Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Lumber Region as Pennsylvania's Appalachia

In 1846, the prolific German travel writer Franz Von Loher observed how the Pennsylvania wilderness had shaped the character of mountain dwellers. Riding his horse into the Allegheny Mountains, he was soon overcome with "a deep sylvan desolation." "Such thick and endless forests," he mused, "are like a dark power of nature, depressing to the spirit. And to try singing is to hear oneself in the echoes of the first verse, and to sink back into the heavy silence of nature." The forest enveloped Von Loher and he began to see his journey as one of time as well as space. Life in the wilderness seemed to trigger a reversion of cultural progress. "The longer in the forest, the further from European civilization." As civilization receded from view, Von Loher contrasted the effect upon the people. "In valleys, which communicate with a much-traveled thoroughfare, farmers already have elegant homes and gardens. Yet these beginnings of culture are like a few specks scattered about the forest that runs for hundreds of miles unbroken over stretches of hills and mountains in which there are, even now, wooded acres and craggy slopes where no human sets foot the year round, where only deer and bear roam." The urbane, well-traveled Von Loher could not help but pity the dwellers of the forest.

I went into several of their cabins and found a completely backwoods character. People live alone in the dark of the forest, cut off from all the happiness of fellowship. Life is a monotonous battle with nature every day, and thoughts go no further than the thicket that hems in home and field. To these people, axe and rifle are treasures; self-confidence and the Bible, the only sources of ideas and solace in this desolation. Silence and emptiness of wilderness, which surround these people unremittingly, fill their souls with a dismal religiosity.

Throughout history, humans and their environment have been locked in an intimate embrace, making it essential to understand the significance of place in human affairs. In the mountains of Pennsylvania, the environment helped shape distinct social, political, and economic tensions that provided a fertile ground for Civil War opposition. From the narrow river valleys to the remote mountain districts, the people of the lumber region responded to the war in dramatically different ways. While opposition was a direct response to wartime conditions, it also occurred within a diverse people confronting the challenges of an expanding market economy. Internal divisions between residents of the Pennsylvania Appalachians also reflected different ideologies and opposing loyalties.

While conflicting political ideologies were significant, economic inequalities also contributed to wartime protest. In the Appalachian highlands of Pennsylvania, the environment placed considerable obstacles in the path of economic progress. The imposing terrain separated settlements over great distances and left residents with tenuous ties to outside people and markets. It was a region of befuddling contrasts, dominated by mountains, rivers, and seemingly endless stretches of old-growth forest. Although land was cheap and plentiful, it took a lifetime of exertions to clear the dense woodland and establish farms. Climate and mountain soils doomed most of the farms to marginal quality at best. Early settlers established reasonably productive farms in the narrow flatlands along rivers and streams. Later immigrants, however, were forced onto some of the state's worst agricultural lands, where the dreams of family comfort proved illusory.

To offset the disadvantage of small farms, agriculturalists sold timber in downriver markets. Lumber region farmers relied on the symbiotic relationship between forestry and agriculture that accompanied early settlement. While the region's vast woodland resources would turn select capitalists into millionaires, small farmers did not share the wealth. Their simple technology and lack of capital relegated them to a minor role in the lumber trade. With only their own labor to exploit, most area farmers became marginalized as industrial exploitation of the wilderness expanded in the 1850s.

Pennsylvania's Appalachia was a multilayered society, representing distinct and often contested political and economic interests. The economic potential of the region attracted people whose goals for settlement and permanence differed. On the eve of the Civil War, the lumber region was both a rural backwater and an industrializing landscape with unique consequences for wartime opposition. In the small farming communities a rural, agricultural economy predominated. Poorer farming conditions were offset for a time by the vigorous exploitation of the forest. Community bonds drew different groups of people into networks of exchange and reciprocity. In that sense, the mountains of Pennsylvania shared characteristics of the southern Appalachians. Residents engaged in a dual economy, supplementing exchanges of goods and labor with occasional market transactions. The bonds between families and friends were crucial in sustaining community members through hard times.

In contrast, capitalists exploited the mountains with industrial development that threatened the livelihoods of area landholders. Beginning in the 1850s, large-scale logging dramatically increased the number of wageworkers in the region. The discovery of oil and later of bituminous coal in northwestern Pennsylvania provided additional work for thousands of young men hoping to get ahead someday. While many of these day laborers came from local farming families, the mobility and anonymity of wage work was the antithesis of settled community life. Industrial exploitation of the wilderness created temporary workers' communities, characterized by an aggressive masculine culture and a fluid workforce.

