The next time you rent a pontoon boat at Lake Nockamixon, look at the water off the eastern end and know that a village is underneath you. Not a legend, not a story that grew in the telling. An actual settlement with a name, a grist mill that predated the Revolution, a quarry, a general store and families who did not want to leave. Most of it was demolished on purpose before the valley was flooded. One structure was not, and it is still down there, roughly 60 feet below the surface.
The Village of Tohickon
The community was called Tohickon, and before that Stovertown. It sat along Tohickon Creek just upstream of where the dam stands today, in the valley that gave the lake its shape.
Its anchor was Sterner’s Mill, a grist mill built in 1758, eighteen years before the Declaration of Independence. People who saw it before the end remember huge wooden gears meshing with metal ones and a massive water wheel. The miller’s house, a handsome three-story building, stood nearby. A quarry operated next to the mill and shared its pond.
Around that core were the ordinary pieces of a rural Pennsylvania settlement: a general store, iron bridges over the creek, farmhouses, barns, and a cave known to hold Native American artifacts. Summer camps brought families out from Philadelphia to swim in the creek. It was not a boomtown. It was a place where people had lived for two centuries.
Nearly 300 Properties, Condemned
The reservoir was first proposed in 1958 by Dr. Maurice K. Goddard, then Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Forests and Waters, who wanted flood control, water supply and recreation for a fast-growing region. Land acquisition began in 1961.
This is the part the cheerful versions of the story tend to skip. The Commonwealth did not simply buy the valley. It condemned roughly 290 properties across five townships, Bedminster, East Rockhill, Nockamixon, Haycock and Tinicum, using eminent domain. Farms that had supported families for generations were taken. Residents fought it, and some never accepted the outcome, describing it as theft dressed up as progress.
One of those families has a Lehigh Valley name attached to it. Pamela Varkony, the Allentown writer, broadcaster and women’s advocate, grew up on a 100-acre farm in Haycock Township where her father, Clyde Feist, ran the Tohickon Stone Quarry. The farm went under with everything else.
“Then the government came calling with their right of Eminent Domain,” she has written of the valley. “The result was shattered lives, lost legacies, and historic structures that met a watery grave.”
Varkony has called the destruction of Sterner’s Mill a travesty, and she did not let the valley disappear quietly. She co-authored “Our Lost Tohickon Valley” with Marjorie Goldthorp Fulp, a book documenting the people and places the lake erased. “Margie and I both lost our family homes to the park,” she wrote. “This book has given us the chance to reclaim our memories, one last time.”
It is worth sitting with that for a second the next time you pull a boat out at the marina. The people who lost the valley are not distant historical figures. Some of them went on to build careers a half hour up the road, and they remember exactly what is under the water.
What They Tore Down, and the One Thing They Left
Dam construction began in October 1968 and finished in June 1973. State Route 563 had to be relocated first, work that ran from September 1970 to 1972.
Before the water rose, crews demolished the buildings. This was not carelessness with history, at least not officially. Anything left standing would become a submerged hazard for boat traffic, so the mill, the miller’s house, the farmhouses and barns all came down. Nearly every bridge was destroyed for the same reason.
The exception was the five-arched stone bridge at Tohickon village. It was left in place, and when the lake filled it simply went under. It is still there, intact, about 60 feet down. Boaters pass over a pre-Civil War stone bridge all summer without knowing it.
The lake took roughly six months to fill after the dam was finished. Nockamixon State Park opened to the public in December 1973.
When the Water Drops
The valley has not disappeared completely. In drought years, when the lake falls well below its normal pool, foundations, bridge pilings and old roadbeds emerge along the shoreline. In October 2024, water levels sat low enough that the state canceled the scheduled whitewater release from the lake into Tohickon Creek, a release that whitewater paddlers plan their fall around.
You do not need a drought to see traces. The Sterner Mill and High Bridge trails follow Tohickon Creek past foundation stones of a long-gone summer camp, above the waterline and open year round.
If You Go
Nockamixon State Park covers 5,286 acres in upper Bucks County, an easy drive south from Quakertown and well within day-trip range of anywhere in the Lehigh Valley. The lake itself is about 1,450 acres and stretches roughly eight miles, fed by Tohickon Creek, Three Mile Run and Haycock Run. The earthen dam holding it back stands about 120 feet high and runs nearly a mile long.
The park is open every day of the year from sunrise to sunset. There are more than 20 miles of hiking trails plus a two-mile paved multiuse path that starts near the marina and connects the day-use area, the pool and the playground. The swimming pool runs Memorial Day through Labor Day.
The boat rental concession sits inside the park at 1542 Mountain View Drive in Quakertown and offers canoes, kayaks-style craft, rowboats, motorboats, sailboats, paddleboats and pontoons through the summer season. It has historically been cash only, so it is worth calling ahead at 215-538-1340 before you drive out.
Bring the cooler, rent the boat, enjoy the afternoon. Just know that the quiet water you are floating on is the roof of somebody’s hometown.
