PA Northwest Lancaster County Rail Trail

The landscapes of the Mid-Atlantic can hardly be described as wild. Almost every square foot of mountain, forest, and river bank has been mined, logged. farmed, or altered by an industry in the last two hundred years. The truth is, there are few places in our six or seven state area that survive in their natural state - untouched by exploitation. But, as I try to convey with the title of my blog, there are substantial portions of our region that have recovered as semi-wild state - maybe approaching wilderness.

Early 20th century scene of the Mussleman-Vesta Hot Blast Furnance, Marietta. 

Riding the Northwest Lancaster County Rail Trail (NLCRT) really gives a sense of the industrial history that formed these landscapes and which nature is not-so-slowly reclaiming. I must admit I was off my bike as much as on it in order to take all this in. Bainbridge, Marietta, and Columbia are beautiful river towns on the Lancaster side of the river and, minus the smoke, noise, and dust of their industrial pasts, are wonderfully walkable and fun to explore.  So many hidden treasures and so many reasons to find it a little wild.

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I started the rail train at the Columbia Crossing Center, the new visitor and programs center on the bank of the river. The center is a major investment in transforming an industrial town into a center of arts, museums, music, parks, and vibrant small businesses. I could see how much excitement there is for the "new" Columbia by just how fast three parking lots filled up! Glad I got there early.

Columbia Crossing Center. 

At about the time large-scale mining, milling, and manufacturing reached their peak in these towns during early 1900s, there were movements afoot in Pennsylvania that encouraged town and city folk to invest in greening their urban landscapes.  Mira Dock, a trained botanist and Harrisburg resident, became a one-woman movement for tree planting in towns and cities not for beautification but because trees "make us healthier." She was passionate about the cause and provided the science behind it. "Trees produce oxygen! Trees filter the air we breathe!" Susquehanna River towns like Bainbridge, Marietta, and Columbia  participated in her tree planting efforts and many of those early 20th century trees still grace town streets and parks.

Who doesn't love a tunnel to ride through? 

Past the nearly hidden ruins of the 19th century St. Charles Foundry Stack, I zipped through the  Point Rock tunnel blasted out of underlying metamorphosed  mud shales that in some places still show the ripple marks from a silty-sandy seabed. Thin layers of mica embedded in bands of shale-turned-phyllite gives the rock a shimmery look.

Chickies Rock

Chickies Rock looms large ahead. The 100' quartzite anticline formation is very resistant to weathering and may be one reason for the dogleg in the river where the Susquehanna bends sharply around this height of land. It's a favorite destination for rock climbers and by the time I returned at noon the site had filled up with climbers and curious onlookers. In the early morning light, however, the great rectangular joints and blocks were great to observe. These were caused by intense pressure due to the collision of continents that formed the nearby Appalachian Mountains.

Ripple marks on Chickies Rock quartzite 

The trail crosses several creeks and dry washes on wood plank bridges. This past year has been a record-maker for precipitation in Lancaster County and viewing the gullies and creeks from above made it really obvious that flash floods are more frequent events. Creek banks are scoured of summer vegetation. Dry washes show signs of recent and major rock movement with crush and scrape marks on boulders that have been pushed along by fast-moving flood water.  The scoured bed of Chiques Creek once held a large dam that fed water to a large saw mill here. The dam was removed in 2015 to free fifteen miles of upland creek for American shad and eel. Dam removal at these former industrial sites is an important conservation strategy to reunite migrating fish with their historic spawning creeks, but I wondered what the effect the flooding has had on spawning this year.

Chiques Creek is now free of its old dam, a big win for native fish conservation.

By the time I arrived at the outskirts of Marietta, I was well aware that the woods, fields, and riverbanks have all been under extensive transition from 19th industrial sites to the park-like setting we see now. The rate of change is astounding. How quickly nature takes it all back when given the chance. At  Musselman-Vesta Iron Works an almost spooky setting of encroaching forest and hulking tressle ruins tangle on the site of the large blast operation.

From the Marietta Restoration Associates website:

According to George Miller, a local Marietta resident who had worked at the furnace for 16-years before it closed, ten carloads of scrap iron and manganese ore were fed into the furnace each day to produce a daily output of 80 tons of ferromanganese. Miller noted that the manganese ores came from all over the world, and its ferromanganese product was shipped by rail to steel mills in Youngstown, Ohio, Coatesville and Pittsburgh. The furnace burned coke (five carloads per day) which came from Connellsville in western Pennsylvania. By that time, the furnace had four hot blast stoves which preheated air to 1300-degrees Fahrenheit, two large blowing engines, a gas washer and dryer to precondition gases before they were sent to pre-heaters and boilers and an elaborate pumping system to bring water from the river to the steam engines. New stock sheds and new railway lines on concrete piers were also added. Remains of the pump house, piers and other foundations are visible today among the undergrowth on the site.

The remains of one of four high-blast furnaces.

