Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area
Van Campen Inn: Hospitality Was Once an Obligation
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Despite the name, Van Campen Inn was not a commercial inn in the modern sense.
It was a substantial colonial farmhouse.
Along isolated major roads, certain households were expected to provide shelter for travellers.
The house also reveals a harder history.
Large properties in the Minisink required considerable labor, and NPS interpretation documents enslaved African Americans working on substantial farms in this northern landscape.
That matters because Americans often imagine slavery as belonging somewhere else.
It did not.
The building also served as refuge during periods of frontier violence and as military quarters in the Revolutionary era.
Farmhouse. Shelter. Refuge. Quarters. Historic site.
The word “inn” sounds quaint.
The actual building had to carry a much heavier load.
The house also complicates a familiar regional identity.
The Delaware Valley is often presented as a meeting place of Dutch, English and other European colonial traditions.
That is true architecturally.
But those cultural mixtures unfolded on land already inhabited by Native people and inside economies that could include enslaved labor.
“Colonial heritage” is therefore not one warm category.
It contains migration, adaptation, coercion, commerce and survival at the same time.