The Valley of Delata sits in the middle of the Whitetail Mountains, about 120 miles north of Philadelphia. The surrounding hills are picturesque and quiet, and they protect the town that’s continually featured on various “Top 20 Small Towns in Pennsylvania” lists. The town’s official name is Duffmore, but its citizens never call it that. To those who live there, and to those who grew up there, it’s always been the Valley of Delata. The man the Valley is named after wasn’t a war hero or a man of political affluence that brought the town great prosperity. He was simply a man with great vision, who was able to help others see the beauty in his dreams. Without his vision, the town may not exist as it does today, if at all. There’s sadness in his story, and his passing deeply affected the few who knew him. They kept his story alive through word of mouth, just as human beings have done for centuries. Over time, his life and death became tall tales throughout the area. Fact and fiction became intertwined as the years went on, and it seems that today, nobody really knows why the town bears his name. They meet under his statue in the town square and eat their ice cream on summer nights. Children swing from his bronze arms that cling to his hips as he looks out into the distance with his head held high, but they don’t know his real story. Their assumptions are grandiose and monumental, like his statue, but they’re not the truth.
Salvatore Delata wasn’t mauled to death by a grizzly trying to save two children who ventured too far into the woods. Nor did he rescue a woman fighting off a pack of one-hundred red-tail wolves with a broken leg before being killed by the one-hundred and first. He simply was someone who possessed the capacity to dream. He was human, and this is his story.
***
Salvatore Delata was born in 1875 in Palombaro, a rural town in Abruzzo, Italy. His father, Matteo, owned an olive grove and from a young age, Salvatore, his parents, his aunt and uncles, and his cousins spent their days collecting olives, pruning the trees on which they grew, and crushing them for olive oil. His mother, Anita, tried having more children after he was born, but had three miscarriages, each one breaking her spirit a little more than the last. The town doctor suggested that she give up the prospect of having more children after the third miscarriage, telling her that he feared her life could be in danger if she became pregnant again. Salvatore would ask her why he didn’t have siblings like his cousins, and she would respond by telling him because he was perfect, and that she didn’t want or need any more children. Being an only child allowed Salvatore to become extremely close to both his parents, something he learned to be grateful for at a young age.
The family was never wealthy, but they lived comfortably without serious financial troubles. They worked hard and produced olives and olive oil that were sought after from all over Abruzzo. They had a system that worked, and their work ethic could never be questioned. Because of that, they had a roof over their heads and food on the table, two things that weren’t guaranteed in Italy during the late 19th century.
Things began to change in the summer of 1893. Signs of the famine were beginning to show, but nobody could have predicted just how bad it would get during the next few years. Matteo’s grove was still the main source of olives in the region, but he began to grow weary of what he was starting to find: little patches of dead brown leaves on the olive trees. They weren’t found often, but he identified enough of them to mention it to his family one night during dinner. Salvatore waved it off, not understanding that a few brown spots on some leaves could signal a catastrophe was coming. His father knew better, having experienced the famine of 1858 as a boy. It’s what made his father move from Naples, where he had a vineyard, to Abruzzo.
The word, “famine” isn’t fully comprehended in today’s Western society. It doesn’t mean empty shelves or having to buy in bulk. Famine means your source of income and food are dead. And when you have no food and no money, starvation becomes a very real, very common outcome.
By 1898, the famine had planted its roots of death all around Italy, starving most of the country of necessary nutrients and monetary profits on which they lived. Protein from meat was a luxury, and any protein at all was hard to come by. The Delata family lived on small amounts of different grains, mostly rice, and after some time, their malnourished bodies began to groan about the lack of food they were receiving. Later that year, Matteo noticed a dark red circle on the back of his right hand. It didn’t hurt and it didn’t itch, but he didn’t like the look of it. The patch came and went during that autumn, fading and then growing darker, as if it had a pulse. It disappeared during the winter but then came back the following spring, this time larger, darker and with a scaly appearance. He noticed that similar spots had also appeared on his legs and feet. Matteo knew what it was but chose not to say anything. When the patches began to attack Anita’s body as well, he became worried. The disease had obviously gotten a head start on him, as his mouth had felt infested with foulness as the spring progressed into the summer of 1899. Bloody gums and black teeth, rotten with sickness, pierced the inside of his face with unrivaled pain. Matteo lost his appetite and felt so nauseous that sleep became impossible. He called for the town doctor, having one of his nephews make the two-mile journey to where he lived, to plead that he examine his aunt and uncle. The doctor arrived two days later and gave the diagnosis Matteo had expected: pellagra. Also known as “the disease of the poor”, pellagra is a nutritional deficiency that spread through the mostly rural, poorer regions of Italy during the famine of the late 19th century. It claimed the lives of so many during those years that it’s now officially recognized as an endemic. By the summer of 1900, both of Salvatore’s parents were dead.
