Walpack Center Ghost Town

Walpack Center sits in a bend of the Flatbrook River in northwestern New Jersey. By the mid-19th century it had developed as a small but functional agricultural community: a post office, a church, a school, a hotel, and a scattering of farmsteads serving the upper Delaware River valley. The village was isolated enough to change slowly, and it retained much of its 19th-century built fabric into the 20th century.

In the early 1960s the Army Corps of Engineers and the Delaware River Basin Commission advanced the Tocks Island Dam project — a proposed impoundment on the Delaware River that would have created a 37-mile reservoir stretching into New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. The federal government began acquiring land by eminent domain through the late 1950s and into the 1960s. Walpack Center fell within the project footprint. The last residents were displaced by 1965 under purchase orders that gave them limited time and, in many cases, prices well below what the community felt the properties were worth.

The Tocks Island Dam was never built. Opposition from New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, combined with environmental concerns raised after passage of the National Environmental Policy Act, stalled and ultimately killed the project. Congress declined to approve further construction funding in the 1970s. The land the federal government had acquired — including Walpack Center itself — became part of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, established in 1965.

The National Park Service maintains the surviving structures as a preserved ghost town. The Walpack Historical Society, a local preservation group, documents the community's history, maintains relationships with former residents and their descendants, and offers periodic tours. As of the 2020s, roughly eleven structures remained standing in recognizable form, including the church, the post office shell, and several farmhouses.