Cummings Township
Cummings Township was formed by the Pennsylvania General Assembly in 1832 from parts of Mifflin and Brown Townships. Early industry in the county included quarries of flag and building stone and lumber.
The Little Pine Valley in Cummings Township was used by the Iroquois and Algonkian tribes as a hunting ground. Historians believe that there may have been a Shawnee village and burial ground just to the north of Little Pine State Park.
By the mid-19th century the demand for lumber reached the Little Pine area, where White pine and hemlock covered the surrounding mountainsides. Lumbermen came and harvested the trees and sent them down the creeks to the West Branch Susquehanna River to the log boom and sawmills at Williamsport. James and John English were the first to build a sawmill in the area in the Little Pine Area. They built two sawmills in 1809 on Little Pine Creek. In 1816, the village of English Mills sprang up around the two sawmills. The lumber era at Little Pine lasted until 1909, when the last log raft was floated down Little Pine Creek. Remnants of the lumber era can be seen today in and around the park.
Waterville is the most significant population center in Cummings Township. Michael and Henry Wolf arrived in the area from Berks County in 1817. The helped to establish Waterville by building a sawmill and clearing some land for farming. A post office was established in Waterville in 1849. Other early business establishments were two stores and a hotel, which stands today.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Townships Of Lycoming County, Pennsylvania
Famous quotes containing the words cummings and/or township:
“Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived Brister Freeman, “a handy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings once.... Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord,—where he is styled “Sippio Brister,”MScipio Africanus he had some title to be called,—”a man of color,” as if he were discolored.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The most interesting thing which I heard of, in this township of Hull, was an unfailing spring, whose locality was pointed out to me on the side of a distant hill, as I was panting along the shore, though I did not visit it. Perhaps, if I should go through Rome, it would be some spring on the Capitoline Hill I should remember the longest.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)