After they passed, he wrote to his uncle Pietro, who had immigrated to America in 1892, asking if he would sponsor his move to the States. Pietro agreed and lined up a job for his nephew at the butcher shop he had been working in for the last eight years. Pietro told Salvatore he could stay with him in his one-bedroom apartment for as long as he needed. That fall, Salvatore received a letter from his uncle, enclosed with a ticket for the ocean liner “Epida”, scheduled to leave from Naples on January 23, 1901.
***
Salvatore arrived at Ellis Island on March 30, 1901. After being shoved, nudged, and pushed through hours of medical exams and legal inspections, he was deemed fit for entry into the United States. He spoke very little English, but thanks to thorough instructions from his uncle in one of his letters, he was able to purchase a train ticket to Philadelphia.
The size of the city was something Salvatore couldn’t have possibly imagined, no matter how many times his uncle tried to convey how vast Philadelphia was. He despised the city and its stuffiness. The grotesque smells of the butcher shop made him sick, and he grew tired of the men who used to sling bloody entrails from the pigs and cows at him, the “greasy little guinea”. Salvatore never complained about the way he was treated, wanting to show gratefulness to his uncle for getting him a job and allowing him to stay with him. But his uncle saw the anguish in his nephew’s face and noticed how little he spoke even when they were in the apartment together, alone. Homesickness, grief over losing his parents, the loss of his best friends in his cousins who remained in Abruzzo — he didn’t have to say anything for his uncle to understand that the young man was having a tough time adapting to his new life. The three years Salvatore spent in Philadelphia weren’t completely useless, though. He had been able to save almost all the money he made at the butcher shop, thanks to Pietro declining rent from him. He had also learned to speak English after having to work with people who spoke no Italian. Those three years were difficult and demanding, but they served a purpose.
One night during dinner, Pietro mentioned that he had a friend who lived in a place called Old Forge, a coal-mining town about 125 miles north of Philadelphia. He explained how the surrounding areas of Old Forge were similar to Abruzzo, with mountains and wildlife and some wilderness. Salvatore couldn’t suppress his smile as Pietro introduced his idea. His uncle had already spoken to his friend, a man named Alberto who had traveled to America with Pietro in 1892. Alberto had tried the butcher shop with Pietro just as Salvatore had, but left after a year for Old Forge, where he worked in the coal mines. It wasn’t exactly rural in the same way Palombaro was, but it could feel more like home than Philadelphia had. Pietro explained that Alberto had already agreed to take him in, and that he was certain he could get him a job in the coal mine.
***
It was the spring of 1904 and the now 29-year-old Salvatore sat aboard a steam locomotive on his way to Old Forge from Philadelphia, excited for a new beginning. As the train sped through Pennsylvania, ducking below the carved-out tunnels, and weaving its way around the rocky terrain, the trees opened up to reveal a deep valley below the right side of the tracks, flanked by a range of mountains on all sides. The view lasted only a few seconds, as the forest quickly swallowed the train back up, but it had been enough time to allow Salvatore to imprint the scene into his memory. He was given a map in the train station and had been tracing their route since they left the city. He determined where the valley was on the map, somewhere close to where the words “Whitetail Mountains” were spread across in a neat script. Next to it he wrote, “Le Valle di Delata” – “The Valley of Delata”.
***
Salvatore had off from work every Sunday, and he usually spent them atop Alberto’s horse exploring the outskirts of his new home. With a population of just over 4,000 people, Old Forge wasn’t nearly as congested as Philadelphia, but it was still too crowded for him. He liked to ride, even though cars were quickly becoming the main source of transportation throughout the country. He kept the map from the train station in his sock at all times, trying to figure out just how far his Valley of Delata was from the town. In the local library, he found maps close in size to his and estimated that based off their distance keys, the Valley was about eight miles south of Old Forge. Six months after first seeing the Valley, he decided that he was going to find it.
