Cover Story
How Green Is This valley
by JOHN FULMER

One hundred years ago, Pennsylvania’s Pine Creek Valley was a barren landscape. Almost all of the forest surrounding Pine Creek had been clear-cut to feed a growing country’s insatiable need for lumber. Entrepreneurs and speculators became ‘Lumber Barons,’ a concentration of which lived in Williamsport, the unofficial capital of the Keystone State’s timber industry. It is often repeated that Williamsport during this turn-of-the-twentieth-century boom had more millionaires per capita than any other city in the world.

Today, this might seem like a dubious distinction since Pennsylvania’s lumbering industry played havoc with the environment, but history revels in human accomplishment. Progress is measured in dollars and millionaires per capita, but species lost to habitat destruction and creeks silted in by erosion are usually the concerns of revisionist historians or tree-huggers, precious few of which lived here in 1908.

In a brief but comprehensive booklet distributed by the Pennsylvania Lumber Museum, the editors note that, by 1900, after a century of intensive logging, the state had seen sawmill production rise from less than a thousand board feet a day to several hundred thousand per day.

“The people involved could see better than anyone the depletion of the forests,” they wrote. “Soon they would be completely harvested, but the lumbermen did not slow down.”

By 1906, fifty-seven Pennsylvania mills produced three million board feet a year. And there were hundreds more smaller mills. Two of the largest mills were in Potter County: Galeton’s Goodyear Company mill, with a ninety-two million board-foot yearly output; and Austin’s Goodyear mill, with an output of seventy-two million board feet. 

“For two centuries, the relentless use of Pennsylvania’s forests was overlooked by most people,” the booklet editors wrote. “As long as profits were realized, the loss of forest did not seem to matter.

“By 1920, the seemingly endless forests had become history, and in hundreds of lumber towns as the last, solitary log was moved up the jack ladder, the sawmill whistle was given a long, lonely, final blast, which signaled the closing of the mill and the end of an era. Loggers moved to West Virginia and to the lake states, leaving behind thousands of devastated treeless acres.”

The glory, the miracle is that nature rebounds. Pine Creek and its valley and surrounding forests have made a recovery, most of which is due, oddly enough, to the Lumber Barons’ love-’em-and-leave-’em business practices. When the timber was exhausted, they simply lit out for new territories. Unlike today, lumber wasn’t seen as a “renewable resource;” Forest management was an alien concept.

Chuck Dillon, owner of Pine Creek Outfitters (see sidebar on page 12), is the author of several trail guides and Pennsylvania’s Grand Canyon: A Natural & Human History, in which he wrote:

“The lumber companies moved south and west, selling their lands to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania or letting them go for unpaid taxes. The commonwealth set this land aside as ‘Forest Reserve,’ but it quickly became known as ‘The Great Pennsylvania Desert,’ covered by thick brambles and brush as the forest we see today began to take root and grow.”

But much of this wasteland became public land. The Division of Forestry, created in 1895 as part of the Department of Agriculture, became a separate department after 1900. According to the Lumber Museum booklet, “Within four years, the new department had almost 550,000  acres under its control. It’s mission was to regenerate the forest, protect the watersheds, and extinguish forest fires. A forestry school was established at Mount Alto, and it began formally training foresters.

Then came “The Father of Pennsylvania,” Joseph Rothrock, the department’s first commissioner. The Pennsylvania Lumber Museum describes him as a tireless worker whose motto was: “Forests are a crop; protect them from fire; take care of them.”

Despite drawbacks such as a general lack of interest  by the public, fire hazards in the still-smoldering woods, and lack of funds to buy land, Rothrock, who became commissioner in 1895, set to work. A couple of things worked in his favor.

“In the north-central plateau,” according to the museum, “the cut over land was of little value to the lumbermen, so it was available at a very low cost, sometimes only a few dollars per acre.”

In addition,  iron foundries were, at this time, switching from charcoal to coal, and some lumber companies had thousands of useless acres on their hands. Useless to them, because Rothrock snapped it up.

“In ten years,” said the booklet, “the Pennsylvania Department of Forestry had obtained 632,000 acres, about thirty percent of the two million acres it owns today.”
Almost half of that acreage is close to the Grand Canyon. This forest belt, known as The Pennsylvania Wilds, is one of the largest publicly owned tracts in the East.

Two hundred years ago, the forest around Pine Creek, was very different than what we see today. It was mainly white pine and hemlock. The white pine, prized for its use as ship’s masts, might rise to 150 feet or more, and the hemlock, whose bark contained tannin, would be stripped for use in tanneries that soon sprang up as an ancillary industry to lumber. Pine Creek itself was home to spawning salmon. It was perpetually cool due to the dense cover.

So thick was this canopy that the Native-Americans saw Pine Creek as a forbidding, spirit-filled place. The first white men to journey there were equally spooked. The forest was dark at midday. It was filled with mountain lions, bear, bald eagles, and elk.
It’s improbable that Pine Creek will ever return to such a primitive state. Still, its recovery has been remarkable. As Dillon writes: “Places such as the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania challenge us to consider time of a magnitude beyond our everyday frame of reference and to ponder processes which display a wisdom and power beyond what we possess.