FESTIVAL: History and woodscraft roll into one festival in early August. The Festival of Wood is held in Pike County today and Sunday.

According to the Pennsylvania Magazine, July/August 2019 Pennsylvania Magazine, the festival celebrates and remembers Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Pinchot, who was also a two-time Pennsylvania Governor, owned property in Milford that is now the Grey Towers National Historic Site — and the location for the festival.

The festival is free to attend, although for those interested in a tour of Pinchot’s mansion, there is a $5 admission fee per person.

Pinchot’s former home is made of Pennsylvania blue stone with turret towers with an outer layer of scalloped grey slate.

In addition to tours of the home, the festival includes tree walks, demonstrations that include tree trimming and competitions to ring bells set high in trees on the property, craft vendors with wares that include birdhouses that are crafted to look like the wise visage of an older man or hand-crafted furniture and jewelry.

The Pennsylvania Woodmobile will also be on hand for the event: a 34-foot trailer that educates on the various woods that grow in Pa. forests (with samples to see and touch), materials on the products that can be made from wood and information on the possible threats to our local forests.

Children’s activities and live animal exhibits round out the two-day schedule of activities and events.

The annual festival remembers the contributions Pinchot, a Yale graduate in Biology and attendee of the National School of Forestry in France, made during his tenure with the US Forest Service. These contributions included tripling the size of America’s national forest to more than 170 million acres and working with President Theodore Roosevelt to make forestry and natural resource conservation a nationwide movement.

Pinchot surrounded himself with reminders of the forests he protected and oversaw, including the collection of wood samples in residence on his desk.