Welcome to Fox Point State Park

Fox Point State Park occupies a Delaware riverfront with a long history as Lenape, Swedish, Dutch, and English land that served at different times as a hunting ground, farmland, resort, and industrial area. In the mid-1800's, this shoreline of the Delaware River was known for fine homes, bathing beaches, inns, recreation, commerce, and fishing, but in the early 1900's upstream oil refineries and other industries polluted the river so badly that the old houses were abandoned and the land sat idle for more than forty years. In the early 1950's, the Pennsylvania Railroad began widening the property for possible industrial development by bringing in slag and other fill from steel mills and extending the land into the river; over the years, the three and a half mile stretch between Claymont and Edgemoor was widened by as much as eighty feet in some places, a common and unregulated wetland-filling practice until about 1970. Local opposition and the eventual bankruptcy of Penn-Central Railroad halted the landfilling, but by the late 1960's, without a development plan, Fox Point had become a trash dump, with some areas later covered by silt dredged from the river, and from 1975 to 1977 dry processed sludge from a treatment plant was spread across the site in an effort to support vegetation. When plans emerged for a major riverfront park, concerns about contamination led to a 1991 state investigation that found low levels of contaminants including arsenic, antimony, lead, PCBs, cyanide, and other manufacturing chemicals, after which Fox Point was closed to the public and designated for cleanup under the State Superfund program. Delaware chose the most expensive cleanup option, using an impermeable liner beneath soil so contaminants would not rise to the surface or be carried into the river by rainwater, and on the fifteen-acre site the waste was covered with sand, thick fabric, a high-density polyethylene liner, another reinforced fabric layer, and two feet of soil planted with grass. Reclaimed with help from state and federal agencies and community effort, Fox Point became Delaware's first park recovered from land once severely threatened by environmental hazards, offering riverfront recreation, access to the Northern Delaware Greenway's more than ten miles of hiking and biking trails, and a public landscape long championed by Marston Fox, for whom the park is named.

Delaware · United States