Larrys Creek — Fifty-Three Mills in One Watershed

The stream flowing past this part of Lycoming County carries the name of a man who left almost no other record of himself. In the seventeen sixties, surveyors working through this territory encountered a solitary European settler living in the hills, trading with Native American communities and married to a Native American woman. His name was Larry Burt. The creek took his name, and that is essentially all history preserved about him. It is also notable as the only major creek in Lycoming County whose original Native American name is unknown.

What replaced the wilderness around Larrys Creek over the following century was one of the most concentrated industrial operations in the American interior. At the peak of the lumber era, fifty-three separate sawmills operated within this single watershed. A nineteen oh three newspaper article observed that no other stream in the country had so many mills in so small a territory. The first sawmill went in along the creek in seventeen ninety-six, and the industry compounded from there: by the middle of the nineteenth century the valley also contained grist mills, leather tanneries, coal and iron mines, all threaded along a single watercourse that originates in the mountains above.

This was the engine of Lycoming County's wealth. During the peak lumber decades from eighteen sixty-one to eighteen ninety-one, the mills along the West Branch Susquehanna corridor and its tributaries produced five and a half billion board feet of lumber. Williamsport, at the river's mouth downstream, briefly became the wealthiest city per capita in the United States, its Millionaires Row of Victorian mansions financed by timber from hollows like this one.

The forests came down fast. By the early nineteen hundreds, the hillsides that once held old-growth white pine and hemlock were stripped bare. The mills closed one by one, and the creek ran through a landscape of stumps and slash. A century later, the watershed is eighty-three percent forested again, one of the most complete regenerations in the northeastern United States. Walking these hills today, you would not easily guess that they were once the noisiest industrial valley in Pennsylvania.