Wood Hicks and Bark Peelers ─ A Photographic History of Pennsylvania Railroad Lumbering Communities: The Photographic Legacy of William T. Clarke

Without the lumber industry, and the trains that hauled felled trees and trimmed logs, Pennsylvania’s history and present day would look very different. In this book, Ronald E. Ostman and Harry Littell use the stunning documentary photography of William T. Clarke to shape and share the story of the state’s lumber heyday, a time when loggers serving the needs of a rapidly growing and globalizing country forever altered the dense forests of Pennsylvania’s Northern Tier.

Discovered in a shed in upstate New York and a barn in Pennsylvania after decades of obscurity, Clarke’s haunting photographs provide an unprecedented view of the transformation that took place during the era of logging, lumbering, and wood industries that followed the advent of steam-powered machines. Together with Ostman and Littell’s narrative, these photographs show us how the men and families who made up the lumbering communities worked and lived, the dramatic ways in which they reshaped the landscape around them, and the sheer might of the lumber industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Wood Hicks and Bark Peelers is an extraordinary look at the remarkable work of a little-known photographer and his world. It is also the story of the dramatic transformation of a natural landscape altered forever by industrialization—and of the ongoing efforts to reclaim that landscape.

Ronald E. Ostman is Graduate Professor of Communication and Professor Emeritus, Department of Communication, Cornell University.