Clearfield County: Logs, Rafts, and Clear Fields

Clearfield County takes its name from a practical observation: early travelers found open clearings here, attributed to bison herds and the old corn fields of Native peoples. The county was carved from Huntingdon and Lycoming counties in eighteen oh four. For much of the nineteenth century, its economy ran on timber.

Loggers felled the vast Pennsylvania hardwood forests and floated the logs down the West Branch of the Susquehanna River on massive rafts, a practice that peaked between eighteen fifty and nineteen oh one before the best stands were exhausted. The county seat, Clearfield, was incorporated in eighteen forty. That rafting era reshaped the watershed and the local economy in ways that still echo through the region today.