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Local History Interview
Huntington Mills, Maple Run, Ricketts Glen, Cambra
Jonestown, Emmons, Elk Grove, Mossville

Doris from Red Rock and Jim from Shickshinny being interviewed by A.J, Tierney, Kris, and Eric, students at Greenwood Friends Middle School, accompanied by their teachers Shelly and Susan.

December 11th, 2000

Eric: When was Huntington Mills settled?

Doris: I don't know when it was officially done, but I do know that back during the Civil War days there were the Koons brothers who went to the Civil War. While they were gone, they made up their minds that when they came home they were going to turn Huntington Mills into a real metropolis. One (brother) came back and became a doctor. One built the Paper Mill Dam and had a paper mill there. They were going to build a railroad track from Shickshinny to Huntington Mills. They were going to put the mill down below the creek, down along Marsh Creek, someplace in there. Was it a wool mill?

Jim: That one I don't know about. There were five mills on Little Rodger's Creek that enters Huntington Creek at Huntington Mills. A grist mill, a saw mill, two tanning mills, I believe. Lots of mills, but I didn't realize&ldots;

Doris: I think they actually had a wool mill there at one time too. Anyway, they were going to turn it into a metropolis. I don't know what happened. They started the railroad track, and I don't think they got out to Conesville. They started the track and everything just sort of came to a halt.

Jim: It wasn't a very good route from Conesville to Shickshinny. The mountains came right down to the creek. There might have been a land dispute.

Doris: When it was actually first settled I don't know. That's a good question. When I get that Heartland history back I'll let you know.

Eric: What types of things have changed in Huntington Mills over the years?

Jim: We don't use water power any more. It was water that powered all the mills and how Huntington Mills got its name. We were surrounded with mills. The biggest, I understand, was a toy factory behind the mills. A giant building where they made toys and pretty much everything was water powered in those days. Now, of course, we have electricity and we don't have as much water to power the mills. A lot of the runs have dried up. Like any other area, we got better roads and better modes of travel. It was all dirt back in those days when Huntington Mills was established. Our property had lots of stone walls, just a network of stone walls. When they decided to make the roads better they took all the stone walls and chopped them up and put them in to make the roads. That's the base of our roads now, those stone walls.

Tierney: Has anything changed over time in Mossville?

Doris: Mossville always was a farming community. Of course, there used to be a one room school there. A one room church there. The buildings are still standing, the school has been turned into an art gallery. Jeb Conroy has it. And he was a curator at the Wyoming Historical Society for a long time. He's quite interested in local history too. Jeb is very much interested in art and sculpture and he has an art gallery there in the old schoolhouse. He actually lives in the church, he turned that into a home. Down the road from there they have a big township building now where a fair amount of the township goes to vote and everything. Of course that's new. Other than that, well there is a big sawmill now where there used to be a field. Not much going on in Mossville.

Shelly: What about Cambra, I see an awful lot of photographs where it looks like it was a pretty big down.

Doris: Yes, it was a busy community.

Shelly: Why? What was there?

Jim: Way back in the beginning, timber was the big thing. Up the creek from me, up Marsh Creek, there was a big stone arch bridge that is still there. A beautiful bridge. There was a house right by it, and that was the Rodgers family. They were the original people. We always thought the name of the creek was Rodgers Creek, but the old topographical maps tell us that it's Marsh Creek. It's all marsh and springs up there where the creek originated. Their house was situated there. It had a great big sawmill with a great big paddle wheel. It was a reverse wheel, it had a big long trough where the water came up over the top of the wheel. The weight of the water would get the big wheel spinning that way (counterclockwise) instead of this way (clockwise) where the water is coming into it underneath and spinning it. I have a big piece of that old wheel that Agnes flood brought it up from underneath. It preserved perfect, one little six foot section of it. They set up on the creek there for the water power to run a big sawmill. They said the road there, going up towards Four Tops, was huge virgin timber. Like part of the park in Ricketts Glen which came down last year in the storm. Timber was part of what brought people to the area originally.

Shelly: Cambra is right on that Tioga turnpike, wasn't that insurance building that is there now&ldots;didn't that used to be a store?

Doris: I think so, I know there was a hotel around there too.

Jim: Each little community had at least one store, didn't they Doris?

Doris: Yes, their own store and their own hotel.

Jim: You couldn't go far in those days, horse and buggy and so forth.

