Childs Park reopens with new trails, amenities

By Jerry Goldberg
DINGMANS FERRY — After spending three years and $2.9 million on a major renovation, the National Park Service has re-opened the sublime Childs Park to visitors.

The 53-acre park now includes accessible trails and picnic sites, new, modern-looking restrooms in the main parking lot, new stairways, and new overlooks from which to view the falls.

The walk from the parking lot to the falls is about a half-mile along a pleasant, mostly level and shaded paved trail. The old entranceway to the park has been closed off and a new one opened.

The park is newly designated as a "carry in, carry out" site — that is, visitors are required to carry out everything they bring in with them, including trash.

The park contains three main waterfalls — Factory Falls, Fulmer Falls and Deer Leap Falls — along Dingmans Creek, a few miles upstream from Dingmans Falls and Silverthread Falls. Fulmer Falls is the park's main attraction.

The pools below the waterfalls were popular swimming holes, when the park was owned by the Pennsylvania Bureau of State Parks. Swimming was banned when ownership transferred to the National Park Service in 1983 — although visitors still use it for diving and swimming in hot weather.

The park is the legacy of the great 19th-century newspaper publisher and philanthropist George W. Childs, known mostly for turning around the fortunes of the failing Philadelphia Public Ledger. He was friends with Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman, and was a pallbearer for his good friend Ulysses S. Grant. In 1888 he turned down a nomination to run for president.

In 1912, his widow, Emma Childs, donated the park to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

The renovation project has brought the park closer to Childs' original vision, as a place where people could enjoy nature.

The park also includes the ruins of Joseph Brooks' 19th-century woolen mill.