Delaware View House on Old Mine Road in Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area

Old Mine Road Historical Buildings

The Delaware View House is located on the New Jersey side of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area on Old Mine Road. If using Google Maps for directions, search “Delaware View House.” It is 1.5 mile north of Millbrook Village, another historical site within the park.

The Delaware View House is the name given to the building when it served as a hotel in the 1910s. It started out as a smaller house built in the early 1800s, though the exact date is unknown. The first reference to a house at this location was when the property was sold by Charles Yetter to Charles Huff in 1836. Whether that house has any connection to the one standing today is unknown, but some historians believe that the current house is the result of an expansion of the original house.

The house changed hands a number of times until being purchased by Jacob and Melinda Stickles in 1882 for use as a rental property. Records show that in 1892, Samuel Garris was operating the house as a hunting lodge known as the Flatbrook Hotel, though the house was still owned by the Stickles Family (now Seymore and Abby Stickles). Garris eventually purchased the house in 1904 from the Stickles and then leased it to the Losey Family, who ran it as the Losey Boarding House until 1910. By then the house had been enlarged to accommodate more guests, either by Garris when he was renting it from the Stickles or soon after he purchased it.

In 1910, Garris signed a new lease with Bertha Konkle, and the name of the establishment was changed to the Delaware View House. Konkle ran the business until 1923.

Garris sold the property in 1926 to Andrew and Nelda Salama, Russian immigrants who came to the United States to escape the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. They obtained a mortgage directly from Garris and ran the house as a summer retreat, now called the Salamovka Hotel, for their artist and acting friends from New York, mainly fellow Russian refugees. Garris got the property back when the Salamas defaulted on the mortgage payments in 1942.

Garris died two years later, and his executors used the house as a rental property until it was purchased by the United States government in 1967, which planned to tear it down or move it to make way for a lake that was to be created by the proposed Tocks Island Dam (the house itself was just above the maximum pool level but close enough to warrant removal or demolition). When the dam project was cancelled in 1975, the Salamovka Hotel was still standing but was now owned by the federal government and part of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. By then the house had been vacant for nearly ten years.

I can’t find any information about what became of the Delaware View House between 1975 and the early 1990s, but I did find one article that claimed it was leased and run as a general store from 1990 to 2009. Numerous news articles dated July 6, 2009, state that a young girl nearly died from being electrocuted when she stepped on a makeshift electrified bear fence at the house, which WAS being run as a general store under terms of a 40-year lease. The lessee was arrested for maintaining a hazardous device on federal land. According to one article, the store was soon closed due to his arrest. This may well be the case, but the building could not have been leased in 1990 because the Historic Structure Report from 1994, where all the above information came from, details the deterioration and proposes various uses for the building should it be restored. It also includes many photos taken in 1994 of the deteriorated condition, and all rooms are empty.

If the Delaware View House was in poor condition in 1994, as you can imagine, things have only gotten worse. Today the house is in awful shape, and I don’t see how it can avoid eventual collapse, if it isn’t torn down before that happens. Supposedly tearing a house down costs more than the National Park Service can afford, so this may be a case of demolition by neglect.

Food For Thought: Why does the National Park Service refer to the house as the Delaware View House, one of many names it went by, and not the Salamovka Hotel, its last known name and the named used by many authoritative sources. My guess is that in the 1970s at the height of the Cold War, the United States government didn’t want anything it owned being referred to by a Russian name and thus chose Delaware View House.