Ronald E. Ostman, Harry Littell. Wood Hicks and Bark Peelers: A Visual History of Pennsylvania's Railroad Lumbering Communities; The Photographic Legacy of William T. Clarke. Keystone Books Series. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016. Illustrations. 252 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-271-07207-4.
Reviewed by Vagel Keller (Independent Scholar)
Published on H-Pennsylvania (March, 2018)
Commissioned by Allen J. Dieterich-Ward (Shippensburg University)
The history of lumbering and its associated industries in the hemlock-beech consociation forest in the northern tier of Pennsylvania is short and unflattering. Between 1870 and 1920, steam-powered sawmills, tanneries, and railroads combined to clear-cut the old-growth pine, hemlock, and hardwood forests to meet the voracious demands of a growing industrial society. White pine, hemlock, and hardwoods housed and furnished an urbanizing population, while hemlock bark provided the tannin to process leather for shoes, harnesses, and belts to drive the machine tools in steam-driven factories and mills. No tree greater than six inches in diameter was left standing. Then came the wood chemical plants, which harvested the remnants for cordwood to feed their charcoal kilns, the distilled gases from which yielded solvents needed by the dye and paint industries. In the end, the mountains of northern Pennsylvania were rugged wastelands overlooking valleys dotted by ghost towns and depressed communities bereft of the means for recovery.
Wood Hicks and Bark Peelers chronicles those years through the photographs of William T. Clarke. Clarke, a native New Yorker, was an itinerate professional photographer whose three-decade sojourn in north-central Pennsylvania between the mid-1880s and World War I produced an unsurpassed photographic record of the industrial and social landscapes of lumbering in the Commonwealth. When he returned to his family homestead in Rochester, New York, around 1917, Clarke left behind a trove of glass-plate negatives stored in a McKean County barn and then disappeared from view. Found in 1923 after a lengthy search encouraged by renowned forester and governor, Gifford Pinchot, he agreed to transfer those negatives to the Pennsylvania Forestry Commission, which wanted the images to shape public opinion in favor of state forests. But the barn's roof had leaked; many negatives were damaged beyond use. Moreover, the Forestry Commission was interested in the industrial processes and their environmental consequences more than Clarke's images of lumber camps, woodland villages, and studio portraits. All told, 470 of Clarke's negatives ended up in the state archives to occasionally be viewed by historians interested in that time and place—the quantity and subjects of those left behind are lost to history. But something happened in 1974 that would lead to Clarke's work being made available in a more accessible format to the general public.
The prologue tells the story of the serendipitous discovery in that year of a crate of old "window panes" in a shed behind a lakeside cottage in New York and their link to Clarke, revealed through the historical and genealogical detective work of archivist Linda Ries. Wood Hicks and Bark Peelers is a wonderful read, complemented by Ries's introductory chapter tracing Clarke's backstory and explaining the technology of glass-plate photography that he employed. There follow seven short chapters providing historical sketches, rigorously cited in endnotes, of the old growth forest, industries and workers, logging camps and communities, the devastation, and, finally, a conclusion aptly titled "A Mighty Transformation." The heart of Wood Hicks and Bark Peelers, however, is Clarke's photography reproduced in the 109 8x10 prints that follow.
It is the scope of these photographs—discovered, preserved, and now reprinted for the first time in over a century—that makes this more than just another coffee table book. The subjects correct the oversight of the forestry officials in the 1920s, noted by the authors and Reis, by bringing the social context of Clarke's work to light. Nearly all of the images have people in the foreground—family groups, bunkhouse denizens, loggers and railroaders, and the entire populations of deep woods hamlets. In these scenes, looking over the shoulders of the people in the photos as it were, the reader can visualize the working and living conditions of those folks and watch, with the turning of each page, the inexorable advance of (borrowing from Leo Marx and the title for chapter 2) the "machine in the garden." For this reason, at least, Wood Hicks and Bark Peelers is an important contribution to the environmental sector of public history in Pennsylvania.
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Citation:
Vagel Keller. Review of Ostman, Ronald E.; Littell, Harry, Wood Hicks and Bark Peelers: A Visual History of Pennsylvania's Railroad Lumbering Communities; The Photographic Legacy of William T. Clarke.
H-Pennsylvania, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=51563
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