***
It was October of 1904 and the leaves had begun to change. Waves of red and yellow splashed atop the trees and Salvatore hoped that he’d still recognize the valley below the mountains as he started on his way. Growing up in Abruzzo, where cars were still a luxury, he was as skilled a rider as Old Forge had seen in the last decade. But trying to follow the sweat-stained map and navigating through the up-and-down nature of the land, what should have been about an hour-long ride ended up taking him close to two-and-a-half hours. He believed he was headed in the right direction, though, and after crossing over a small creek, an opening through the thick trees revealed itself, giving way to the Valley. Salvatore jumped down from the horse, tied him up to a tree near the edge of the forest, and began walking. It was autumn, but the vibrant green had yet to leave the grass, especially in the blades that sat on each side of the water. The creek he had crossed over in the forest had spilled into a small stream that peacefully glided through the middle of the Valley. He looked up to see soaring mountainsides, painted in yellow and red, standing guard over the precious land. The place was quiet, so unlike anything he had experienced since he had been in America. Philadelphia and Old Forge were both remarkably noisy, and he didn’t realize until this moment that he had been longing to hear the buzz of silence for more than three years.
He spent about two hours in the place he deemed the Valley of Delata, traversing the silky grass in a peaceful haze, in awe that he had found an untapped oasis of stillness in a country that seemed to not only tolerate, but worship the constant metal-crunching roars from oil-guzzling machines. He wrote down his observations in a notebook he brought with him, making sure to notate that a fox and then a few deer had emerged to drink from the stream after he settled in the grass. He noticed geese tracks in the dirt and saw no swarms of flies or bugs hovering above the water, which made him confident that it was safe to drink. He wrote that he could hear the high-pitched wails from the steam locomotive on its journey through the mountains and how the railway must not be far. He swung his hatchet into the ground and dug about six inches deep, pulling up dark handfuls of soil with strong tangled roots. He fervently watched the six-inch hole for about five minutes, hoping he’d see signs of a lively underground. Spiders, ground beetles, centipedes, and worms hurried away from the sunlight that now seared into their burrows, and Salvatore wrote with excitement that the ground was fertile. Dark soil, strong roots, and lots of insects are all signs that point to rich land, something his father had taught him on their olive grove. He drank from the river at three different points, notating that it was clear with no odor or metallic tastes. After basking in the Valley’s silence a little longer, he went back into the forest and gave the horse sips of water from his canteen he had collected from the stream. Then he got back on the horse and rode into town, carving X’s into trees with his hatchet along the way so that it wouldn’t take as long to get back next time.
***
Salvatore showed Alberto the sketches he made of the Valley and read him the notes he took about the fertile land and the animals and the odorless water that hadn’t poisoned him. The man told him to make friends. “Sei solo,” he’d say. “You’re lonely.” Salvatore laughed the notion off at first, but soon realized the older man was right. His experience in Philadelphia made him weary of approaching Americans. The way the men in the butcher shop acted toward him once they heard his accent and saw his dark hair had begun to resurface with the men from the coal mine, and he decided to keep to himself. There was another Italian immigrant he had become friendly with, and for now, one friend was enough. His name was Enzo, a 27-year-old who had moved to Old Forge from a rural town outside of Florence, a place called Pratolino. They had similar experiences with the famine, both losing parents to malnourishment and having to uproot their lives and move across the Atlantic. They were able to establish a connection right away and confided in each other about the oddities of their new home.
Salvatore’s first winter in Old Forge was disturbingly cold. The sky opened up one day in late November and released thick blankets of snow upon the town, blankets that continued to fall all winter long, making the possibility of traveling to the Valley on the back of a horse almost impossible. Salvatore went to mass with Alberto every Sunday, and then would spend the afternoons touring the city with Enzo. They went to nickelodeons, a new commodity in America at the time, where you could watch projected motion pictures for a nickel. They spent most afternoons walking the streets in the cold, talking about their homeland, and discussing whether they’d ever make it back.
Most of the men from the mines would go to the bar Sunday, to drink away the pain from a rigorous week, and to prepare the for next. They’d occasionally step outside to get some fresh air and smoke their cigarettes, eager to whistle at any woman who walked by or berate any Italian who dared to exist. If any of the men happened to be outside the bar as Salvatore and Enzo strolled along the sidewalk across the street, the men would yell at them or throw stones in their direction. Enzo had grown used to the abuse from the men after being there for two years, and Salvatore had already developed thick skin, thanks to the profanity-laced slander and animal guts that used to be hurled his way in Philadelphia. Their non-reactions made the miners outside the bar seethe with hatred.
