From Cemetery Hill to the Quiet Glen

Let me tell you the other half of Colonel Ricketts, because the man who spared these trees had already lived a whole lifetime of thunder before he ever came here — and it makes the quiet of this glen mean something more.

Go back to July of eighteen sixty-three. Gettysburg. The great battle, the turning point of the whole Civil War. Young Ricketts is an artillery officer, and on the evening of the second day his battery is posted on a rise called East Cemetery Hill — cannon lined up, the fate of the Union army riding on holding that ground. And in the dusk the Confederates come. They come in a screaming charge right up the hill and into his guns. It gets to hand-to-hand — men fighting with rammers and fence rails and fists among the cannon, in the smoke and the dark, right there at the muzzles. And Ricketts and his gunners hold. They hold the hill. It's one of the desperate, famous stands of that battle.

That man — that officer who stood in the middle of that horror and did not run — is the same man who, decades later, walked down into this silent green canyon and decided to protect it. He rose to Colonel, came home to these Pennsylvania mountains, made his fortune, and then spent the long back end of his life not tearing things down but opening this glen up, cutting trails to the falls so ordinary folks could find the peace of it. He died in nineteen-eighteen, an old man, up at his lake on the plateau — Ganoga Lake, the one that shares a name with the tallest falls.

So when you stand under Ganoga Falls in all that mist and thunder, remember: the man who saved this spot knew real thunder, the kind made by men and cannon, and he'd had his fill of it. Maybe that's why he could see what this quiet place was worth. Some men have to walk through hell before they can recognize a piece of heaven and leave it be.