MORE CURIOSITIES: “More deer than people live in sparsely populated Potter County,” said writer Clark DeLeon in his segment on Galeton and its lumber industry.
The story is found in Clark’s 2001 book, “Pennsylvania Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff,” which we talked about in Tuesday’s column.
When researching the book, Clark stopped at the Pennsylvania Lumber Museum in Potter County.
At the museum, he learned about the Civilian Conservation Corps, an agency set up by the United States government to keep people employed during the Great Depression. This group planted 200 million trees across the country, filling in the spots in Pennsylvania emptied from the lumber museum.
“Imagine the leafy rolling mountains we see today throughout central and northern Pennsylvania without a single living tree to bend in the wind,” he writes.
At the museum, he learned about the “woodhicks” that worked seasonally in Potter County. These lumberjacks worked 16-hour days, six days a week, from November to April. These hardworking men “lived in close quarters and barely bathed,” Clark said.
Before leaving McKean County, Clark, the proud owner of a Zippo lighter with a Harley-Davidson Motorcycles logo on it, made a stop at Zippo Manufacturing Co. in Bradford.
He also stopped at the Penn-Brad Oil Museum in Custer City, where he learned about the history of drilling in Bradford — “the greatest oil field in American history,” he states.
Clark’s other local stop would be Emporium in Cameron County; Cameron County, he says, “is the ‘Divorce Capital of Pennsylvania.’”
He relates that in the “Pennsylvania Statistical Abstract,” each year 6.2 Pennsylvanians per thousand on average get married, while 3.3 per thousand get divorced. Meanwhile, the average divorce rate in Cameron County is 874 per thousand.
David J. Reed, who was Cameron County prothonotary at the time Clark was researching his book, reported the county, with a population of 5,800, handled more than 8,000 divorces in the year 2000.
If that numbers seems a little off to you, there is a reason behind the Alice-in-Wonderland math. People can get through the divorce faster there because of the small population.
According to Clark, after the state adopted no-fault divorce law, people from other parts of the state started filing for divorce at the Cameron County Courthouse in Emporium because the courts in more populated areas were congested.
