The production of leather is one of the oldest trades known to man, making leather one of man's oldest cultural creations. Prehistoric man used hides and skins of animals for clothing and decoration, and in our modern world we still use it for leather clothing and shoes, furniture and much more. Leather can be colored, can repel water and oils, it is resistant to scratching, and withstands ageing.
The clothing of our ancestors several generations back was home-made and needed to be serviceable, often coming from deer and bear. Men wore breeches and jackets and the women wore jackets and skirts (then known as "petticoats") of buckskin. Many farmers wore leather aprons which extended to the knees and covered to just below the neck on the front side. Hats worn in the winter were often beaver skin, although rye hats made much more sense in the summer.
Indians never tanned their leather, instead prepared skins to wear by kneading and scraping. Early pioneer families tanned their own leather by soaking skins of cattle and other wild animals in lye made from wood ashes to loosen the hair so that it could be scraped off. The hides were then soaked for a period of time in a strong concoction of tannin made from oak or hemlock bark. A wooden trough was often sunk into the ground to serve as the tanvat.
After the soaking, the hides were dried, scraped and softened by pounding them on a block of wood with a mullet, then rubbing the hide in bear grease or tallow. The hides were darkened, as required, by applying a mixture of lard and soot.
Custom tanneries began to spring up in the backwater communities, which freed up the busy farming families for other farm-oriented work. Cash wasn't used much then, as the farmers generally worked deals to give half the hide to the tannery in exchange for getting the other half of the hide tanned. As a result, the farm family only had to pay for the making of shoes or boots, clothing, saddles and the like. In some larger communities, officers were appointed, known as "Leather-Sealers" to make sure no one got cheated. You can read more about this interesting occupation of Elishia Swift, Ebenezer Hibbard, and Captain Silas Parke, Leather Sealers, in the History of Hanover Township and the Wyoming Valley, by Plumb.
Leather clothing began to give way to tow (shorter flax fibers are called "tow" and the longer ones, "line"), woolen and linen garments from about 1720 through the end of the Revolutionary War. Reference books show leather being used in the Wyoming Valley until about 1830. As sheep became more popular on the farms, and flax became more prevalent, leather was slowly replaced by linens and woolens and we moved into an era of linsey-woolsey, which had a warp of flax and a woof of wool. Tailors and shoemakers continued to tour the countryside and used the stash of leather saved by the farm families to make shoes and a stock of homespun.
Leather can come from cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, horses, deer, elk or antelope, and I found several references to the use of hide from dogs. If it can be skinned it can be tanned--and probably has!
The ancient tanning process must have been a foul smelling trade, usually relegated to the fringe areas of a community (or in the local case to the north end of the county). Skins typically arrived at a tannery stiff as a poker and dirty as a Mexican Presidential campaign. The tanners--the people who made leather--in a bygone age soaked the skins in water to clean and soften them, then they pounded the skin to remove any remaining flesh and fat. The tanner removed the hair fibers from the skin by either soaking the skin in urine, painting it with an alkaline-lime mixture, or simply letting the skin become putrid over a period of several months before dipping it in a salt solution. After the hair fibers were loosened, the tanners scraped them off with a knife.
Tanners collected urine from various places, let the urine collect in jars until it turned into ammonia, then poured the ammonia on the leather to cure. I can only imagine how tanners and tanners' shops smelled!
Once the hair was removed, the tanners pounded dung from dogs or pigeons into the skin or soaked the skin in a solution of animal brains. Sometimes the dung was mixed with water in a vat, and the skins kneaded in the dung water until they became pliable. Bare feet kneaded the skins in the dung water during warm weather, occasionally causing burns to the human skin.
The scraps of leather left over from whatever project was being worked on would be turned into glue by letting the hides deteriorate for months in a water mixture. Later, the water was boiled off to make "hide glue," the most common woodworking glue for thousands of years. Hide glue, if kept dry, can last a very long time. It was dissolved in water, heated and applied warm, typically around 140°F. As the hide glue cooled, it gels quickly. When the hide glue gets to room temperature, the consistency is similar to stiff gelatin. It did not have great strength.
Actually, I have forgotten as much as I ever knew about the subject. I went to Wilkes University with a very focused student by the name of Lou Davis, whose father owned a glue factory. Lou told me lots of stories about making glue, although I would not feel comfortable telling them in a farming community like the upper Fishingcreek Valley. Today the L. D. Davis Industries, Inc. is still very much in the same business. The name "animal glue" is used by that company, rather than "hide glue."
Some say that the best way to tan leather is by using a chemical called tannin, and here is where things get gross! In this process, the hide is rubbed with dung to let the tannin penetrate the leather, a process known as "bating." The bating process imparts certain properties to the hide. The dung of carnivores like dogs is used as it contains an enzyme that digests collagen, which is an elastic component of the hide. Perhaps now you'll have a better appreciation of the old, angry statement, "I'll tan your hide" and the equally angry "I'll give you the tannin of a lifetime."
Yvonne Heath Starr, San Antonio, Texas, remembered an Eskimo mask she bought in 1963 when she and her husband lived in Alaska. Yvonne recalled that "We knew Eskimos used urine for tanning, but never related that to our leather Eskimo face completely surrounded with parka fur. It even had reindeer for the hairline, eyebrows, mustache and goatee. When we were transferred to Laredo, Texas, it was l05°, so we left the mask in a box in the closet for eight years. When we finally opened that box, there was no doubt urine was used to tan the leather."
