Burlington Island sits almost unnoticed in the Delaware River between Bristol and Burlington City, silently healing from decades of human abuse. 

The island is large, roughly 396 acres and even includes a 100-acre lake. For thousands of years, the island was used by the Lenni Lenape people, who refer to the island as Mattenecunk (usually translated as “the island of the pines”) and the Delaware River as Lenape Sipu. The tribe’s sacred sites have been disturbed for centuries by the settlers who first came in 1623. 

Today, visitors, the few allowed with permission and permits, are more likely to encounter artifacts from the island’s last century.

Now, the forest grows around, and sometimes within, the ruins of a century-old amusement park that burned down in the 1920s. It winds around a set of long-forgotten mid-century vacation homes. The interior of the island is marked with piles of rusting scrap, discarded bicycles and cars, and even a Depression-era stone bathhouse. The island has been uninhabited since 1976, when several makeshift summer homes were demolished. 

Left more or less alone for the last 50 years, as the island is not freely accessible by the public, woods have overtaken much of the island, except for a few sandy spots marking the deposits of infertile dredge spoils. Hardwoods like maple and hickory, rather than pines, dominate the island now. Herons, deer, and even eagles are occasionally spotted. It is quiet compared to the historically industrial towns that border it on either side of the river.