The Lumber Industry in Tioga County

It would be hard to estimate the value of lumber floated out of Tioga County before the advent of railroads. An old record says that in 1804 about 452 rafts, containing 22,000,000 feet of lumber, besides a large number of arks, loaded with wheat, flour, staves, whiskey, and shingles, the whole aggregating in value $5,000,000, passed out of the North Branch at Northumberland. Of course, only a small part of this was from Tioga County, it being then comparatively unsettled, but it shows the magnitude of lumbering operations in northern Pennsylvania even at that early day.

Few, if any, of the early lumbermen made any money at the business. The owners of small mills scarcely realized as much from them as a good farmer would now make on a twenty-acre farm. But lumber was about the only thing that brought any ready money into the county, and the timber had to be cleared away before the land could be cultivated. Farming, at least, in the western part of the county, was at a low ebb, none making more than enough to eke out a scanty living for a family. Men, women, and children had to live, and to live decently had to have clothing, and to live at all had to have something to eat, and the men especially had to have something to drink. They could raise a little rye, which was changed into whisky at the distillery in Wellsboro; but tea and coffee and spices and cotton they could not raise, and the only business that furnished the money to buy these necessaries was lumbering.

It is hard to tell whether it was sawed lumber or squared timber that brought most money back to the creek settlement; and what did come generally went to Wellsboro to pay store bills contracted during the lumbering season, never for a moment forgetting the little stone distillery across the creek in that town. Payday was always "after rafting," and it was generally futile and very unpopular to attempt to collect a debt till after the spring floods had floated the lumber to market and its diminishing price had been brought back. With all the hard work and drawbacks of those days, lumbering on Pine Creek had its charms. With the hardy, rugged lumbermen it made little difference whether he slept on a board, hemlock boughs, or a feather bed. Most of them preferred the former.

History of Tioga County Pennsylvania R. C. Brown & Co 1897 Chapter IX Industrial Development Pages 111, 114 & 115

Photo: Lumber Crew from James V. Brown Library, Williamsport