Do you know the history of Core Creek Park and Lake Luxembourg? A reader explains
With my Way Back glasses, I can make out the Bucks County of dreams courtesy of readers who share sweetly distilled memories. To them, it’s a kind of Happy Valley that persisted until I-95 came roaring through in 1969. The highway opened the floodgates for suburbia to replace farms and forests with popup homes, schools, shopping centers and mobs of traffic.
At the cost of disappearing heritage however, new kinds of enchantments have emerged. Take for example county government’s Core Creek Park in burgeoning Middletown. The 1,200 acres of greenery enclosing Lake Luxembourg is a beautiful sanctuary amidst the work-a-day hustle between Langhorne and Newtown. It’s the largest of the county’s five parks with lakes, the others being Lake Towee in Haycock Township, Giving Pond in Tinicum, Lake Galena in New Britain Township and Silver Lake in Bristol Township.
By kayak, my family enjoys exploring Lake Luxembourg’s heavily-forested coves, cruising past docks where visitors linger with fishing poles, and paddling to the headwaters and its protected eagle sanctuary. Mallard ducks ply alongside while snowy egrets and great blue herons strut the shoreline, one so accustomed to boaters she doesn’t mind extreme closeups at water’s edge. For landlubbers, there are picnic groves and pavilions, a marina and trails to hike and bike plus a scenic drive for motorists. There’s also a marker next to a flourishing sycamore tree sprouted from a seed flown to the moon by astronauts in 1971 and planted in the park in 1976.
Fortunately for historians like me, readers share vivid memories of the way it used to be before there was a moon tree, a lake and a park. Edgar Fulmor of Newtown as a kid in the 1950s recalls the joy of Core Creek. He reached out to me after reading my recent column of a village beneath a lake in Upper Bucks.
“I certainly enjoyed your story of the creation of Lake Nockamixon. It has turned out quite nice but at a very high cost for that beloved section of Bucks County. There is a similar story concerning the construction of Lake Luxembourg and Core Creek Park off of Route 413. It mirrors work on Lake Nockamixon but on a smaller scale.
“Core Creek ran through our farm on Woodbourne Road and was a favorite swimming hole back in the ’50s. The creek ran under a hunchback, single-lane bridge on Tollgate Road which on one side had a beautiful stone farm house and chicken house where eggs were sold and on the other side an old grist mill made into apartments. Of course, all of these buildings, and other homes of historic nature, including the home previously owned by the Duchess of Luxembourg, were destroyed when the lake was created. Toll Gate Road now dead ends just north of where the bridge used to be and Village Road on the other side of Woodbourne Road was closed off where it met Silver Lake Road.
“On the bright side, our farm is now part of Core Creek Park and is one of the very few farms in this part of Bucks County that has not become a housing project and is still being farmed today. The old barn and out buildings are gone but the stone farmhouse still exists looking over Lake Luxembourg, although a very different view for the current owners than what we had growing up there.”
History of Nockamixon:Is there really a village under Lake Nockamixon? The truth about the creation of state park
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The name given the lake memorializes the memory of a Luxembourg duchess.
Despite the French-speaking nation’s neutrality in World War II, the Nazi blitzkrieg of 1940 overran Luxembourg. Adolph Hitler humiliated the country by changing its name to Heim ens Reich (“Home ensemble Empire”), imposed German as the national language and instituted a military draft.
Charlotte Wilhelmine, the grand duchess, and her government fled into exile in Britain and Canada. From Montreal she broadcast weekly encouragement to those back home. She toured the U.S. and visited President Franklin Roosevelt at the White House, keeping her cause alive.
She also purchased 500 acres of farmland along Core Creek to raise food for her beleaguered citizens. With the collapse of Hitler’s Third Reich in 1945, she returned home a national hero and remained monarch until 1964. Before her passing at 89, she sold her Middletown farm, later acquired by county government. The farm became Lake Luxembourg in 1975. It is a part of a countywide plan to control periodic flooding on Neshaminy Creek. Acreage around the lake became Core Creek Park.
Today, the park represents an interesting slice of history and convenient getaway for outdoor adventures for folks like us.
Footnote: Dredging is underway to deepen Lake Luxembourg’s upper end. The reservoir’s level was lowered 5 feet to enable the excavation of sediment. Work is due to end by December. Meanwhile boating and fishing continue.
Sources include “Core Creek Park and the Grand Duchess” by Jane Meimerdinger and Thomas Michener published in 1984 by Pennswood View.
Sources include “Core Creek Park and the Grand Duchess” by Jane Meimerdinger and Thomas Michener published in 1984 by Pennswood View.
Carl LaVO can be reached at carllavo0@gmail.com
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Readers shares history of Bucks County's Core Creek Park
