The Indian Rock Inn on River Road in Upper Black Eddy has reopened as a fine dining restaurant, bar and hotel, continuing a 700-year-old tradition. That’s right: 700 years.

Located just south of the Kintnersville intersection of Routes 32 and 611, the site where the inn currently stands has been involved in the hospitality business since the 1300s. At that time, Lenni Lenape Indians inhabited the area. They used a deep natural pool in the rocks at the base of the Palisades as a holding tank for fish they had caught in the Delaware River. When the current building was erected in 1820, owner Jacob Krouse used the sturdy walls of that tank as his new tavern's foundation.

He must have been operating before then, though, as tavern licenses for the property exist dating back to 1812. Most likely, he served five-cent mugs of beer to the pilots of large lumber rafts that plied the river from 1763 until the railroad displaced them in 1907. The stage line from Easton to Morrisville also disgorged its passengers there, and it's likely that workers rested and refreshed themsellves at the tavern while building the Delaware and Lehigh Canal between 1828 and1832.

In 1837, new owner John Derr enlarged his business to include a refuge for weary travelers, which he called the Rising Sun Hotel. He probably named it after the fact that the sun rises over the river there, in the direction the building faces. It was known by that name until 1854, with the exception of a short period in 1851 when owner Frederick Trauger thought it might do better as the Farmers & Travellers Inn. Apparently it didn't, because that name—and Frederick— lasted less than a year. In 1854, owner Mathias Lehman changed it to the Narrowsville Hotel, to reflect the name of that area, which straddles Nockamixon and Bridegton Townships. It remained the Narrowsville Hotel except during a part of 1859, when owner Levi Trauger turned it back into the Rising Sun again for a few months.

The inn’s modern name derives from a nearby rock formation whose profile is said to resemble the face of an Indian. The mural of an Indian life scene, painted in 1988 by Irish artist Eric Patton, still decorates the north side of the building.