Equinunk Historic District

Equinunk is a village of wood-framed houses, commercial buildings and a cemetery set where Equinunk Creek meets the Delaware River in Wayne County, Pennsylvania. Its development began in 1831, when Israel Chapman and Alexander Calder bought land from the Preston family and laid out the village. Through the mid-nineteenth century the community grew around a sawmill, a hemlock-bark tannery begun in 1847, an axe factory, a planing mill, a wood distillation plant and an excelsior factory. Most of those businesses were later destroyed by fire or abandonment, but their associated residences and stores remain. The district includes Second Empire houses built by the Lloyd brothers in 1873 and 1874, a Gothic Revival Methodist church dated 1895, and Bleck's Hotel, a 1905 masonry Craftsman building that reflects the tourism that followed the bridge across the Delaware in 1904. The district is regarded as the largest and most intact group of its kind in the Upper Delaware Valley, with 56 contributing resources against 20 non-contributing ones.