Valley Girl Views: The Susquehanna Boom Co. Log Boom in Williamsport

The Susquehanna Log Boom 1846-1907

A "Six-mile series of piers, built by a company incorporated in 1846; used to collect and store logs during the spring log drives down the West Branch. Helped make Williamsport the world's lumber capital prior to 1900. Badly damaged in 1889 flood, the boom declined thereafter."

Historical Marker Located at: 41° 13.666′ N, 76° 59.119′ W

Inventing The Boom
By 1846, three men, John Leighton & Major James, and John DuBois , had devised a solution to the short lumber season.

In 1846, they formed the Susquehanna Boom Co., and they created an area on the river to store logs. Leighton & Perkins were timbermen from Maine, where log booms were already in place. In Williamsport, where they joined with Dubois, they had been unheard of, and local men were skeptical it would work.

The ideal location was right nearby. An area known as "Long Reach" (Today, near Susquehanna State Park) formed the southern border of the town.

The bend in the river at this point, and for miles above, naturally draws the logs to the south side of the stream, and the river is almost level for miles beyond, preventing swift currents during low water stages.

This map of the Susquehanna Boom is split in half, so that it can be more easily read.

In short, this 7-mile-long slack water stretch was the "slow moving belly" of the Susquehanna and the ideal location for the boom.

The Susquehanna Boom was built in 1851, and it began with just 20 cribs. It was expanded over the next decade, growing to 400 cribs. By 1870, the boom was 7 miles long, and thirty mills had been erected along the rivers edge in Williamsport.

A Crib In The Susquehanna River

The Boom was an arrangement of log cribs, filled with stones and logs, built in log cabin fashion, that rested on the bottom of the river. Between these cribs, chains of logs were fastened like "a necklace of pencils", using tremendously strong iron couplings.

Rafting out logs in the Susquehanna River

At one end, it was possible to unhook the log chain and let the logs or rafts progress downstream. All other timber was brought to a standstill until the boom became filled with saw logs.

This floating fence could hold enough timber to keep the sawmills busy long after logging season ended. Mills sprang up. Within ten years, they had outgrown the boom.

The construction of the Williamsport Log Boom in 1849 was an industrial milestone in Pennsylvania history. And the timing of this invention was impeccable. After the Civil War broke out, the nation needed more lumber than ever.

The combination of mountains full of trees, the need for lumber, and the invention of the Susquehanna Log Boom - a way to store and sort the lumber - all together is what built a town full of millionaires.

A tug boat and Susquehanna Boom Co. Spike Driver

Between 1868 and 1906, the areas mills sawed more than eight billion feet of white pine. When, by the late 1870s, the pine was largely gone, the loggers moved on to the hemlocks.

The boom ran for about eight months every year and was annually removed from the river before the ice came—an "onerous task completed by workers and tugboats". (I would love to find photos of this. I just can't picture what a tugboat looked like on the Susquehanna River in 1860)

The remains of a crib in the Susquehanna River at Williamsport

END OF AN ERA
Damaging floods, the clear cutting of timber and improved shipping capabilities of railroads contributed to the demise of the boom.

"The good times lasted close to seventy years, until the timber boom was followed by a timber bust. By the 1880s the timber barons were building railroads into Pennsylvania's northern woods and using portable sawmills to cut wood on site that could then be hauled directly to market. No longer dependent upon streams and rivers to float the logs to towns with mills, the railroads made logging a year-round operation. The more intensive logging accelerated the cutting of trees, and soon little remained of the great woods of northern Pennsylvania." - WIlliamsport History Marker

Linden Branch of the Penn R.R. looking west towards Penn R.R. river bridge in Linden, abt 1888, showing the log boom on the river

By the late 1880s, it was cheaper to bring logs to Williamsport by rail than river.

The flood of 1889, in particular was a turning point, washing away 300 million feet of lumber. In the process, every sawmill in the valley was wiped out. In the time it took to rebuild, the market shifted to Wisconsin and Michigan. Williamsport was never again “lumber capital of the world.”

In 1894, another flood broke the Boom and washed close to two million board feet of lumber down the river,

The Susquehanna Boom Co. was dissolved in 1907.