09/18/2026
🌲 A little over a hundred years ago, the mountains of northern Pennsylvania looked like the surface of the moon, and people called the region the Pennsylvania Desert.
The lumber boom ran roughly from the Civil War into the nineteen teens and it was total. Crews took the white pine first, then the hemlock, which was cut as much for the bark as the wood because tanneries needed it. Logging railroads were pushed up every hollow. Whole towns appeared next to a mill and disappeared when the timber ran out. Photographs from around 1900 show ridge after ridge of nothing but stumps, and the erosion and fires that followed made a lot of it worse.
What happened next is the part worth knowing. 🍃 Starting around the turn of the century the state began buying up the cutover land that nobody wanted, often for a couple of dollars an acre, and set it aside as state forest. Those purchases are the reason Pennsylvania now has millions of acres of public forest and why the fall color people drive hours to see exists at all. Almost every mature stand you walk through up there is second growth on ground somebody once wrote off as ruined.
Has your family ever shown you a photo of a Pennsylvania hillside that looks nothing like it does today?
