In August of 1955, Hurricanes Connie and Diane, in rapid succession, bsttered the eastern seaboard of the United States. In the Poconos, river and streams overflowed their banks; nearly 100 people lost thier lives on the banks of Broadhead Creek alone.

Congress responded quickly, commissioning the Army Corps of Engineers to dust off a 1930s river basin study and determine the viability of constructing dams and reservoirs along the Delaware, with one dam on the main stem of the Delaware at Tocks Island.

The proposed Tocks Island Dam would create a lake-sized reservoir roughly 40 miles long and a mile wide. Some 600 families and property owners whose land would be inundated had to be displaced. Some of these families had lived on and worked the land for centuries.

Also, to offset some of the cost of the project, the Army Corps rented some of the newly acquired properties for the short term. Those who had unwillingly sold their homes now saw their land and houses occupied by people from outside the valley.

It was a turbulent era: Vietnam, Civil Rights, Back to the Earth. Grassroots organizations of citizens, scientists, educators and legislators began to mobilize in a new and uniquely American struggle -- the Environmental Movement. Congress responded with the Clean Air and Water Acts, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Protection Act.

A few earnest voices against the dam in 1964 grew to a uproar by 1971. New studies challenged the conversion of a river into a stagnant body of water, and the cost of expanding local infrastructure.

In 1975, the Delaware River Basin Commission, composed of four basin-state governors, voted to shelve the Tocks Island Dam project. The land already acquired by the federal government was handed over to the National Park Service for stewardship, and Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, originally intended as a narrrow swath of land around a reservoir, became a 70,000 acre park with 40 miles of free-flowing river.

Though it had promised drought abeyance, flood mitigation, power generation, and reservoir recreation, in the end the project was too costly in other ways. A long and often bitter battle was over.