***
It was late January in 1905. The two perused the city streets, speaking in their native tongue with each other. Salvatore had told his friend about the Valley, and how once the weather broke, they’d go together. As they continued to walk, the bar door that stood twenty feet in front of them swung open with such force that the top hinge exploded from the wooden panel. Three men rolled out into the sidewalk and toppled onto the street. Salvatore and Enzo instinctively ran over to break up the fight. One of the onlookers noticed the two running toward the three drunken miners and began shouting: “The guineas got knives!”. Within seconds, at least a dozen men, including the three fighting each other in the street, were on top of the two Italians, kicking them with more force than a frustrated branded horse. They each covered their faces and curled their bodies together as tightly as they could, trying to block the kicks and punches with their backsides and legs. Whistles blew out from around the corner, which quickly dispersed the crowd, and as the yelling faded away along with the attackers’ footsteps, two officers knelt down and checked the two young men’s pulses. They were still breathing, but obviously hurt. Blood stained the ground and gentle wheezes were escaping from Enzo’s mouth as their limp bodies were dragged over to the police carriage.
They awoke in what seemed to be an abandoned hallway in the hospital; first Enzo, then Salvatore. They spoke to each other in hushed whispers, not from fear of being heard, but from fear their lungs would explode if they raised their voices. The doctors told them they’d be alright, to get some rest, and to stop causing trouble. The policemen who brought them to the hospital waited outside, and when they limped down the stairs toward the sidewalk to head home, the cops whistled at them, motioning for the men to stop. One grabbed Salvatore by the shirt and the other grabbed Enzo. A spit-filled rant emerged from the mouth of the officer who had Enzo in his clutches, and his head jerked from Salvatore’s face to Enzo’s, swinging back and forth as he spoke. He told them he’d kill them if he got another call about the two of them disturbing the peace, and that they were being watched.
The two staggered back to their homes without uttering a single word to each other. They knew the targets that had already been on their backs just grew ten times larger, and that they couldn’t do anything about it.
***
The weather finally broke, and as spring shooed winter away, allowing the sun to hang in the sky a little longer, Salvatore was stuck in the dark. The men in the mines continued to make life difficult for both he and Enzo. They’d steal their lunches or urinate in their canteens. They’d grab the Italians’ leather tool sacks and write on them with chalk: “Dago”, “Greaseball”, “Ginzo”. The two never retaliated, which infuriated the miners even more. The men realized they couldn’t break the Italians’ minds, so they settled for their bodies. They’d throw rocks of coal at the two. They’d hit Salvatore and Enzo’s legs with their pickaxes in their backswings as they clinked the land for coal. Enzo finally suggested to his friend one night after work that they ought to kill one of the men to send a message. Salvatore admitted he would like to but reminded Enzo that if they were to attack any of the men, they’d each end up dead within hours. Alberto told them to just keep their heads down and do their work. Eventually, the men would grow tired of it all, and the abuse would stop. He knew from experience, he told them.
The spring brought with it the chance to get back to the Valley. Salvatore brought Enzo to his sanctuary on a golden Sunday in late March, and the two stayed as long as the sun permitted them to. Salvatore knew the best route to the Valley by now and they made it there in forty-five minutes, arriving a little before noon. They traversed the delicate grass without shoes, allowing their bare feet to slowly sink into the rich soil Salvatore had been telling his friend about for the last few months. They each took sips from the stream that still lay just as peacefully down the middle of the land as it had in the fall. They followed deer tracks into the forest on the western side of the Valley and listened quietly to the birds catch up with each other high in the trees after being away all winter. They heard the howls of the train ring out through the trees and bounce off the mountainsides that encircled the land, echoing like a ghostly psalm. Enzo told his friend that it was better than he let on, and that the quietness of it reminded him of his home. They talked about Italy, about each of their hometowns, Pratolino and Palombaro, and how the Valley acted as a vessel, willing and able to transport them back to home.
The aesthetic resemblances between the Valley and their hometowns brought on spells of nostalgia to both young men. They knew this, but let it work its magic, enjoying the memories of the past through the physical sensations of the present. Nostalgia is a peculiar power once it seeps inside one’s mind. It’s capable of twirling around visions of yesterday and mixing them with the desires of tomorrow or the excitements of today. Salvatore saw Palombaro, the charming mountainous region in the hills of Italy, his home, as the embodiment of beauty. He remembered the way the wind hit the tall tufts of grass as it rolled down the hillsides. He could still hear the way the stream sounded outside his bedroom window on summer nights — unrestricted harmony in its purest form. In his mind, Palombaro was the Valley just as Pratolino was the Valley for Enzo. It was beautiful, and they talked about making it theirs.
