A Northampton reader suggested I find out why Lake Nockamixon was built in the 1960s in Upper Bucks County. Was it to cool the Limerick nuclear power plant in Montgomery County?
I laced up my hiking boots and headed for the lake. There I climbed rugged paths leading to the top of the 112-foot-tall earthen dam roaring with overflow. Down below I found Steven Cook and Michelle Cairns of Milford fishing in the deep, chiseled gorge of Tohickon Creek. I asked them about the nuke story. Not true, they assured. “It was to provide drinking water to Perkasie.”
The truth I knew. The lake was created exclusively for recreation. Not only that, the state evicted hundreds of landowners and destroyed an 18th century village to create the lake in the 1970s. “Wow!” was the couple’s reply.
I envisioned strapping on my twin U.S. Divers air tanks from cave-diving days in Florida to take a plunge 70 feet to the lake bottom. There I’d find the remains of Tohickon Village: a stone arch bridge built in Colonial times to serve the the valley’s 290 property owners.
So upset were residents of what state government was about to do to their “personal Brigadoon” in 1960 that 800 angrily stormed eminent domain proceedings at the local high school. Five state troopers stood guard to preserve the peace.
State officials remained unmoved. Maurice K. Goddard, the man who conceived Lake Nockamixon, arrogantly told the assemblage, “It’s unfortunate that you’re in a reservoir, but it is God’s will”— as in Goddard.
He deemed boating, fishing and hiking of more value in the 20th century than preserving a pristine village founded by Henry and Barbara Stover in the mid-18th century. Tohickon Village for more than 200 years was a prosperous farming hub. Stone-ground wheat and rye flour from the local Great Valley Mills was shipped by mail order all over America.
No matter to Goddard. He was determined to create 45 state parks, spreading them out so that one was within 25 miles of every Pennsylvania resident. In Tohickon valley, he began seizing private property and ousting residents from heirloom farmhouses. Everything was plowed under or removed so as not to create water hazards in the future lake. Obliterated were a general store, grist mill, saw mill, tannery, houses, barns, iron bridges, trees, gardens, a cave known to contain Indian artifacts— all except the stone bridge in the village.
In 1960, the original plan for the lake was expanded, further infuriating local residents. Targeted were lands in Bedminster, East Rockhill, Nockamixon, Hayco*ck and Tinicum. Goddard nabbed 5,283 acres to make Nockamixon the largest state park in Bucks County. Forced from her home was Marjorie Fulp. It was torn down. Her friend Pamela Varkony’s house remained standing— but for park personnel only. Both women are known as “the Ladies of the Lake” for a book they published in 2010 about their lost valley.
“A lot of hearts were broken,” Marjorie told me. “It is always surreal to go back to my childhood ‘stomping grounds’. The land is there, although all the buildings are gone. It was a beautiful valley, very picturesque. Tohickon Village was idyllic. Nice old houses, and the bridge was a work of art.”
State workers completed the dam in June 1973. It took six months to fill the reservoir to its brim. Boaters were invited to a launch party in 1974. A marina began operations three years later. Today, there are cabins to rent, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and picnic grounds. Fishing, canoeing, kayaking and sailing are joyful. The 8-mile-long finger lake is extraordinarily beautiful against the backdrop of Hayco*ck Mountain, considered by many the county’s highest at nearly 1,000 feet, replete with meandering hiking trails.
Goddard, who is believed to have committed suicide in 1995, is viewed as an icon of environmentalists in Pennsylvania. However, the history lost beneath the waves at Lake Nockamixon is tragic, a case of state power run amok in the 1960s. According to the Bucks County Historical Society, “The end of Tohickon village is a melancholy one indeed.”
Yet there is that bridge beneath the waves. Scuba anyone?
Sources for this column include “Our Lost Tohickon Valley” by Marjorie Goldthorp Fulp and Pamela Feist Varkony published in 2010 and available through the Bucks County Free Library and Hayco*ck Historical Society. Also, “Local residents tell story of life and land before Lake Nockamixon” by Erin DuBois published by the Perkasie News Herald on Nov. 6, 2010.
Carl LaVO, a retired Calkins Media editor, can be reached at carllavo@msn.com. As the author of “Bucks County Adventures”, he will appear Wednesday (March 15) at 12:45 p.m. at Salem United Church of Christ in Doylestown to discuss “Auntie Lela and Fonthill Castle”. On Sunday March 26 at 2 p.m., he will be at the Bristol Cultural and Historical Foundation on Cedar Street to illustrate “The Last Flight of Bristol’s Yellow Bird”, a plane built to beat Charles Lindbergh to Paris in 1927.
