The Delaware River stretches 330 miles and is the longest free-flowing river east of the Mississippi River, with a watershed covering 14,119 square miles in four states. This nationally important corridor shaped regional settlement and later economic and cultural history while also serving as a critical natural resource, providing drinking water for nearly 20 million people, habitat for wildlife including migrating birds, and scenic and recreational opportunities for millions of residents and visitors. Its pristine waters once supported thriving fishing and transportation and supplied fresh water to towns and industries along its banks, but by the 1960s unchecked growth, habitat destruction, and pollution were destroying the river. Public outcry led to sweeping environmental protection laws, remediation efforts, greater vigilance, and citizen activism, producing cleaner waters and increased recreational use, though environmental threats continue and some native species remain in peril. In the 1990s, the section above Trenton to the Delaware Water Gap, known as the Lower Delaware, was designated a National Wild and Scenic River, a federal designation reserved for less than one percent of the nation's waterways. Indigenous peoples have lived beside the river for thousands of years, and early maps labeled it simply South River while the area remained a wilderness known only to a few explorers, soldiers, and traders. After England gained control of West Jersey in the 1660s, the river was named Delaware in honor of Baron De la Warr, and immigrants from the British Isles, often fleeing religious persecution, arrived in great numbers. Known in the 1680s as Farnsworth's Landing by an English farmer, Bordentown became one of the Colony of West Jersey's important early river ports along with Burlington and Trent's Town, now Trenton, and its strategic position along early roads and at the confluence of the river and Crosswicks Creek made it an important transportation and cultural center for two centuries. It was home to notable residents including Francis Hopkinson, Thomas Paine, Joseph Bonaparte, Clara Barton, and Commodore Charles Stewart, and Bordentown Beach marks the site of the former town wharves. The beach itself was created in the 1930s from dredge spoils taken from the river's navigation channel. The Delaware once supported the largest spawning population of Atlantic sturgeon in North America, but the fish are now listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act.