***
Salvatore had taken all the notes he could on the Valley. He had explored every foot of it and knew that he could cultivate it. He had spent many evenings in the library reading about the recently passed Mountain Homestead Act, an amendment to the Homestead Act of 1862 that granted any US citizen 160 acres of land who was willing to settle on it and farm it for at least five years. The original Homestead Act had expanded the country westward, leaving untapped land in mountainous regions back east vacant. The Mountain Homestead Act was created to entice people to move into mountainous regions that were usually more difficult to tame. Once approved, the homestead had five years to show “evidence of improvement”. Once that happened, the land belonged to the farmer. The amendment was Salvatore’s ticket to making the Valley his, and after studying the act in full, he applied for a grant.
It was then that Salvatore convinced Alberto to visit the Valley with him and Enzo. Their enthusiasm about the place intrigued the older man, but Salvatore’s application for a grant through the Mountain Homestead Act is what made him want to go see it. He promised to look after his friend’s nephew and needed to make sure this application wasn’t a mistake.
Alberto fell in love with the Valley just as quickly as Salvatore had, and for the same reasons. It brought him back to Palombaro, a land he hadn’t seen in thirteen long years. The stream, the vibrant grass, the mountains all around them. He told the two young men he felt as though he was dreaming, stuck in a place between the past and present, not wanting to leave. After surveying the land with Salvatore and Enzo and listening to Salvatore explain his notes, he was sold. He watched in silence as Salvatore demonstrated how fertile the soil was by digging six inches into it with his hatchet as he did before. He heard the train in the distance and liked how even though they were separated from the chaos of town, they weren’t so secluded that they couldn’t use its resources when they needed to. He patted the young man on the back once Salvatore finished his informal pitch, nodded with approval, and told him he had done well. “E bene.”
The three men visited the Valley every Sunday from April until early June as they waited for a response about the grant. Salvatore shared his many notes with them, which had become much more extensive since his first visit in the fall. He discussed his plans, the short-term and the long-term. The Valley was about two miles wide and four miles long. Salvatore’s rendering of what he wanted to do with the land purposely left a lot of it untouched. He liked the idea of keeping it as close to how he found it as possible, an area unharmed by modernization. He came here to get away from the boisterous places, not to create one. But he did realize the potential of the land in the Valley and marked down which crops he thought would do best in its soil. His notes showed that he planned to have cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, and green beans to start, each in their own sections on the eastern side of the stream. He wanted to build one small log cabin on the western side of the stream, a place the three could live while they farmed. He told them one would be sufficient at first, and then they could work on building two more so that each could have their own dwelling. The northern edge of the forest, the section from which they entered the Valley, was included in the grant application, which would allow them to use the oak trees for the cabins. In his notebook, there were sketches of a small town with one longer street, featuring small shops. This was further down the road, Salvatore told them. Enzo and Alberto realized this was much more than a dream to their friend. It certainly started out as one, but he had made moves to transform it into a reality, and the fruits of his mental labor were blossoming before either of them knew the seeds were planted.
***
On June 7, 1905, Salvatore was granted the land. The stipulations were simple: he had to reside on the land for five years, show evidence of having made improvements within that time frame, and if he did, then the land was truly his. He knew he would succeed, and in his mind, the Valley of Delata was already his.
When the three men quit their jobs at the coal mine the following Monday, the miners didn’t understand. They were furious and the town buzzed with wild bouts of gossip. They must have a guinea in the government, they said. “They blackmailed him!” they shouted. But Salvatore and his two friends didn’t care what was said. They were free to farm the land and escape the noise of the town. They immediately got to work on building their cabin and finished within a month. Salvatore had started accumulating supplies. He had tedders and mechanical rakes, which were larger than the ones his father had back home. He began to till the land, feeling lucky that the approval had come when it did, as early June in the northeast region of the US is about the latest you can till land without harming it. Salvatore’s vision had manifested into existence, and he was proud.
***
The men in the mines were not willing to accept that three immigrants were smart enough to know how to take advantage of what they called “government handouts to the lazy guineas.” Their rage festered inside them as summer passed into fall, but the tipping point came on a Sunday in September. Salvatore walked into the bakery after mass. Four of the men from the mine were in there, prepared to throw insults in his face. But right before they opened their mouths, several of the people in the bakery not only approached him, but congratulated him on his “well-deserved” success. The miners stood in silence with their arms across their barreled chests as more and more of their friends and neighbors offered up compliments to the man they determined was grotesque.
