Stubborn Water Gap Farmer Dies at 93
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A farmer who refused to sell out when the land around him was made into a national park has died at 93.
Enos “Cy” Harker lived in a 200-year-old stone farmhouse in the state’s northwest corner on the only non-federally owned farmland in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.
He died Thursday when his tractor flipped over on top of him.
Harker was the lone holdout on Old Mine Road, which runs the length of the park. Other farmers in the park lease their land.
Even in his 90s, Harker still cut his own fields and heated his house with wood he carried himself in five-gallon barrels, friends and family said.
A World War II veteran, Harker rode from Cumberland County in southern New Jersey to Sussex County in 1935 to become a wrangler, teaching Western movie stars like Tex Ritter how to ride a horse. He also ran a dairy farm until 1960.
When the federal government forced some 8,000 landowners off their property in preparation for the Tocks Island Dam in the late 1950s, Harker held firm and didn’t relent when the area became a national park.
“The land meant everything to him,” his niece, Jody Clark, told The Sunday Star-Ledger of Newark. “He had taken it from a run-down place to what it was. He devoted his whole life to keeping this place up.”
