Eight hundred people, a railroad, a school and a church, all built to cut one mountain. By 1914, five families were left.
You've been walking past trees that never felt a saw. Let me tell you what happened to the ones that did.
A few miles north of Lake Jean there was a town. Ricketts, Pennsylvania. You won't find much of it now, and here's why.
In eighteen ninety the Colonel leased his timber to an outfit called Trexler and Turrell, and they went up on Mehoopany Creek and built a whole town in the woods to cut it. At its peak, eight hundred people lived there. It had a company store, a hotel and a boarding house, a railroad station, a Lutheran church, a community hall, and a two-room school. Downtown, the mills turned out barrel staves and excelsior, the shredded wood folks packed their china in. Uptown, a big hardwood mill ran all day. Three locomotives hauled logs over twenty-two miles of track. By nineteen eleven that mill had cut better than five hundred million feet of lumber. Try picturing that as trees. Children learned their letters to the sound of those saws. And folks planted apple trees, the way you do when you figure you're staying.
Now here's the part that aches. A lumber town doesn't have a future, friend. It has a supply. Every day the whistle blew, those saws were eating the very reason the town existed. Everybody knew it, and I don't imagine anybody said so at supper.
The last full season was nineteen thirteen. By the end of nineteen fourteen, five families were left. Five. Eight hundred people gone in about a year, with the mountain stripped bare behind them.
It's all state game land now. There's a stone railroad abutment beside the creek. There's the foundation of that schoolhouse. There's an old well. And there are the apple trees, still standing back in the woods with no yards around them.
So when you put your hand on one of these old giants up here, remember they've got a twin. Same owner. Same mountain. One piece got the saw, and one got spared, and there's only a few miles between them. And every fall, those apple trees still drop their fruit for a town that walked away. The deer don't mind a bit.
Photo: Postcard lower right corner has "Photo by M. F. Peale" · Public domain
