LXI
FOREST COUNTY
FORMED April 11, 1848; named for its great variety of timber; hemlock and pine, east; dense forests of deciduous trees west along the Allegheny River. Game large and small abounds; streams are full of brook trout. Atmosphere is fragrant with health-giving ozone, strengthening the weak and restoring those affected with lung trouble. Chief industry is lumbering; in western part agriculture, and the growing of fine apples.
David Zeisberger, first white man in Forest County, came in 1767, Moravian missionary to the Monseys, a wild and warlike tribe; he stayed two years in their three villages, Goshgoshunk (Holeman’s Flats), Sa-quelin-get, Place of Council (Tionesta) and La-hun-ichannock, Meeting of the Waters (East Hickory), and migrated with them to Fort Pitt. After Monseys, came the Senecas under Cornplanter, in 1770. First settler Cyrus Blood, surveyor, who cleared land for Marienville, first county seat, and improved it. “The Big Level,” name of old state road, 1728 feet above sea, follows northeast from Marienville to Mount Jewett, McKean County, roadbed compact and solid, 100 feet wide, was first made in Cyrus Blood’s time. On this road is Beaver Meadows, formerly a dam built by beavers, which backed water over an area one and one-quarter miles long by one-eighth mile wide; dam four and one-half feet high.
Along the Guitonville road toward Marienville, on a high plateau with two miles of straight, natural, firm roadbed, is Job’s Pinnacle, from which is a fine distant view of Tionesta Valley; a mile farther, Pisgah, also a pinnacle, is on Salmon Creek Hill; the whole hill is composed of magnetic iron ore, on a sandstone foundation, above shale and slate stratification; in surveying, the magnetic attraction is so great the needle is paralyzed; it is a mass of rocks; another magnetic iron ore hill is Bald Bluff, where lightning strikes freely. Stony Point, back of Salmon Creek Hill, near Newtown Mills, is the highest land; scenery about here is so beautiful at the mouth of Salmon Creek, that Erion Williams, the early surveyor, called it Eden revived. Beautiful scenery is along the State road parallel with the Sheffield & Tionesta Railroad, crossing a large iron bridge over Tionesta Creek at Nebraska, two miles farther, over another iron bridge, and three miles to Ross Run. This land produces oil and gas in good quantities.
At Kellettville, on the Tionesta, pieces of ancient pottery have been exhumed, showing that this was the home of a race older than the Indians, who had not made pottery in this section; three miles above Kellettville is a long sloping rock in the bed of Tionesta Creek, “Panther Rock,” where Ebenezer Kingsley, a pioneer hunter, shot many cougars; state paid twenty dollars bounty for a panther, twelve dollars for a wolf. Picturesque falls are on Blue Jay Creek; near its mouth is Rocky City, on Tionesta Creek, a vast aggregation of rocks like tall towers, with grand scenery, nearly opposite is a prehistoric square hole forty feet deep, no record of its formation.
Tionesta, population 642, county seat, incorporated, 1852. Principal buildings, Courthouse on high ground in public square of two acres, brick, built 1870, architect, Keene Vaughn, contains proof copy of “Zeisberger preaching to the Indians in Forest County in 1677,” engraved by John Sartain, with a volume of Zeisberger’s Life and Notes, a gift from the Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia; and a receipt signed by David Zeisberger, framed in wood of the wild cherry tree under which, legend says, he originally preached; also portraits of prominent men of Forest County. Jail, brick and stone, in courthouse ground, built by Van Dorn Prison Company, Cleveland, Ohio, in 1895. The Forest County National Bank, native stone, Romanesque, built, 1899, architect, C.M. Robinson, Altoona. Presbyterian Church, brick, 1910, on site of old wooden church, built, 1851; and Methodist Church, brownstone, built, 1909; both contain memorial windows.
Lawrence County