The park, with its six miles of ocean coast and 20 miles of bay shore lands – mostly marsh – first opened in 1965 as Indian River State Park. The stabilized inlet and new bridge created the beginnings of a small seasonal community of campers and fishermen at that location, which eventually grew into Delaware Seashore State Park. The state also removed the previous fixed wooden bridge and replaced it with a sturdier swing bridge which would accommodate shipping in and out of Indian River. Army Corps of Engineers stepped in and aided with construction of two steel-and-wooden jetties, one on each side of the inlet. Without jetties, however, constant dredging to keep the inlet open and to protect the highway became cost-prohibitive. According to a February 2020 article by Delaware Seashore State Park historical interpreter Kenneth Horowitz, the first highway was built in 1933, along with the first crossing of Indian River Inlet – a wooden bridge. The first jetties finally did come in 1938 as part of the effort to build the first real ocean highway along the barrier islands to connect Rehoboth Beach and Bethany Beach. However, the state appropriation that year was not enough to build the needed jetty. “There is a general feeling in that section that any inlet, no matter where dug, connecting Indian River Bay and Atlantic Ocean, will shoal with sand unless a jetty is built out in the ocean to divert the current and shifting sands.” They had had enough.Ī newspaper clipping in Delaware’s Public Archives from September 1923 noted that the new inlet would “be adapted for the use of small boats only, but it will prevent overflowing of the surrounding farmlands and enable the raising of hay which is a profitable industry in that section.”īut the article also stated what most people were already feeling, after watching the inlet shifting constantly, opening and closing with storms, and costing frustrating amounts of money to reopen time and time again. They estimated the closed inlet had already caused several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage to their crops because of flooded farmland. In August 1919, tired of waiting for the state to decide where to open a new inlet after the former one closed in a storm, local residents bought dynamite and opened the inlet themselves. It also changed salinity in the bays, to the detriment of clams and oysters. That damaged the tomato and hay crops on which the farmers depended, both for cash and feed for their livestock.įor fishermen, a closed inlet meant fewer species to catch in the bays. When storms filled the oft-shifting inlet with sand, Indian River and Rehoboth Bay’s waters backed up, leading to flooding of surrounding farmland. But if the state didn’t move quickly enough, they took matters into their own hands. In the early 1900s, when Indian River’s inlet changed locations almost as often as the weather changes, farmers and fishermen looked to the state for help.
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