In Wood Hicks and Bark Peelers, Ronald E. Ostman and Harry Littell draw on the stunning documentary photography of William T. Clarke to tell the story of Pennsylvania’s lumber heyday, a time when loggers serving the needs of a rapidly growing and globalizing country forever altered the dense forests of the state’s northern tier. Discovered in a shed in upstate New York and a barn in Pennsylvania after decades of obscurity, Clarke’s photographs offer an unprecedented view of the logging, lumbering, and wood industries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They show the great forests in the process of coming down and the trains that hauled away the felled trees and trimmed logs. And they show the workers—cruisers, jobbers, skidders, teamsters, carpenters, swampers, wood hicks, and bark peelers—their camps and workplaces, their families, their communities. The work was demanding and dangerous; the work sites and housing were unsanitary and unsavory. The changes the newly industrialized logging business wrought were immensely important to the nation’s growth at the same time that they were fantastically—and tragically—transformative of the landscape. An extraordinary look at a little-known photographer’s work and the people and industry he documented, this book reveals, in sharp detail, the history of the third phase of lumber in America.

A study of the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the most popular programs created by FDR as part of the New Deal, examines Pennsylvania's CCC program, discussing their successful work in the reforestation of the state, upgrading state park recreational facilities, historic preservation, soil conservation, and relief assistance to Pennsylvania families in need.

The bloodshed and hatred of frontier conflict at once made go-betweens obsolete and taught the harsh lesson of the woods: the final incompatibility of colonial and native dreams about the continent they shared. Long erased from history, the go-betweens of early America are recovered here in vivid detail.

Placemaker is a call to tend our souls, our land, and our homes--to cultivate comfort, beauty, and peace in the places God has us. Images of comfortable kitchens and flower-filled gardens stir something deep within us--we instinctively long for home. In a world of chaos and conflict, we want a place of comfort and peace. In Placemaker, Christie Purifoy invites us to notice our soul's desire for beauty, our need to create and to be created again and again. As she reflects on the joys and sorrows of two decades as a placemaker and her recent years living in and restoring a Pennsylvania farmhouse, Christie shows us that we are all gardeners. No matter our vocation, we spend much of our lives tending, keeping, and caring. In each act of creation, we reflect the image of God. In each moment of making beauty, we realize that beauty is a mystery to receive. Weaving together her family's journey with stories of botanical marvels and the histories of the flawed yet inspiring placemakers who shaped the land generations ago, Christie calls us to cultivate orchards and communities, to clap our hands along with the trees of the fields, to step into our calling to create, to make a place in the place God made for us. Placemaker is a timely yet timeless reminder that the cultivation of good and beautiful places is not a retreat from the real world but a holy pursuit of a world that is more real than we know.

"Examines the life of Mira Lloyd Dock, a Pennsylvania conservationist and Progressive Era reformer. Explores a broad range of Dock's work, including forestry, municipal improvement, public health, and woman suffrage"--

A study of the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the most popular programs created by FDR as part of the New Deal, examines Pennsylvania's CCC program, discussing their successful work in the reforestation of the state, upgrading state park recreational facilities, historic preservation, soil conservation, and relief assistance to Pennsylvania families in need.

Two powerfully contradictory images dominate historical memory when we think of Native Americans and colonists in early Pennsylvania. To one side is William Penn&’s legendary treaty with the Lenape at Shackamaxon in 1682, enshrined in Edward Hicks&’s allegories of the &"Peaceable Kingdom.&" To the other is the Paxton Boys&’ cold-blooded slaughter of twenty Conestoga men, women, and children in 1763. How relations between Pennsylvanians and their Native neighbors deteriorated, in only 80 years, from the idealism of Shackamaxon to the bloodthirstiness of Conestoga is the central theme of Friends and Enemies in Penn&’s Woods. William Pencak and Daniel Richter have assembled some of the most talented young historians working in the field today. Their approaches and subject matter vary greatly, but all concentrate less on the mundane details of how Euro- and Indian Pennsylvanians negotiated and fought than on how people constructed and reconstructed their cultures in dialogue with others. Taken together, the essays trace the collapse of whatever potential may have existed for a Pennsylvania shared by Indians and Europeans. What remained was a racialized definition that left no room for Native people, except in reassuring memories of the justice of the Founder. Pennsylvania came to be a landscape utterly dominated by Euro-Americans, who managed to turn the region&’s history not only into a story solely about themselves but a morality tale about their best (William Penn) and worst (Paxton Boys) sides. The construction of Pennsylvania on Native ground was also the construction of a racial order for the new nation. Friends and Enemies in Penn&’s Woods will find a broad audience among scholars of early American history, Native American history, and race relations.

True tales of a Pennsylvania Game Warden tracking down wildlife poachers and bringing them to justice.

A century ago, the forests of northcentral Pennsylvania provided white pine and hemlock timber for much of the United States, and the region boasted two of the world's largest sawmills.