This was a beast of a furnace and under its last owner, E.J. Lavino, it was put into high grade metals production in support of the war effort in 1917-1919. After the war it ceased operations and fell into ruin except for the small square office building that holds a fantastic small museum. I counted six species of butterflies on the low round remains of the smoke stake that once stood over a hundred feet high.

Concrete piers that supported a railway that delivered anthracite coal to the the furnace. 

I stopped in at the museum and the docent there told me to leave my bike and take a walk around town.  I looked for some of the old grand street trees planted in Mira Dock's time and I found so much more. Restorations, lovingly done to public buildings, churches, homes, and businesses, were abundant. When I returned for my bike I asked how this town was so picture perfect despite economic downturns.  He explained that as was the case with many Lower Susquehanna River towns the clean-up from the historic flood of Tropical Storm Agnes ushered in a period of restoration and renewal funded by large recovery grants and rebuilding investments. "The town really took the time to decide what it wanted to be in its next life and money was used wisely. Marietta took this imperative to heart and the town really is a gem."

Early 20th century worker's homes lovingly restored. 

Past a row of restored workers homes, the trail dips steeply down a loose gravel embankment. I stopped again and explored the shady banks. The shores are silt-covered in several inches of brown muck that obliterated any chance of summer growth. Only a scum of algae had formed on the dried crusty plates that crackled underfoot.  The woods were quiet - fall migration has begin and the birds have moved on.

Silt plates.

Young Sam Haldeman would have roamed these woods and riverside in the early 1800s.  His interests in nature and natural history led him on to Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. He worked as a state geologist and university professor for Delaware College and the University of Pennsylvania.

Monarch cat on milkweed

"He loved each thing for the thing itself," wrote J.P. Lesley, an early biographer. "He was the most trustworthy observers—one of the most accurate naturalists that ever lived." Haldeman literally wrote the book on eastern mollusks and Charles Darwin found much of interest in his papers on comparative zoology and freshwater species and wrote to his friend Charles Lyell about Sam's work.  The National Academies of Science recognized him as one of America's first scientific naturalists.

Sam Haldeman by Mathew Brady, (National Archives)

The bike trail was originally a hiking trail, the Charles Greenway, that connected Bainbridge and Marietta which explains the rolling and rambling section along the river that in sections was part of the Main Line Canal towpath. Modern trails like this can usually be traced to some previous use - even our big interstates were once native paths for seasonal migrations and trade routes. In 2010 the Greenway was upgraded to paved multi-use recreational trail. Even the grand old bridges can be traced back to old ferry crossings and shallows where people found it easiest to cross.

Shocks Mill Bridge, a 28-span stone arch railway bridge built in 1905.

The walk-around is a little tricky - best to slow way down or better yet, walk your bike. 

In the early 1700s the Susquehanna posed a serious obstacle to westward migration. A good ferry and skilled ferryman were necessary to carry people, animals, and freight across this rocky and sometimes nasty stretch of river. During the 1800s when the Underground Railroad was operating through Pennsylvania, some of these old ferry routes offered ways to move people fleeing slavery across with having to access a bridge and thus capture from southern bounty hunters who frequented them. I had heard this was true for the old Vinegar's Ferry site and I again hopped off my bike to investigate.

Vinegar's Ferry depicted in the early 1800s. 

An old river approach

Riding into Bainbridge to the end of the paved section of trail (there is another 4-mile stretch of proposed rail trail yet to be finished), I had to stop at the odd but wonderful White Cliffs of Conoy. These are no White Cliffs of Dover but simply an impressive pile of limestone quarry tailings - industrial waste. Though now in public ownership, there's not much but a sagging orange plastic fence to keep someone from sliding off the overlook. More fascinating to me was that this quarry operation had its own town of 1,000 residents. Nothing of it remains except for some factory ruins in the woods across the railroad tracks. The quarry pit out of sight on the bluff across from the tailings pile is easily seen on Google Maps. It is now a scuba center. You can see, too, Sam Haldeman's home while you are taking in the satellite view.

White Cliffs of Conoy

A mile or so more on the path and I came to the end of the paved section, stopping at Koser Park along the water front. I sat and had lunch looking across the water to nearby Haldeman Island with the tall stacks of the Brunner Island Electric Station showing above the trees. The whole area in and around Bainbridge was once a series of native villages, occupied in succession by the Shenk's Ferry, Susquehannock, and Conoy people. The island camps and the shore villages would have been busy this time of year with fishing and harvesting crops, putting up food for the long winter ahead. The dogwoods and locust are just beginning to show some color and autumn is just arriving.

Notes:

For more on Mira Dock, see: Ellen Stroud. "Dirt in the City: Urban Environmental History in the Mid-Atlantic." Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Vol. 79, No. 4, Autumn 2012.

Marietta Restoration Associates http://www.mariettarestoration.org/history.html

J.P. Lesley. Memoir of Sam Stedman Haldeman, 1812-1880. Monograph read before the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/haldeman-s-s.pdf