The Minisink Trail Project

The Lenape Great Navesink to Minisink Trail was a roughly seventy five mile route used for thousands of years by Lenape communities for seasonal migration, trade, and ceremony, connecting the Navesink River near Sandy Hook to Minisink Island in today’s Delaware Water Gap. Mapped by 1747 and still remembered in land deeds and roadways like Mill Road in Matawan, the trail later shaped some of New Jersey’s earliest colonial infrastructure. Recent efforts by Indigenous organizations, historians, and local partners have placed historical markers along surviving portions of the route to honor the Lenape as the original inhabitants of the land and to recognize a living heritage that persisted even after displacement in the eighteenth century.