The Commission did do something; it sponsored a study of the elk situation. But what was intended simply to solve the elk-tourist-Benezetter wrangle, ended up triggering a soul searching for 12,500 square miles of forested north central Pennsylvania. In only a few years this region, practically unknown beyond its borders, would be reborn.

      A twenty-minute drive north of Benezette, Bob Imhof feels the damp forest soil outside his hometown of Ridgway. His finger traces out a half-foot wide by six-foot long curvature in the leaf-covered ground and then another one just like it a few feet away. Other indentations follow in line, marching off under low hanging oaks, sloping down toward Maple Run. “My interest in railroad grades began when I was around ten after my grandfather described his work on the Pittsburg, Shawmut and Northern rail system,” Bob says, wiping moisture onto his pants. “We used the removed grade to get to the area I hunted with my grandfather.”

      Bob was born in 1947 and raised in Ridgway, a town that had at one point more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the US. Late 19^th Century lumber barons built their mansions there with money that flowed from the forests, via rivers, horse-drawn sleds, or narrow-gauge railroads. Ridgway earned special fame for its homegrown Hyde-Murphy Company that mastered the art of interior woodworking, having decorated buildings such as the Library of Congress, US Supreme Court, and the Smithsonian Institution. But by 1961 the company went bankrupt lying alongside the railroad grades, tanneries, sawmills, and ghost towns — all swallowed up by the forest.

      As post-lumber boom trees reach skyward, many people in Ridgway do not see what the forest has overgrown. Bob does what he can to unearth that history. “Over the last 30 years, I have documented 325 miles of narrow-gauge railroad.” He gets excited when he talks about local history, “The density of industry that used to be here and now was like night and day.” His tie and button down dress shirt belie his penchant to romp in the woods. “At one point it was just one big huge industrial arm. It was driving the economy of this area. These were the resources that helped build the US — at least the eastern US. Many people think it always looked like this. Not even close.”

By the time Bob got into the Penn State Forestry Program at State College about an hour and a half drive south, he had still not left his region. Fearing a lack of jobs after graduation and also a soldier-hungry draft that plucked young men from universities like a kingfisher hunting breakfast, he enlisted in the Air Force.

There Bob found a welcoming environment for his passion for details, punctuality, and precision. To-do lists controlled his daily productivity like a ball-and chain locked to his desk. “I am anal retentive,” he puts it plainly. This isn’t the kind of man you send into battle. From an Air Force base in Thailand Bob became the operations manager keeping fighters and reconnaissance planes in the sky over Viet Nam.

      After his service he worked at Bank One Corp in Ohio where he managed corporate reorganizations. But the call of the wild brought Bob home to Ridgway in 1988. His years away trained his eye not only on the history beneath the detritus-capped soil but rich cultural heritage stretching across the vast north central Pennsylvania that few people who lived there — or away from there — appreciated. This perspective, his self-effacing work ethic, and his operations and accounting background would lay the tracks for north central Pennsylvania’s designation as the second largest heritage area in the United States.

 

Wilderness Undone

Howard Zahniser lived in Forest County, an hour’s drive west of Ridgway, still in north central Pennsylvania. Author of the US Wilderness Act of 1964, he defined wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Perhaps unwittingly he described north central Pennsylvania four hundred years ago. Because the area was so rugged and the towering white pine trees and hemlocks shaded out browse needed by game animals like deer and elk, even Seneca Indians passed through and did not remain.

      But the pioneers didn’t see Zahniser’s wilderness when they moved in — and remained. Through their eyes virgin forests and unworked, ripe land awaited them like an overstocked Wal-Mart on opening day. They didn’t even see white pines but ship masts; they didn’t see hemlocks but tannin factories for tanning leather and for creating formaldehyde and wood alcohol. In 1681, Penn’s Woods stretched nearly unbroken across the state. But by the  beginning of the 1900s, the forests had been transformed into briar patches. The resulting tangle of dried and broken branches, dead bark, splintered snags, and rotting stumps fed conflagrations that burned for years.

