In 1742, crossing the Delaware River at the Forks in Easton, Pennsylvania meant climbing into a canoe. Your horse did not get a seat. It swam alongside, reins in your hand, the current pulling at its legs. There was no bridge. There was no town on the Pennsylvania shore, only woods, brush, and an Indian path toward Bethlehem. There was just a ferryman, and he was a former New Jersey sheriff named David Martin.
Martin was born in Piscataway, New Jersey, and served as sheriff of Hunterdon County for thirteen years. In 1739, he received a grant to keep a ferry at the Forks of the Delaware, where the Lehigh River meets the Delaware. The Lenape called the place Lechauwitank, the place at the forks. A second grant followed in 1741. According to Phillipsburg’s local history, the first grant came with 105 acres on the New Jersey shore.
That same year, Martin built the first house at the Point, a log cabin near the foot of what is now Ferry Street.
The timing matters. The Forks lay in land the Penns claimed through the Walking Purchase of 1737, and settlers were only beginning to arrive. Easton did not exist. In 1751, Thomas Penn wrote that the new town should carry that name, and surveyor William Parsons laid out its streets around 1752, the year Northampton County was created. In a letter, Parsons counted just eleven families in Easton in 1752. Martin’s crossing came first. The town grew up around it.
Martin’s life was larger than his ferry. He later moved to Philadelphia, taught Greek and Latin at the Academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, and joined the American Philosophical Society. Benjamin Franklin found him his toughest opponent at chess.
Martin died in 1751. His heirs sold the ferry to Nathaniel Vernon, who turned the log ferry house into a hotel. His first license application was refused. He applied again that December and won it. Over the following decades, the rights passed through several hands, including Richard Penn.
Then came the Revolution. The state historical marker says the ferry transported troops and supplies during the war, and Easton’s position made that plausible. The town kept a hospital for wounded Continental soldiers. In the spring of 1779, General John Sullivan gathered his army there for the expedition against the Iroquois. On June 18, roughly 2,500 men marched out of Easton, after weeks of drawing down the supplies stockpiled for them.
The ferry’s long run ended in 1806. Phillipsburg’s local history records an early bridge around 1800 that a flood washed away, and a lottery in 1805 to fund a better one. In 1806, Timothy Palmer’s covered wooden bridge opened across the Delaware, replacing a crossing that had operated for sixty-seven years.
Before bridges, rivers were the roadblocks of early America, and ferries were the technology that solved them. A ferry turned a barrier into a toll road. Martin’s grants gave the Forks a reliable crossing on a main route to the west, years before Easton had a courthouse or a street grid.
You can visit the site today. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission dedicated the David Martin’s Ferry marker on July 20, 1953, at Front and Ferry Streets in Easton, near Scott Park and the meeting of the two rivers. Stand there and look across the water. Traffic now crosses the Delaware without a thought, on bridges that exist because a man once rowed travelers over, one canoe at a time. If you go, read the marker slowly. It is short, but every line in it names something that changed how this region moved.
Information for this episode was provided by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission marker program, the Historical Marker Database, the University of Pennsylvania Archives, the Phillipsburg, New Jersey local history, the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission, the National Park Service, and Easton city histories.
