in a pasta sauce and then again in omelets the next morning). Our little day trip reminded us – once again – how lucky we are to live in New Jersey!