Doris: An interesting thing about that store is my grandfather had a store down in front of the big wheel. There was a stagecoach stop down at Harveyville, where Dick Dole lives. Well, Dicky Dole lives there now in the place where&ldots;Jesse Telle, he is buried down at Harveyville. Well, he was the proprietor of that hotel and they would have these, they called them drummers, but they were salesmen. In those days they were called drummers. They would come into the local hotel and stop in there. Then they would go to all of the different stores and take orders. My grandfather, I know, ordered things from Philadelphia and from Wilkes-Barre and they would send them by train into Shickshinny. Then he would have to send somebody out with a wagon to Shickshinny to pick up whatever he had ordered. They did that in all the communities. Every community had to have a store and a post office. The post office was usually right in the store. I know my grandfather had a post office right there in his store. And Huntington Mills and Cambra, all of these places around had a store and a post office together. And they had their blacksmith shop or whatever.

Jim: Huntington Mills freezer plant. An outside freezer where they had brought in ice. If you had stuff that you needed frozen, they had a locker right there and it was kept cold by ice.

Shelly: So you kept yours there? I never knew that. Like now you can rent storage space, you just rented cold storage?

Jim: Yep, Pine Tops had that.

Doris: Yes, that's right. In one of those albums it shows a picture of a covered bridge and the old academy. They had an academy at New Columbus, which is still there. Of course, it's not used as an academy any more. And they had one at Pleasant Hill, which is just outside of Sweet Valley. There was the Huntington Mills academy. Of course you know you had the one room school, what did you do after that? If you wanted to go on you went to an academy. You know where the bridge that goes over to the school is? Here's the post office, here's the bridge and right there was his freezer. Wasn't it turned into a garage or something for a while?

Jim: Yeah, the Ford garage is down there&ldots;.Bear Ford has it.

Doris: Then he moved across the road and got elaborate.

Jim: That was Pine Top Locker, I think it was called, and meat packing probably.

Tierney: There's a road, people now call it Maple Run. Why is it called that?

Doris: Because there was a brook that went down through there and it was always called Maple Run. You know, they always used to call them a run, or a rill, or a brook. Maple Run was the original name. I guess, probably because there were so many Moss's that lived there, they changed it to Mossville. There was Brooks, Moss&ldots;there were a number of Moss's there, before them even.

Shelly: AJ is doing Jonestown, he'd like to ask you about that now.

Jim: I really don't know much about that. You know you can see where the old one room schoolhouse used to be on top of the knoll there.

Susan: Didn't there used to be a mill there too?

Jim: Yes, even the little runs, Rohrsburg and all over, they all had mills. Guy Fracey, the old fellow I worked with, he showed me where they were. All the little brooks, they're all dried up now, they all had some sort of a mill.

Doris: One of the things that people did for entertainment, besides ice skating and winter sports and sleigh riding, that kind of thing; they had debate societies. They were quite popular. I called Jim one day and asked him if he knew where the Rodger's school was, because I knew the Rodger's mill used to be down near him. Yeah, he knew where it was. It was up on the hill in the field across the road from them. And on their side of the road they had found where the old well was, because the kids would have to walk down the hill, get a bucket of water, and go back up the hill to school. And they found where the old well had been and he and Karen had laid the stones back up to mark it. I had come across a little booklet from the debate society at Rodger's school and they were quite popular. I read the one from the old opera house in Shickshinny. They had a debate society out there. If you know where the Acme store was, the opera house was across the street there. That was a very popular thing, in fact, some of the churches would have debate societies too.

Jim: My aunt that's living now, she's 93. She taught for 36 years in a one room schoolhouse. In the early morning, she used to go in and a child would usually carry the wood in for her and start a fire for her. Then the rest of the children would come and she'd close the shutters and lock 'em and lock the doors. And one morning the shutters rattled all the way around the school and then the door banged and she just kept the children quiet. It ended up a prisoner had gotten out and they tracked him and they caught him eventually. He was checking the school out. He went to the restroom, the old out house, and then took off across the headwaters of Huntington Creek.

Doris (to Jim): Do you remember Mr. Marshall? He used to teach and this was something he always drilled into his students in these one room schools. "Know the rivers and how they connect" and all that and so few do that anymore. So few know anything about this anymore&ldots;it's too bad.

