Originally Published in the Cecil Whig
This weekend, the Little League World Series will be played in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania, just across the Susquehanna River from the birthplace of Little League in Williamsport. As many of us watch the youngsters square off in their playoffs, we should know that there is a connection between Williamsport and Cecil County, Maryland.
A century and a half ago, the mountains and valleys around Williamsport supplied tens of millions of logs for processing into lumber for much of the mid Atlantic. The sheer volume of mountain trees could not be handled by the local saw mills, so they were transported, via the Susquehanna River, to mills down south. Which brings us to the Cecil County connection.
All of that corralled lumber moved in great raft like structures, down the river, passed villages and cities that lined it, until it crossed the Mason Dixon line and ended up along the shores of Cecil County’s own Port Deposit.
An article in the Cecil Democrat from March 22, 1851 titled “Lumber at Port Deposit” noted that “about fifty rafts of lumber had descended the Susquehanna to Port Deposit up to Wednesday last and many others were on their way. We learn from gentlemen of the town that an active spring trade is anticipated.”
Alice Miller’s book, Cecil County, Maryland: A Study in Local History published by the Port Deposit Heritage Corporation sheds some light on the numbers resulting from the lumber industry at Port Deposit before the Civil War. Miller writes that “fifteen hundred arks arrived in Port Deposit in 1826. Between February 28 and June 23, 1827, 1631 rafts and 1370 arks passed Harrisburg. It is supposed,” Miller continues, “that the rafts contained on average of 25,000 feet of lumber, which would amount to 40,775,000 feet.” But wait… there’s more. By the 1840s, Miller writes that rafts carried a quarter billion feet of lumber into Port Deposit. That’s a lot of wood!
Miller was able to speak with some residents who remembered the post-Civil War lumber boom and they “say that over fifty vessels often anchored in the river waiting for a chance to load at the wharves. Rafts reached from Port Deposit to below Mt. Ararat. Some of the ring-bolts,” the older residents said, “to which these were tied are still visible along the shore.”
Even today, as anyone who has seen the lower Susquehanna River knows, maneuvering water crafts could not have been an easy task in the late 19th century. Then as now, the Susquehanna was full of dangerous “rocks and projections.” According to Miller, river pilots named the rocks “Spinning Wheel,” “Sour Beers Eddy,” “Blue Rock,” “Turkey Hill,” “Horse Brother,” “Hangman’s Rock,” “Ram’s Horn,” “Slow and Easy,” and “Hollow Rock Sisters.”
Rafting lumber and other goods down the Susquehanna from such exotic places as Williamsport, Pennsylvania came to a screeching halt, as Miller notes, in 1910 when “the dam at McCall’s Ferry (now Holtwood),” was completed. However, that wasn’t the only reason the trade ended. The greedy lumber barons up north had clear cut the mountains of north central Pennsylvania and there was no more lumber, at least not until new trees were planted and the old growth forests were replaced. But by then it was too late, as the nation had found other sources of lumber and new building materials to replace the wood that came from the Williamsport area. And so another chapter closed in the continuing cycle of economic boom and bust in Cecil County and the Susquehanna Valley.
For more information about Port Deposit and the lumber boom, contact the Historical Society of Cecil County at our web site, www.cecilhistory.org