Hike #1177; Easton/Wilson/Morgan Hill

Hike #1177; Easton/Wilson/Morgan Hill Area

11/21/18 Morgan Hill/Easton with Jennifer Berndt, Jennifer Tull, Brittany Audrey, Mackenzie Wieder, Kirk Rohn , and Mike Merunka

This next hike would be a point to point set up between Phillipsburg/Easton area and Morgan Hill. We’d had such a great experience with the Morgan Hill section before, I knew that we just had to do it again.
Unfortunately, I neglected to get a group photo on this one, but such is the case I suppose when a trip to Weyerbacher is in order.
We met at the boat launch area near the Northampton Street Free Bridge in Phillipsburg, then shuttled up to my brother, Tea Biscuit’s house on Morgan Hill.
My plan was to walk Morgan Hill Road to the golf course up there, and then head down the way we’d gone up the previous time and get all of the expansive views.

View on the course

It’s kind of funny that Brittany had never had her sister Mackenzie come out with us until this time. She had just finished backpacking the entire Appalachian Trail, which from what Brittany said came as a surprise, because she was always the one more inclined to hike, but Mackenzie just kind of came out of the blue with it and succeeded.
The walk on Morgan Hill Road is NOT one I’ll ever incorporate into a hike again. I’d walked some bits of it over by Crivelero’s Restaurant in the past, but this was horrible. There is absolutely no shoulder, and the people driving it are doing so like idiots. I regretted planning that route from the start, but there really is no other good place to park on Morgan Hill, so there was very little choice apart from my brother’s. Maybe my dad’s.
We walked the road, and I pointed out some of the old houses. I have family from Morgan Hill that date back many generations. Both of my maternal grandparents have ancestors from there. My grandfather’s roots go back to my great great grandmother, Jane Hutchinson, who married Michael Cline Allen, lumberjack and sawmill owner. Jane was granddaughter of the prolific Albertsons of Knowlton Township, and her paternal side finds it’s roots in Hutchinson, a little village on the Delaware River south of Belvidere. Those relatives find more roots in the Germans speaking immigrants of Easton area, and some of them were on Morgan Hill in the early 1700s.
My maternal grandmother’s mother, Sadie Halera Benner, was born on Morgan Hill and lived there, and I find roots there to the first Unangst in America in 1755.
Every time I walk by one of those old stone houses I wonder what my family was doing up there at the time. Certainly they knew these people, if it wasn’t their homes outright.

View in the golf course to Easton

We made our way up Morgan Hill Road past the old school house, then right on Moyers Lane where a very old house stands on the corner. We followed this to the right, to the golf course, where we turned to the right to walk the section to the south. It was not a direct route, but I figured it’d be a nice walk on the path. I had scaled this in as part of the hike, although everyone noticed when we came back around that we ended up back on Moyers Lane just a short distance from where we had turned off of it.
We continued to the north after that little loop, on the same golf course paths weaving back and forth, east and west, until it started ascending to the club house building. When the path did that, we cut to the right across the green to head up to the next level of the path. This cut a corner and kept us away from more of the buildings.
We headed to along the path slightly up hill until we crossed over Clubhouse Drive. Just beyond this point is the best view out of the Easton area. Like before, we could see out as far as the Martin Tower, and through Easton. The hill between us and Lafayette College Hill blocks the main part of town, but we could still see to the college. We continued weaving back and forth on the path as it switched back and forth down hill through the course.

View on Morgan Hill

Once we got to the bottom on Congressional Drive, we turned to the right out to Cedarville Road. We crossed that, then skirted a strip mall where it seemed the only thing open was a laundromat.
We followed Cedarville off to the left, then turned to the right to cut behind one of the fireworks stores, and out to Morgan Hill Road. I forgot there was a fence there blocking some of it, so we had to go around it.
We turned to the right and used Morgan Hill Road to take us across Rt 78, and we paused by the abandoned house on the other side. I opted not to go in and bother whatever homeless people were living in that one. I think someone told me the landfill owns that property.
Once on the other side, we stopped at the Turkey Hill store to get some snacks and drinks. I got some cheese, because I wanted something to go with my drinks.
It started snowing like crazy while we were out there. I was not expecting any of that. Brittany was in heaven because she loves walking in the snow.
We headed from here across and out behind Sky King Fireworks. This took us on a swath of grass along a chain link fence out to Industrial Drive North. We turned right, here, then left on Belmont Street, then right on Centre Street to Line Street. A left on Line Street led us to the Weyerbacher Brewery, and we got there with only about ten minutes to spare.