The terrain and resources of the Pennsylvania Appalachians shaped the economic and political conditions for both the rooted and the rootless. Small farmers who relied upon rafting feared economic marginalization in the face of expanding industrial logging. State Republicans were the foremost advocates of large-scale lumbering and their opponents had a history of violent backlash that predated the Civil War. In the late 1850s, raftsmen literally fought back against loggers in defense of their customary use of the rivers. Wageworkers presented a different challenge to Republican authority during the war. Cut from the ties of community, mobile wage laborers were free to pursue economic self-interest. Many of these hard-working young men were hesitant to forgo wartime wage increases for the poorly paid and dangerous job of soldiering. In both cases, the environment of the region contributed to unique social, political, and economic circumstances at the root of wartime opposition.

Refined travelers like Franz Von Loher failed to see the social and economic diversity of the Pennsylvania Appalachians. The Bavarian affirmed that the desolate mountains stalled economic and cultural advancement that could be deemed "civilization." Von Loher held a decidedly middle- class image of culture, measured in the visible material progress of prosperous farms and factories. Observing the lives of early settlers, he dismissed their toil and communities as dismal and meaningless. Yet the people of the mountains varied greatly depending on one's vantage point.

Social distinctions were manifest from the area's earliest settlement and magnified by the expansion of the market economy in the mid-nineteenth century. The region's oldest and most influential families bought land along the narrow river valleys of the Susquehanna's West Branch and Allegheny River systems. Early investment in the most valuable properties insured a place of social and political prominence for their offspring. Elite families improved their standings by promoting the social and economic development of the region. They played paternalistic roles in community advancement, organizing internal improvement companies and supporting charitable and civic projects. In addition to their work as boosters, these local elites grew wealthier through land investment, manufacturing and mercantile endeavors, and exploitation of the region's abundant resources. With so much at stake, these successful families garnered prominent positions in politics, adopting a predominantly Whig outlook supporting state-sponsored economic improvement. They stood in the forefront of plans to develop the region's transportation and industrial potential. Though not all were Republicans, local elites were conspicuous in support of the war effort.

The Philadelphian Thomas L. Kane was representative of this group. Born into a wealthy and politically influential family, his father was a judge and his brother a famous arctic explorer. In 1856 Kane settled in Elk County as one of the directors for the Sunbury and Erie Railroad venture. He had ambitious plans for an agricultural estate supported by revenue from mining coal, raising sheep and cattle, and cultivating large tracts of land. Builders had cleared the land and piled materials for constructing his new mansion house when war broke out. Kane earned lasting fame as the primary organizer of the Pennsylvania "Bucktails," a regiment of mountain soldiers who wore deer tails as an emblem of their wild nature. Men like Kane aspired to wealth and status, and saw the resources of the mountains as commodities. Their wealth and connections brought them a disproportionate share of profits, reflected in their fine homes and more elegant lives.

The majority of inhabitants lived more modestly than Kane. Later migrants typically became tenants or owners of smaller upland farms, composed of simple log homes and barns. Most people did not live in towns but in scattered agricultural settlements. Williamsport and Lock Haven, both situated on the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, were the only towns with more than 2,500 people. The small towns like Clearfield represented the spear points of Von Loher's civilization thrust into the forest, and formed the economic, social, and political hubs of their rural hinterlands. Area farmers went to town to trade with country merchants, to hear political speeches and vote, to pay taxes and attend court, or to get their likenesses taken by itinerant photographers. Social institutions in the countryside went little beyond churches and rudimentary schools.

Those at the bottom of the social pyramid were most susceptible to failure. The descriptions for sheriff sales in local newspapers recorded the humble farms of the indebted, characterized often by their small clearings and log barns and dwellings. For those families that could not make ends meet, moving out of the region offered a solution. In one township of Clearfield County alone, 46 percent of the farm families listed in 1850 were gone a decade later.

