How a 1926 Hydroelectric Dam Accidentally Created the Poconos' Best Vacation Lake

Lake Wallenpaupack was not built for you. It was built to make electricity. The dam and powerhouse are still working infrastructure — two units producing roughly 44 megawatts, about 35,000 homes' worth of power, with water running about 3.5 miles through a flow line to reach the turbines. The vacation lake on top of it was, in the most literal sense, a side effect.

The engineering project

PPL dammed Wallenpaupack Creek at Wilsonville in the mid-1920s, building a dam 1,280 feet long and 70 feet high plus the Tafton Dike, with a construction workforce of roughly 2,700. The resulting reservoir covers about 5,700 acres, runs roughly 13 miles long, reaches about 60 feet at its deepest, and is wrapped by 52 miles of shoreline straddling the Pike and Wayne county line.

The lake officially opened on July 31, 1926 — which makes 2026 its centennial, marked locally with a dedicated Centennial Celebration and history presentations at the Environmental Learning Center hosted by Brookfield Renewable, the current operator.

The hotel boom that followed immediately

The vacation economy did not take decades to arrive. The lake's creation in 1926 triggered a hotel-building boom in Hawley almost at once, and the buildings from that moment are still in business.

The Settlers Inn is a 1927 Arts & Crafts lodge built by the community as the lake was being developed, now a Historic Hotels of America member with a farm-to-table restaurant on six acres along the Lackawaxen. Silver Birches Resort on Route 507 is the direct descendant of a 1926 inn, still renting vintage two-bedroom cottages by the week in July and August. Later arrivals built on the same foundation — Gresham's Lake View Motel has been family owned since 1952, and Woodloch has been run by the Kiesendahl family since 1958.

Why a utility lake makes a better vacation lake

Because Brookfield owns the shoreline, the lake is open to the public for boating, waterskiing, fishing, camping and hiking rather than carved into private frontage. That ownership is why you get a free public launch at the PFBC's Mangan Cove off Route 590, fee launches at Caffrey, Ironwood Point, Ledgedale and Wilsonville (waived for campers), ADA-accessible fishing piers at Mangan Cove and Ironwood Point, and miles of shoreline trail.

It also explains the rules. Slow-no-wake zones sit where the infrastructure is — Wallenpaupack Creek, from the Ledgedale Bridge to about 1,000 feet downstream, from the dam to about 600 feet south, and between Cairns Island and the Pike County shoreline. Even the whitewater downstream is scheduled: under FERC relicensing obligations the operator provides boating releases of 1,200 cfs on the Lackawaxen River below the powerhouse at Kimbles, on or after July 1.

See the working lake for yourself

Start at the dam overlook on Route 590 in Lakeville — a parking-lot viewpoint over the dam and the full length of the lake, and one of the better sunrise and sunset spots in the region. Add the Environmental Learning Center for the construction-history displays, then get on the water: marinas and rental operators ring the shoreline, from Tafton to Greentown to Hawley.

A century on, the accident holds up. Browse our directory for the marinas, campgrounds, inns and restaurants that grew up around a power plant.