Up from the ashes, nevertheless, a reborn forest has been fighting back. This forest has a new face painted with maple, ash, red oak, and black cherry, perhaps the most valuable hardwood forest in the world. These north central woods today blanket five million acres, consisting of the 512,000-acre Allegheny National Forest, 34 state parks, 1.4 million acres of state forests, 450,000 acres of gamelands, and many private properties.

What distinguishes this forest most from its grand poles are 700,000 people scattered across 15 counties. Frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote that many immigrants coming to the United States “gained an energy, an independence, and a creativity that were the sources of American democracy and national character.” And so the people of north central Pennsylvania have retained their independence, stubbornness, and pride in their land. The rural and rugged lifestyle needed to dominate the erstwhile forests and build logging towns and tanneries rooted deeply long after the lumber barons moved on to other things.

At the turn of the century people like Joseph Trimbel Rothrock (father of Pennsylvania Forestry) and Gifford Pinchot (America’s first trained forester, first to use the term “conservationist,” and Governor of Pennsylvania) bought for the Commonwealth smoldering acres on the dollar. They had a forested vision they themselves would never hike during their lifetimes. Later Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps constructed over 60 camps in north central stomping out fires, planting millions of trees, and building infrastructure that would become Pennsylvania’s state park system. Later the state reintroduced deer, otter, fisher, and elk. Bald eagles flourish again, great blue herons are back. Now 80 years later, clearly the fathers and mothers (Rachel Carson was from Pennsylvania) of conservation had done their job.

Wilderness scholar Roderick Nash said that wilderness — or any wilds — is a human creation imbued mostly with meaning by urbanites. While the region’s physical character recovers, the spiritual character has yet to blossom. Few people know the region is one of the largest chunks of public land on the East Coast. Fewer still know its rich heritage. What would it take then to build north central Pennsylvania’s character again?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lumber Heritage Region

In the early 1990s four county commissioners asked the North Central Pennsylvania Regional Planning and Development Commission to help them apply for state heritage status. Since the Commission’s job is to promote local economic development among its six counties, it agreed. In 1995 the Commission turned to the best person for the job. Because of his genetic fondness of detail and love of the outdoors, Bob Imhof, who has been working with the  Commission since 1989 as a procurement manager, sighs, “So now I’m holding two positions at the same time.”

Over the next six years Bob led the application for the feasibility study in 1995, the feasibility study in 1997, the management action plan in 1998, the early implementation projects in 2000, and finally the heritage designation in late 2001. The fifteen-county Lumber Heritage Region became the eleventh of twelve state heritage regions.

Just a five-minute drive from Bob’s office in Ridgway, Dale Lauricella manages the Towers Victorian Inn, a lumber baron Italianate mansion built in 1865 and restored to its youthful splendor. The Inn is a must stop on the downtown historic walking tour, especially in October 2004, when Governor Edward Rendell himself chose to spend the night.

The Philadelphia Democrat had just returned to the region since first being introduced to it during his Route 6 campaign in 2003 that cut across the entire northern length of Pennsylvania. The governor had hopes of picking up votes from the largely Republican rural populace and got more than he planned on.

“He fell in love with the place,” says Dale who expresses the mood in the Inn when the governor’s entourage arrived. It was an historic moment for rural folks of north central Pennsylvania when a flatlander (as the locals call people from Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Pittsburgh) had not only taken interest in their neck of the woods, but declared to make economic development there a high priority. The governor wanted to take advantage of the region’s vast resources — not as early pioneers had — to promote a locally based tourism protecting natural and cultural resources and the way of life of the stump jumpers (as flatlanders sometimes call the sylvan folks).

Dale came to this conclusion after the governor’s visit: “Local communities are slaving away at the grassroots level to save the cultural, natural, and heritage resources that we love and are passionate about. But the Governor and folks at [different agencies] grasped and supported a bigger vision about our inherent possibilities than those of us working on more local and limited levels had ever conceived.”

Part of that vision came when the governor got back to his office in Harrisburg after his first trip and read the 163-page “Plan for Elk Watching and Nature Tourism in North Central Pennsylvania” developed by Fermata, Inc., a nature and culture-based tourism planning company. Bob Imhof and the Commission had funded the elk study with early implementation Lumber Heritage Region grant money. The governor convened a meeting of top aides and Ted Eubanks, president of Fermata, to figure out what to do with the tourists. They decided the opportunity to promote a sensible tourism with the elk in Benezette actually might work for the whole region. So Fermata was asked to assist the state by creating a recreation plan and an interpretation plan for the north central region.

