Centre County Government

11. Fragile Landscapes

Penns Creek headwaters, looking back towards Nittany Mountain—Potter's "empire" view in reverse.

If your eyes are informed, a walk through a Centre County woods discloses more than nameless landmarks and hunters' First Day woods addresses. The wilderness of the county—mountain ridges, deltas of forest spilling out from gaps, the Allegheny plateau—displays its whole history in growth patterns and marks of human passage. Flat circular shelves dug into easy slopes tell where charcoal "pits" consumed acres of oaks a century and a half ago. Mossy tramroads survive where logging and fire reduced the forest to "Pennsylvania desert" between 1880 and 1920. Squares of bushy pine betray where fields have been abandoned more recently. State Forest management has opened the woods with roads and trails, parks and artificial beaches. But it is the wilderness that preserves.

Reforestation, game management, and fire prevention healed the "desert" to an extent unimaginable at the turn of the century. To save watersheds and reduce runoff flooding, the State purchased nearly a third of Centre County's surface, 213,377 acres of stumps, berries, and laurel (149,100 State Forest, 64,277 State Game Lands). Lumber companies sold the wasteland at less than it cost to survey its boundaries. For decades fire outpaced regeneration in this vast acreage, equal to 20 Brush Valleys. From 1908 to 1920, 10% of the state forest burned every year. But fire-prevention paid off. After 50 years, stands of mature oak and pine in the State Forest, now burn-resistant, began to be harvested by clear-cutting and shelter-wood cuts in the late 1960s. Managed cutting intrudes little upon the ecology of the wilderness while improving its looks. What threatens the wilderness today as never before is population increase in the county with its heedless recreational pressures and deepening fingers of woodland housing developments.

A drive through the open valleys is just as informative. Lanes and fencerows by historic roads preserve 200 year-old warrant lines. Farm fields and buildings can be read like a book. Clearing the forest, grubbing the land of roots and stones to make it workable, consumed two generations of relentless labor. As late as 1861 Wesley Bierly, a substantial Brush Valley farmer's son later killed in the Civil War, wrote in his diary, "picked stones for mowing in new ground." Even then, fields did not look like fields today. A drought led farmer Samuel Gramly to remark to his diary in September 1881, "The pasture fields look like the street," a comparison illuminating at both ends.

By that year the county's farmland had swelled to its greatest extent, both in acres and in number of farms. Homesteaders had pushed farms up shale slopes above the limestone. But the next generation, mindful of poor crops and a childhood spent picking stones, walked off, leaving pine-sprouting oldfields and empty cellar holes. Competition from mechanized western farms eventually took the edge off the limestone advantage. Farm sons, far from inheriting "gentleman" status, migrated in droves from "dirt farms."

In 1930 secondary roads were still unpaved, bordered by decaying fences and unpainted houses and barns. A third of Centre County farms were occupied by tenants. There was no electricity outside towns until the late 1940s, and horses were holding their own against tractors—it took character to detect a future in "subsistence farming."

Dairy support, mechanization, alfalfa, asphalt roads you can beam a mouse on at 100 yards transformed the countryside in the 50s and 60s. University jobs, power mowers and latex paint did the same for county towns. The way fine sanding brings out grain in wood, the dreams of past generations stand forth clearly in present landscapes. Over the last 30 years, historic preservation has become a realizable pursuit. "Dairies of Distinction" trim roadsides to show off parading rows of hybrid corn. Amish immigrants import Lancaster County wood and leather shops and bakeries. Farmers markets, subscription farms, and orchards make our county's visible rural heritage one of its leading assets.

But the very accessibility of the good life in Happy Valley foreshadows change. A new, denatured suburban dream is already replacing the county's rich historical legacy. A layer of large-lot, poly-roofed houses expands rapidly outward from State College to serve the growing population, at an acre plus per family. As with every change in materials culture, this new aesthetic erases the past-generation dreams that attracted it, replacing them with its own pleasant, fin-de-siecle vision of assertive prosperity.