In the 1870s, students climbed this plateau for summer school, taught in part by the future father of Pennsylvania forestry.
Here's a piece of this mountain's history almost nobody knows. In the eighteen seventies, people came up here to go to school.
Over at Ganoga Lake, the Colonel ran a summer hotel called the North Mountain House, and in a good season it was busy, with better than a hundred and fifty guests in August of eighteen seventy-eight. In the summers of eighteen seventy-six and seventy-seven, the place also hosted one of the first summer schools in the country.
One of the teachers was a doctor and botanist named Joseph Rothrock, and he's a name worth remembering. Rothrock watched what the saws were doing to Pennsylvania, and he became the state's great champion of its forests. They call him the father of Pennsylvania forestry. So picture him here on this plateau, teaching in the summer air, a few years before the lumber crews moved in on the country all around him. Those state forests and parks you drive through today exist in large part because of what he started.
Keep on along the Highland Trail, and take a good look around. This is the kind of forest he was trying to save.
Photo: Harris & Ewing Collection · Public domain