Jim: Well, you know the neat thing, Doris? Is today, the young folks are real interested in working to get the streams cleaned up, to have the fish here again. Something kind of neat, a fellow I'm working for right now, Ecology III, Teddy, who is in charge of the environment around the power plant. Making sure there's nothing polluting the river anymore. He's real interested in the environment getting better and he works towards that happening. This is kind of interesting, he gave me this folder and I'll make sure you get a copy. I told him what was going on with the class. He's been working on a project for, the last five years or so, to restore Shad to the area. Now, there are pictures in this folder that show some of the fisheries. One of the biggest ones was right up here between West Nanticoke and Plymouth where hundreds of thousands of pounds of fish, Shad, came into this place, were harvested and sold. Big business. It also brought sport fishing into the area. Now, for a number of years, Ted takes a group up to the Delaware near Stroudsburg and they net. They are allowed to gill net Shad and, they get 'em at night. They get 'em in and they milk the eggs out of them. And a truck runs them down to Harrisburg and they're incubated and they are put in the river below the dam. It's all these dams that stop these fish from coming up. It takes a period of seven years, I think, until they go out to sea. Wherever you put 'em, they have a mechanism in them to come back to that same stream. And they are coming back right now. They're coming all the way up to one of those portable dams in Selinsgrove. They can't get over that one. So there's kind of a dispute going on right now, because it takes a lot of money. Either you put the dam back down so there isn't any. It's a blow up, a fabri-dam, or you build these elevators, different means for these fish, ladders for the fish to get beyond the dam. It's predicted that they'll be back full force, in the millions, in, I think it's a year or two years. It's almost here now. And the rivers have been cleaned up now, from the mines, to where the fish can survive. There's big Musky here now and so forth. But that's kind of interesting, you talk about the watershed and the importance of keeping the environment clean and doing the best we can to clean things up that we've already messed up. For legitimate reasons, it was a living, back in those days of mining. It's just a happening thing right now.

AJ: How have the creeks and streams affected the culture of the area?

Jim: Well, of course, originally that was a source of power. The stream was a source of power and a source of food. Along with the Shad that migrated up the river in the late 1800's and the early 1900's, you also had eels. The eel industry was a big industry. Have you ever seen the eel traps, they're still there, in the Susquehanna? Between, didn't you ever see them Sue&ldots;didn't you? You can see 'em in high water, low water you can see more of what's there. But, there are "V"s in the water. They were laid up stone walls. Well, it was a big industry, I mean big. In the hundred thousand pounds I think. Eels would come up from the ocean every year and they'd come up the tributaries. It was food, all these streams brought food and water fowl. That's food too.

Kris: My town was Elk Grove. How has the creek been an influence on that community?

Jim: It was either Elk Grove or Jamison City that had the big tanneries.

Shelly: Didn't we find a tannery at Elk Grove? Yeah, it was there in the fall, we saw it.

Jim: Well, they had giant trees then, big Hemlocks, and they took those down just to use the bark for tanning. That seems like a waste doesn't it?

Doris: Tanning was a big deal. They had these huge vats where they would use the bark, bark only, from Hemlock trees. And I know my husband walked in the woods for years and there would be some places where you'd come into an area and there would be just loads of these huge trees just stacked. All the bark peeled off of them, and they were just there, rotting, over how many years? It was the bark they needed to make the tannic acid that they needed to do tanning with. And that was the big deal, even more so than using the lumber for building. The tannic acid from the Hemlock was what they needed to do the tanning, and back then you used a lot more leather.

Alex: You mentioned a couple of times that some of the creeks were drying up, why is that?

Jim: Well, I think our climate sure has changed. We can see that in recent years in a big way. Some areas get deep water and others don't. All the pollutants that have gotten into the atmosphere seem to have changed to some degree, the climate. What happens over lots of years and lots more population, more people, your water table drops. So, your going to have less water up near the surface. And even our deep wells, when someone adds one behind us, we get the silt. What happens is more people are into the same vein and the more people you have in the system, it is going to take the level down.

Doris: We use so much more water than we used to.

Jim: Yeah, washing the car&ldots;

Doris: Car wash, indoor plumbing and dishwashers. We used to just have a pan of dish water and a pan of rinse water. You just use so much more water. Look at your automatic washing machines. They used to just fill the tub with water and fill the rinse tub with water. You would do your white clothes then you'd do your towels then you'd do your color clothes then you'd do your heavy, dirty work clothes last. And you'd put them all through the same water.

Jim: You conserved everything.

Doris: You sure did.

Jim: You even caught the rain water.

Doris: You had a rain barrel. You set it out under the eve spouts so you could catch the rain water. You could use that on the stove or for baths or for whatever you needed.

Jim: You have more people using more of everything.

Doris: Look how people are moving into the rural areas. The woods are being cut everywhere, all these side roads. The woods are being cut and the houses are being built. People are complaining about the bear in their back yard. Well, where is the poor thing supposed to go. You're cleaning out its habitat? And every house has a well, more water.