New Jersey Kayaking

The blue line on the map is the Delaware & Raritan, or D&R, Canal. The canal is a basically 40-mile-long pond. The water flows very slowly from west to east; it is essentially still. Access points generally coincide with bridges or locks.

The thin red line is the “fall line” – the nominal division between uplands and lowlands. It appears the builders of the canal wanted to stay above the fall line for the entire length, and followed the Millstone and Raritan Rivers. The series of dams resulting in a chain of lakes along the Lawrence Brook reveals a shorter alternate route the canal might have taken. These dams were not built until over 100 years later. Perhaps surveying in the 1830s was not good enough to discover this, or perhaps it would not work, but it certainly looks like it should.

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