Dam Poor

Quinn says it's time I told you about the man who owned all this, so let's talk about money, because that's the part they leave off the signs.

At his peak, Colonel Ricketts owned or controlled better than eighty thousand acres of Pennsylvania. And here's the joke of it. For more than twenty years, the man was strapped. Not poor the way you and I'd be poor. Land poor. He had mortgages stacked to the rafters and a fortune in standing timber with no way to get it out. He'd sell a piece here and a piece there to keep the wolves from the door.

Then the railroad finally came, and the lumbermen came with it, and by the time the Colonel was getting on in years he had some real money at last. And what does he do? Friend, he does what a man like that always does. He bets it on the mountain again.

Around nineteen hundred and five he decides he'll dam the water up on the plateau and go into the electric power business. Three dams. One for a lake he names for his daughter Jean. One for his daughter Leigh. And one he calls Rose, an old family name. The Lake Leigh dam alone, poured in concrete, ran a hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars. The other two ran three hundred thousand more. Those were enormous sums in nineteen hundred and five.

Then along comes the Panic of nineteen oh seven, and banks start falling over. And Mrs. Ricketts, who I suspect had been waiting some time to say it, told the Colonel to stop.

He stopped. And the dams, it turned out, were poorly built. They never could be used for power at all. So there stands this old soldier, a man who held his guns at Gettysburg and carried debt for half his life, looking out at nearly half a million dollars of concrete and log cribbing that wouldn't light one bulb. And what did he say? He made a joke of it. "I used to be land poor," he told folks, "but now I'm dam poor."

The state took down the Leigh and Rose dams years ago, and those two lakes are gone. Lake Jean is still up there, rebuilt and shining, with kids splashing at the beach on a hot day. So when you walk out of this canyon tonight, you can drive up and see what's left of the Colonel's great electric empire. It's a very nice place for a swim.