Ethnic diversity complicated the social structure of the Pennsylvania Appalachians and created the potential for conflicting group loyalties. With slightly less than one in ten residents of foreign birth, the lumber region approximated the average of counties outside the urban centers of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Scots-Irish settlers were prominent among early settlers but the work of lumbering also attracted men of English and French backgrounds from New England and the Canadian provinces. Germans made up a significant minority, accounting for most of Elk County's nearly 30 percent foreign-born population. In addition, smaller numbers of other immigrant groups, including Scandinavians and Irish, lived in the region. Though some Irish became agriculturalists, the census of 1860 also recorded mobile Irish laborers. In St. Mary's, Elk County, dozens of Irishmen were preparing the path of the ambitious Sunbury and Erie Railroad project and lived in boarding houses. Ethnic ties provided an additional security to group settlements but sharpened the divides between strangers and friends. During the war, ethnic loyalties offered the potential to undermine national allegiance.

The mountainous geography of the lumber region shaped local patterns of settlement and labor. While not as high as the southern Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains, the northern Appalachians formed an imposing land mass that constricted westward expansion in the colonial period. They were the eroded remains of ancient continental collisions extending more than 2,000 miles from Maine through Georgia. In Pennsylvania, the Appalachian highlands encompassed the central ridge and valley region as well as the jumbled Appalachian Plateau that dominates the western and northern areas of the state. The lumber region occupied the highest elevations of the Appalachian Plateau and sheltered extensive remnants of old-growth white pine and hemlock forests. The lumbering of these majestic trees gave the region its name and employed thousands of agricultural laborers during the slack winter months.

The distance from early settlements and the difficulties imposed by rugged terrain delayed migration into the Appalachians for decades. Philadelphia lay on a narrow coastal plain bordering the more fertile soils of the piedmont. Throughout the nineteenth century, the piedmont served as the state's breadbasket, surpassing all other regions in agricultural production. In the mid-eighteenth century, as state officials concluded additional purchase treaties with Indian tribes, settlement extended farther north and west in layers. Here settlers found a series of sandstone ridges and limestone valleys stretching westward to the mountains. The Allegheny Front marked the transition from ridge and valley region to the higher jumbled mountains of the Appalachian Plateau. Running diagonally from northeast to southwest, the front was an imposing challenge to settlement of the state's western half. In the debate over land matters, many legislators considered the northern region to be wastelands. In 1784, Pennsylvania purchased the northwestern mountain region from the Six Nations of the Iroquois, opening the door to migration.

Principal landholders of the region tried to promote community building but settlement progressed slowly through the 1820s and 1830s. The early pioneers survived by sheer tenacity alone, with limited connection to the outside world. They lived in harsh isolation, far in advance of roads, stores, mills, and community. An early settler of Potter County wrote: "It was very lonesome for several years. People would move in and stay a short time and move away again. It has been but a few years since settlers began to stick." By 1820, Potter County had only 186 people in a "few straggling settlements."

A number of factors encouraged more permanent settlements in the 1820s. State and land agents, along with settlers, improved roads through the forest, built bridges, and helped link people together. Better transportation routes encouraged investments in stores, mills, hotels, and other community supports. State officials helped by politically organizing the region with its own local governments to promote regional growth more directly.

Group migration formed a number of the ethnic communities in the region, often as an escape from hardship and persecution. German exiles from the European revolutions of the 1840s established several settlements, including Germania in Potter County. Laboring men formed farming communities while skilled tradesmen made homes in the infant towns such as Coudersport. In 1844, German Catholic leaders formed the German Union Bund Society and established the St. Mary's settlement in an area of low hills bordering Elk Creek. Some of their members had been victims of nativist attacks farther east, fomented by anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing politics in Baltimore and Philadelphia. Others migrated directly from revolutionary Europe in response to booster literature that extolled the region's supposed virtues. St. Mary's founders allayed potential immigrants' fears for health and farm productivity. "No better proof of the health of this colony can be had than a little journey through its streets. From every house, one can see red-cheeked and happy-looking people, as we are used to seeing them in Bavaria, Westphalia, and other parts of Germany. ... In one word, nature seems to have taken especial care to prepare this land for the growing of fruit for wine and grains and for all kinds of industrial enterprises." Founders instituted policies to further attract and comfort migrants, including provisions for church attendance, shared labor, and schooling. The population grew steadily, aided by facilities such as a community building, sawmill, church, store, hotel, convent, and brewery.

---

Excerpted from "Deserter Country"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Fordham University Press.
Excerpted by permission of Fordham University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---