Peter Herdic - Early Career

Early Career

In the early 1840s, Herdic worked at a sawmill near his home in Upstate New York. In two years work there, he saved a considerable amount of money. After leaving his mother's farm in 1846, Peter Herdic settled along Lycoming Creek in Cogan House Township, Pennsylvania, just north of Williamsport. Here Herdic, with his business partner William Andress, opened a sawmill, using his saving for the purchase and initial operation of the sawmill. This was the first of Herdic's many business ventures, that led to his rise as one of the richest of millionaires in Williamsport.

Peter Herdic moved to Williamsport in 1853, which was then a small village of 1,700 people surrounded by vast stands of virgin hemlock, white pine and various hardwoods. The lumber industry had existed in Lycoming County since the first Europeans arrived prior to the American Revolution, but it did not become the land-changing and eco-system altering industry until Peter Herdic and men like him arrived on the scene in the mid-19th century. The lumber era began in force in 1846 when the Susquehanna Boom, a series of cribs for holding and storing floating logs on the West Branch Susquehanna River was built under the leadership of James Perkins. Herdic was able to use his business sense, leadership abilities, and according to some questionable business tactics to rapidly acquire wealth by buying and selling several tracts of timber and several sawmills. He used his gains to purchase several tracts of land in Williamsport, more sawmills, and eventually the Susquehanna Boom.

Peter Herdic and two business partners, Mahlon Fisher and John Reading, purchased the Susquehanna Boom and expanded it so that it could hold up to 300 million board feet (700 million m³) of lumber. At this time the most efficient sawmill in Williamsport could process only 100,000 board feet (200 m³) of lumber in a week. The sawmills at first could not possibly keep up with the vast amounts of lumber floating in the West Branch. The approximately 60 sawmills along the river between Lycoming and Loyalsock Creeks operated day and night on a year round basis. Peter Herdic, his partners and many other businessmen in Williamsport, became fabulously wealthy. They made Williamsport, "The Lumber Capital of the World" with the highest number of millionaires per capita of any city in the United States.