A meeting occurred later that evening in one of the miner’s basements. The four who had witnessed the scene in the bakery sat there, sipping their whiskey, deciding that they could not stand by and watch their beloved city get taken over by undeserving sub-humans.
***
The specifics of the murder have always been murky. What we know for sure is that Salvatore had been discovered somewhere in the forest between Old Forge and his Valley of Delata, with twenty-one lacerations across his body. His neck had been slit open, his stomach had been gutted like a prized deer, and his intestines lay frozen on the ground with the morning dew. He was left along the trail on purpose, so that Enzo or Alberto would be the ones to find him, which is exactly what happened. Alberto saw the heap of flesh from atop his horse and immediately knew it was a human body. He got down, knelt beside Salvatore’s mangled flesh, and wept, clutching the young man’s blood-stained arm. Enzo arrived twenty minutes later. The two men knew who had done it. This was no mystery to them. But they knew they were powerless. Enzo traveled back to grab linen cloths from his house, and then hustled to the police station, where the chief followed him into the forest that led to the Valley. Salvatore’s two friends wrapped his body in the linens and rode him back into town.
The murder shocked the town, and the people demanded that an investigation be opened. They asked who could have done such a thing, and why. They didn’t seem to care that it was an Italian who had been slaughtered for no apparent reason. The police closed their case seventy-two hours after opening it, stating that it must have been someone passing through the area, someone they’d never be able to track down. Corruption within societies isn’t a newly discovered art. It’s existed as long as the human race has, and the police and the miners celebrated their part in it over subtle nods and winks to each other in the weeks that followed.
***
Enzo and Alberto stuck to their word they gave their friend in the summer of 1905. They allowed the land to flourish and prosper and had no trouble showing evidence of improvements on the land five years later. Within those five years, more and more people received grants through the Mountain Homestead Act, expanding on Salvatore’s vision of the Valley and helping to transform it into an agricultural hot spot. They kept it simple, with the land never being overshadowed by the added cabins. When one stepped out of the forest and into the Valley, even in 1925, twenty years after Salvatore’s death, the sight looked similar to what he saw the first time he stepped onto its soil. The only difference were the growing number of log cabins and the small squares of crops, sectioned off to look like small gardens across the stream. The green grass and the flowing water had remained untouched. Enzo and Alberto referred to the place as The Valley of Delata, telling the newcomers that’s what their small town was called.
Enzo was there in 1948 to cut the ribbon that introduced the first gravel road in the Valley of Delata. They named it Main Street. It was a short stretch of pavement that ran about half a mile long parallel to the stream. It sat past the cabins on the western side of the water and kept the integrity of the land intact. At 70-years-old, Enzo knew that he wouldn’t be able to control how the land evolved once he passed, but he had done all he could to preserve it. He had shared his friend’s vision with everybody who settled there and had made sure that as long as he was alive, the land would remain unbothered. He had honored his friend.
***
In 2022, you won’t see The Valley of Delata listed on a map. They decided to change the name to Duffmore in 1965, ten years after Enzo’s peaceful death. Government officials agreed they needed something that sounded “like a town”. The Valley of Delata sounded like the name of a film, they said, and was too much of a nuisance to write out. The residents continued to use the name Salvatore first used in 1904. His passion for the land and his motivation to own it without ruining it resonated not only with Enzo and Alberto, but to those who moved there in the years that followed. The first thing any new homestead heard when they introduced themselves to Enzo or Alberto was Salvatore’s story. His two friends made sure that anybody who settled in his Valley would know who he was. It captivated people and gave them hope that they could make their world what they wanted it to be.
They say time heals all things. That may be true, but time also allows memories to fade and stories of inspiration to be replaced with new ones. Salvatore Delata has a statue in a town that used to bear his name. He didn’t rescue anybody from grizzlies or wolves. He simply had a vision and turned it into something real. Most people in the Valley don’t know his story, nor do they care to ask. But now you know Salvatore’s story, and that he created opportunities for generations of people to make a home in a place that allowed them to escape from whatever they need to leave behind.
The Valley of Delata still sits in the middle of the Whitetail Mountains, about 120 miles north of Philadelphia. The surrounding hills are still picturesque and quiet, and they still protect the town that’s featured on various “Top 20 Small Towns in Pennsylvania” lists. If you ever come across it, have an ice cream on one of the benches underneath its founder’s statue and know that this was his vision.