This is always a nice little stop.
My first experience with Weyerbacher was on one of the hikes many years ago. We used to stop and get a brew before walking through the Oxford Tunnel, and Tea Biscuit claims that he got it for the first time when he saw the hike ABV on it I think it was. I usually go ta Molson Ice can back then before going through, but Weyerbacher was a new level. Before the craft beer craze, we never found really anything that strong.
In 2005, my friend Ron Phelps was the first that made me really remember it, when he said “There’s this Belgian style brewery in Easton you’ve just got to try” and he offered me a sip of some Weyerbacher thing I don’t recall the name of.
A few years ago I started getting Blithering Idiot, Tiny Belgian Style Imperial Stout, and Quad, and really loved those ones.
Jen bought me a glass of the Riserva, which is their award winning quad with raspberries. It was actually really good, but more fruity than I was ready for at the moment.
A couple in the group had gotten some food which got them a free beer ticket. They gave them to me, but when I brought them up, they were only good for one of the weak ones. I asked if I could trade two tickets for a good one. The guy asked “Like what?”. I responded “Finally Legal”, which was a 13.5% abv. The guy said “Three times the strength for two beer tickets, you’re making out on this one!”.
When we finished, I got myself another bottle of Blasphemy, because I’d finished one I brought. I don’t know when I’ll get back up there to get another, and I don’t want to use up all of them that I’d bought previously.
We headed down hill from Weyerbacher when we were done between trees and through the South Easton Cemetery. We then went a few more blocks and cut along some paths through apartment building properties. The goal was to get out to the Lehigh Canal.

Lock #47

There is no formal access to Hugh Moore Park from this area, but it’s easy to cut from the apartments, out to the road, then diagonally across the former Lehigh Valley Railroad through a line of brush to the Lehigh Canal, or Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company.
I gave a bit of an historic dissertation about the first discovery of Anthracite coal by Philip Ginder in 1792, and how it eventually led to the Lehigh Canal development to bring it to market under Josiah White, Erskine Hazard, and Philip Hauto.
Lock #47 was a rebuilt lock. It incorporates concrete, while many of the older ones were all stone with wooden buffers on the lock walls to protect them. Most of the canals were finished way earlier, and this one remained in service through the 1930s, in conjunction with the Delaware Canal. It is even reported that some coal was shipped by way of the canal as late as 1942, which makes it the longest serving of the old towpath canals (of course the Erie Canal is a self propelled barge canal, and much canalized river, so it’s not the same).

Lehigh Canal

The Hugh Moore Park section actually still offers mule drawn boat rides, and is probably the most authentic example of such in America.
Some sections of the Lehigh Canal were used in the Henry Fonda movie “The Farmer Takes a Wife” in 1935 as a representation of the Erie Canal, because the the recently closed canal looked so authentic.

Historic image of what is now Hugh Moore Park

We soon passed the site of the Glendon Ironworks, now all in the weeds, and I pointed out where those ruins were between the canal towpath and the edge of the Lehigh.

Lehigh Canal and Glendon Ironworks

The area looks so vastly different today than it did in the past. It’s just a bucolic setting with trees and the canal. A train did go by us while we were walking along the towpath, opposite on what used to be the Lehigh Valley Railroad, but apart from that, no one would ever think there was ever a major industrial center on this stretch.

Lehigh Canal at Glendon

We continued on the canal until the paved path turned to the right, down toward the old Glendon Bridge into Hugh Moore Park. We turned right here and crossed the bridge, but first waited for a car that came through to move out of sight. We quickly went across the bridge, but it turned out to be just someone driving around.
On the other side, we headed up to the former right of way of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, now part of the D&L Trail, and turned to the left.

