the history of Fry's Run

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Fry’s Run Park was nearly Northampton County Parks & Recreation’s “first born.”

When the organization was established in 1974, one of the first orders of business was to work with state legislators and PennDOT to establish the Delaware River Scenic Drive (DRSD) along PA Rt 611 and to acquire lands along the river for small county parks and overlooks. 

While the DRSD designation wouldn’t officially occur until more than 11 years later, Fry’s Run Park was dedicated on September 21, 1977, making it just the second park in the fledgling NorCo Parks System, behind Minsi Lake.

Today, there are 22 parks, preserves and conservation areas in the Northampton County parks system. Others along the DRSD are Wy-Hit-Tuk Park, Frost Hollow Overlook and Mud Run Conservation Area.

Today’s Fry’s Run Park covers 5.8 acres and is located on landscape that was originally known as Kleinhans Common in the historical village of Coffeetown. The common was a village green owned by George Kleinhans, who built a sawmill here in 1762.

A handful of concerned locals joined together in the early 2000s to create Fry’s Run Watershed Association to protect, preserve and improve the land and water of the park and surrounding watershed. The group included Matt Powers, Jeff McGuire, Linda Heindel and Bob Schmidt, the current FRWA president. Early projects included work on bylaws, obtaining a 501c3 designation, building and distributing rain barrels, organizing litter pickups along key roadways, building functional and educational rain gardens like the one at Williams Township Elementary School, and helping to conceive, fund and create park enhancements.

Over the years, FRWA has had help from Northampton County Parks & Rec, Wildlands Conservancy, and the local Boy Scout Eagle projects to add informational signage, pathways and benches, and multiple plantings of trees and shrubs with “live staking” to improve the vegetated buffer zone that helps stabilize the stream bank and lessen erosion.

Watershed association volunteers also have collaborated to help homeowners create the same buffer benefit on private property adjacent to Fry’s Run creek.