Long time readers of the Retrospect column will no doubt recall the chronicles of the protracted efforts 35 years ago to discover the moorings of the ferry that crossed the Delaware River between Barryville and Shohola before the suspension bridge was built there in 1856.

 Hundreds of hours of research and dozens of trips along the river bank by a team of inquisitive searchers yielded few clues to the ferry’s existence, and about the only positive evidence that ever turned up was a mark on an old map and a notation in a guide book that a bridge had been built on the site of an abandoned ferry crossing. Soon the quest was forgotten, as other, seemingly more solvable historical mysteries were addressed.

The author Frank Talbot Dale, who has also provided the exceptional “Delaware Diary” and “Bridges Over the Delaware River,” contributed some useful documentation in his 2008 book, “The Ferry Boat Business on our Delaware River,” still available in both hard and soft cover from Xlibris Corporation.

Dale’s book, like his previous work about the bridges, is one of those books that, while not specifically about Sullivan County history, contains invaluable information for anyone seriously interested in that subject. And it is not just the Barryville-Shohola ferry that he discusses in the book, but the ferries that operated at Pond Eddy, Tusten, Skinner’s Falls, Cochecton, Hankins, and Long Eddy, as well.

But for those who remember following the search for the Barryville ferry so many years ago, it is the section on that operation that proves most rewarding.

 “The earliest organized and commercial transportation across the Delaware, and most other major waterways in our country, was by ferryboat,” Dales writes in his introduction. And this method of transportation started, at first unofficially, in the 17th century.

“The first ferry craft on the Delaware were simple rowboats. In addition to the boatman, this craft could carry a traveler or two, with baggage. The horse that had transported the traveler overland and was accompanying the traveler over water, was tied to a rope held by the owner, and in this way, the horse swam alongside the craft. The boat was rowed across the river.

“But this soon changed; not all horses liked to swim the Delaware. Early in the 18th century, specially designed ferryboats came into existence. These crafts were designed to carry several passengers with some goods, as well as a horse or a pair of horses and a loaded wagon. The craft was rectangular in shape, was thirty, forty, or rarely fifty feet in length, and about ten feet in width.”

Dale indicates that a ferry began crossing the Delaware near the mouth of the Halfway Brook as far back as 1790, about 40 years before the hamlet of Barryville was established with the arrival of the D&H Canal. This ferry, he notes, enabled farmers living on the New York side of the river to access the grist and saw mills then being operated on the Shohola Creek.

After Barryville began to grow into a bustling community due to the canal, the ferry business boomed, as goods from the Pennsylvania side were transported across the river to Barryville for shipment on the waterway. When the Erie Railroad arrived in Shohola in 1849, the process was reversed, as passengers and freight from the NY side made their way across the river to the train station.

 This Barryville-Shohola ferry remained in operation until the suspension bridge was built, and then resumed its crossings whenever the bridge needed repairing or rebuilding, which was often, at least prior to the center pier being added in 1866.

The Pond Eddy ferry began operating in the early 19th century, and was initially run by the Hendershot family. It was instrumental in moving bluestone from the Pennsylvania side of the river to the D&H Canal prior to the construction of the bridge at this location in 1870. The bluestone industry was so vital to Pond Eddy and the vicinity around that the community actually changed its named for a time to Kilgour, in honor of the owner of a major bluestone company in the upper Delaware.

The ferry that ran between Masthope, PA and Tusten, NY began operation around 1840, as did the ferry that crossed the river near Skinner’s Falls. The Cochecton-Damascus ferry began even earlier and was one of the few operations that survived the construction of a bridge at its location.

The Hankins ferry officially began operation in 1860, when William Kellam was granted permission from the Pennsylvania state legislature to create the business. This ferry was used to carry Civil War soldiers across the river during the war years. Dale, however, points out that Jacob Kellam, William’s father, had operated a private ferry at the same spot for many years before his son was granted official permission by the state.

Joseph Geer began running a ferry between Long Eddy and Equinunk, PA in the early years of the 19th century, and after a bridge there had been built and then abandoned, the ferry boat business started up again, operating well into the 20th century. This was probably the last of the upper Delaware ferryboats in existence.

Virtually every significant historic and economic milestone in Sullivan County’s history came about as the result of a major breakthrough in transportation, and the ferry boat operations on the Delaware River are an all-too-often overlooked example of that phenomenon.

John Conway is the Sullivan County Historian and a founder and president of The Delaware Company. Email him at jconway52@hotmail.com.