Children's Home

We followed this to the connecting path to the right, which ascends to the access road to the Children’s Home of Easton.
We headed up hill to the right, then joined the road to pass the lovely mansion building.
The Children’s Home originally started out in the 1800s as the “Home of Friendless Children”, but was changed to a healthier sounding name. They were originally in town in a building constructed in 1887, but soon outgrew that.
In 1917, the 38 acre Firmstone Estate with it’s large stately mansion was purchased by Joseph P. Smith as a donation for the new Children’s Home location. The house was renovated for use as the school, and remains a lovely piece of architecture today.

Historic postcard of Easton Children's Home

Like the previous time, we went up hill past the home, and then cut through grass. There was someone this time on one of the front porches of the homes, so we headed beyond where we went before, and then cut to the right after passing some sort of tennis court. This took us up to a level area. We turned right, then to the left to head further up hill to the edge of the ball fields of the Easton Intermediate School.
We headed several blocks north after coming off of the school land, and then went to the west a bit. We went into an apartment building to see if we could go in, and Brittany reminded me that Justin and I tried to do that before. I wasn’t going to call anyone’s room, so we just left. We got onto the former Easton and Northern Railroad, part of the Lehigh Valley Railroad system, and then followed the trail to the left.
When I was at this spot last, there was a guy with a roller making the trail out to 25th Street. It was now finished to the edge of the road. We crossed over and continued on the paved path to the west, then the north out behind the Home Depot. We continued from there this time.
The trail leads out across Freemansburg Ave and then over William Penn Highway past the Wallgreens. There were cops everywhere because they were having the bonfire at the high school. It would have been cool to go to it, but we didn’t do that this time.
Mike Merunka met up with us at about this point. He was trying to get in touch with me earlier, but my phone had died and I didn’t realize it.
We continued ahead, crossed over Northampton Street where the bridge used to be, then continued out past the Taco Bell. We crossed Northampton Street and continued out to Wood Avenue. The trail crossed the road, and left the railroad bed in this section. Rather than continue on the trail, we continued through Lower Hackett Park parallel with Wood Avenue, through Fisk Field, then out to Wood Avenue again.
The Huntsman industrial place has recently closed down, and so we skirted around the south side of that by way of an old access road that goes down to 13th Street and the old Simon Silk Mills.
We used to go all through those old mills when they were abandoned. I explored every floor of the main building and even went into the basement of others before they made it into more upscale apartments.

The R. H. Simon Silk Mills were the second such industries in the Lehigh Valley, established on the Bushkill Creek at this location in 1883. The property was purchased in 2010 to become part of a redevelopment project, turning the old mills into upscale apartments with some businesses below.
We crossed over 13th Street and continued on the trail ahead, now part of the Karl Stirner Arts Trail. It again follows a bit of the Lehigh Valley Railroad bed for a bit, in a section that led to a depot area along the Bushkill Creek. The trail continues parallel with Rt 22 beyond where the railroad crossed, then regains the railbed again on the other side beyond the cemetery.
We got through this section pretty quick to the under side of Rt 22. Jen and Kirk held back at this point, and I sped off along Bushkill Drive with Mike, while Jenny, Brittany, and Mackenzie had headed on their own back to the cars. Brittany and Mackenzie were to run a 5K the next day, so getting done early was to their benefit.

Historic image of Lehigh Valley Railroad in Easton, photographer unknown

Mike and I made it as far as the Route 22 underpass when Jenny called. My car was at the starting point, and we kind of needed her in order to get back to my van. We had already done over fifteen miles, so I was fine with being picked up a couple of blocks short. She came over and picked up Jen and Kirk first, dropped him off, and then scooped Mike and I up at the intersection with 611 to get us back.
I’ll have to do some more Easton stuff again soon. The area is about the best we have locally for doing night hikes, and we always enjoy them. There’s a ton more stuff I want to do on both the north and west sides, and even more we can do to the south. It’s good to know there’s no shortage for the foreseeable future.

HAM