Williamsport: Millionaires Row and Little League

For a single generation in the second half of the nineteenth century, this city on the West Branch of the Susquehanna River was, by some measures, the richest per-capita city in the United States. Williamsport was the lumber capital of the world, and the pine forests of north-central Pennsylvania were producing wealth at a rate that stunned even the gilded age.

The mechanism that made it possible was the Susquehanna Boom, a seven-mile system of log cribs and chained timbers anchored to the riverbed and designed to catch the millions of logs that were floated downstream each spring from the Lycoming County forests. At its peak the boom could hold a million logs at a time. Nearly sixty sawmills lined the riverbanks between Lycoming and Loyalsock Creeks, processing timber around the clock. Between eighteen sixty-eight and nineteen oh six, Williamsport's mills sawed more than eight billion feet of white pine , a number almost impossible to visualize but easy to see in its consequence. Lumber barons built enormous Victorian mansions along West Fourth Street in a neighborhood still known as Millionaires Row.

But the forests were finite. By the late eighteen seventies the pine was largely exhausted, and the loggers turned to hemlock. Then the floods came. The flood of eighteen ninety-four broke the Susquehanna Boom and washed close to two million board feet of lumber downriver. The era was over.

Williamsport reinvented itself in a smaller key. In nineteen thirty-nine, a local man named Carl Stotz organized a three-team baseball league for boys in his neighborhood, with a field scaled to fit children rather than adults. He called it Little League. The first game was played on June sixth of that year. By nineteen forty-seven the first tournament was held in Williamsport, which became the permanent home of the Little League World Series. Every August, the city that once built America's lumber economy hosts the world's most famous youth baseball championship.