The state tourism folks had already begun marketing the region. Back in Ridgway Dale and other area hoteliers enjoyed a dramatic jump in business volume. But not everyone was ready for the new identity, or even was sure what it meant to be part of a heritage region.

Fermata’s task was to develop a naturally and culturally sensitive tourism that did not necessarily increase visitor volume but rather increase time and money spent by those who came. But that would take time. Fermata was just beginning work on both the recreation plan and the interpretation plan for north central Pennsylvania.

      Some locals worried that their small town way of life could be overrun with pesky tourists. Jim Zoschg, a watershed specialist in Cameron County and local writer, laments, “It’s exciting to think of many people enjoying the wild places and wildlife of Cameron County. However, there is still a part of me that feels Cameron County will lose a piece of herself... Solitude and ruralness will disappear.”

      Others are concerned about opening up the region before it has the capacity to handle more tourists. They worry that there won’t be enough bathrooms, hotel rooms, park infrastructure, or parking spaces in small downtowns, and that the state park budget won’t hold up under the stomping strain of tourists.

      For many it simply comes down to quality of life, wild or not. People in this region are naturally suspicious, home-bred, fiercely loyal to their land and lifestyle. While they welcome economic improvement, they wonder the price. One Amish furniture maker stands in his yard on a hill in Smicksburg. Barns drift on rolling green fields behind him. “I would like the extra business,” he scratches his bushy beard, “but I don’t want tourists coming out with their buses!”

 

Visitors enjoy the Pine Creek Gorge overlook.

 

A New Character Experience

     Even though the Lumber Heritage Region received its non-profit status last October and now dedicates itself to creating natural and cultural products for locals and visitors, Bob is still involved in several older projects. He participates in Fermata’s recreation plan which is for state parks and forests and coordinates the interpretation plan which aims to bring both public agencies and private commercial service providers under one interpretive roof. 

     Despite the identity crisis of north central Pennsylvania reaching back four hundred years, Fermata’s interpretation plan wants to take this crisis head on. It is defining a visitor experience nourished by both the wilderness soul (no people) with the rural soul rooted to the pioneers and loggers. Thus when visitors cross the region, they will have one consistent experience rather than smaller conflicting ones promoted by different local tourism promotion agencies, state land managers, landholders, and tourism companies. They will encounter a cohesive and integrated message whether they visit the ghost towns in Smethport, the Zippo Visitor Center in Bradford, Penn’s Cave in Centre County, the Little League Baseball Hall of Fame in Williamsport, dark skies in Potter County, Heart’s Content virgin forest in the Allegheny National Forest, or Gobbler’s Notch in Punxsutawney.

This approach heartens Bob. “I think the interpretation plan and new tourism emphasis can benefit local people. We want people to be proud of their heritage; it’s not all positive, I would never tell anyone that. But it was a reality and it’s important to educate people.”

Once politicians, interpretive planners, hoteliers, state park managers, tourism promotion agencies, nature guides, and even the elk get on the same page, Bob looks forward to spending more time documenting his railroad grades. “Deep down I am a hill person. I love the mountains, the out of doors, peace and quiet. That’s my therapy. If I didn’t have this, I would go crazy.”

 

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Resources

Elk Study, http://www.fermatainc.com/pennelk

Interp Plan, http://www.fermatainc.com/penn/lumber_heritage.html

LHR web site, http://www.lumberheritage.org/

 

Jon Kohl, interpretive planner consulting with FERMATA, Inc. and a writer specializing in heritage interpretation. To contact him or see his published articles on interpretation, visit his web site.

Shomer Zwelling, a senior interpretive planner with FERMATA, Inc. develops cohesive and integrated frameworks for heritage areas, national parks and museums.  His interpretive plans have laid the foundations for core exhibitions at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, MA, the Boott Cotton Mills in Lowell, MA and the Public Hospital in Williamsburg, VA.