River Access -- King's (or Queens's Grants and all that nonsense ...

[Woolly Bugger]

Landowners and anglers clash over access in the Upper Delaware River

The mostly placid waters of the two branches of the Delaware River (not very imaginatively named the West Branch and the East Branch) hide a turbulence that only sometimes is visible to the communities nearby.

Residents have been alerted to the issue by random unsigned notes dropped into mailboxes in support of river-adjacent landowners who assert ownership of those waters — and the riverbed — through historic right.

If you don't fish in those waters, this tempest is mostly in a teapot, but if you do, then it's a really big deal, and a thorny one, to boot.

The problem, as the landowners see it, is that some people who use the river, like to drop anchor and fish "on their land" in the river.

Landowners claim they have rights to the riverbed from the edge of the river, where it meets their land, up to the center of the river, as the Riverland Defense and Unity Foundation tells the story:

Landowners along the Upper Delaware River own to center of the main channel of the river. In 1708, Queen Anne granted Johannes Hardenbergh 2 million acres in Ulster, Greene, Orange Sullivan and Delaware Counties in New York State, known as the Hardenburg Patent.

Yep, the dispute centers on a land grant from more than three centuries ago.

https://delawarecurrents.org/2025/10/06/upper-delaware-river-access/