The area that we now know as Jamison City seemed to have a location that would be ideal for a vacation during the summer months for the well to do, as well as a convenient site for building a tannery and a saw mill. After all, there were trees in abundance to support both. The mountains were alive with massive hemlocks, and the beauty of the area seemed ideal for hotels to serve patrons and house the extra employees of the tannery. As the leather and the lumber people moved in and railroad service began, what was described as "a boom rush" began and lumbering and even the hotels prospered for a time.
The tannery and a saw mill were not the beginning vision of Jamison City. Bill Mather, former Benton Postmaster and a lifelong resident of the area, said that the Proctor Hotel was first constructed as a "fancy summer resort" in order to bring well-heeled hotel patrons to the valley. "Well, then, in comes the tannery," Bill told us when we recently caught up with him at Ed Cole's Barber Shop.
The odor from the tannery had Proctor Hotel guests wrinkling their noses. Bill Mather recalls that "the next thing in comes the big saw mill and the band saws all operated by steam." Without missing a beat, Bill said "there were three things about it." He continued, "the odors of the tannery, and then the noise from the sawmill, and the drinking."
Bill claimed that really the "thing that topped it all off" was when a man and his wife contracted to cut the logs in the mountains. The man and his wife "moved right back in the mountains" in an old shack for two weeks. They worked in order to get a little money to bring their families over from foreign countries. It sounds like a present-world situation, doesn't it!
"There were Germans, there were Dutch, there were Hungarians, like that--and for two weeks the man cut the logs and the wife cooked and kept house," Bill continued. "The first thing at the end of two weeks, my Dad told me, was that they come to the Post Office these men who were working for the tannery and a large portion of the wage they got went out to New York City to go out to their families to get their families over here."
The transient men at the bottom rung of employment seemed to receive a decent wage. These men were primarily Hungarian, Polish, and Italian immigrants. The next rung up on the employment ladder of this one-industry town were primarily sawmill and tannery workers of British, German, or Irish extraction. On the top rung, were absentee managers, including Philadelphia banker Benton K. Jamison, Boston banker Thomas E. Proctor, and Colonel James Corcoran, Williamsport.
Bill paused, as though what he was going to say next was something best left unsaid. After a few seconds, he continued. "On the whole, they then proceeded to get drunk. Every two weeks, Jamison City was a drunken brawl." Quoting his father, Bill continued "On Saturdays and Sundays and days such as that there would be fights." He told a story about the hotel keepers giving each of the different nationalities a room, since they liked staying to themselves. This is where "they would go in and do their drinkin."
The men were paid every two weeks on Saturday night. The men sent most of what they earned home to their families, the rest they spent in the local bars and drunken brawls would follow. This was not an atmosphere wealthy patrons appreciated. When the Manor Rest hotel was torn down, investors were said to receive 10 cents on the dollar for their investment.
Bill continued with a story about someone throwing a board into a room of one of the five hotels that at one time populated the narrow valley. The men "picked up and went out back with slabs of wood and they cleaned up." Bill mostly enjoyed telling about the Proctor Hotel, the "big hotel up there in the mountains," as he put it, a hotel built on a shelf of land just behind his long-time home. The hotel was torn down in 1908. Other hotels included the City Hotel (also known as the Dorsey Hotel), the Blue Front (also known as the Forbes Hotel) and the Van Sickle Hotel.
Faced with what lay on the valley floor below the Proctor Hotel, the establishment fell on hard times.
In an effort to stimulate business, the hotel was sold and the name changed to the Manor Rest Hotel. That didn't work, either. A man by the name of Parvin Kile bought it and ran it between 1903 and 1908. Bill Mather explained that the "'drinkin' men weren't about to climb the mountain to do their drinkin" and so "the hotel became a flop all the way around."
The Proctor Hotel/Manor Rest Hotel
Bill Mather's father, Frank Mather, got married in 1903 and ran a general store in Jamison City. He told Bill a story about how "tight" Parvin Kile was. Parvin came down off the hill to buy a pair of pants from the store. Frank knew that Parvin was operating the hotel and thought that he would want to be dressed nice and so he showed him the best pants he had. That wasn't satisfactory, and so Frank showed him cheaper pants. Nothing satisfied him. Finally, the store keeper went to the store window in the front and got out a pair of paints with one leg all faded from the sun and that was the pair of pants that Parvin bought.
Frank Mather's Store with the Proctor Hotel in the upper left.
The store still stands. The hotel has been gone for almost a century.
The Post Office Department established a post office on March 2, 1889, at "Jameson City." A year later, on November 28, 1890, the name was changed to "Jamison City." The Jamison City Post Office was disestablished September 30, 1927.
There was one church, built in 1883, used by Methodists. It was converted into a summer cottage in 1932. At various times, Jamison City had a county road and a bridge across Fishing Creek, a school in both Columbia County and in Sullivan County, a baseball team, the Cornet Band, several pretentious hotels, four saloons, four stores, two meat markets, a clothing store and a barbershop.
Jamison City had several wonderful natural attractions, including a stream of water that flowed down Grassy Hollow via Heberly Run and then though the settlement--the start of Fishing Creek. In the valley and extending up part of the foothills, the soil was once good enough for farming, since some of the land had been used for farms before its purchase for lumbering purposes. The land was sufficient for grazing cattle as contrasted to the top of the mountain where cultivation was never successful.
Jamison City is nine miles straight north of the Borough of Benton, a beautiful little community at the northernmost end of Columbia County, with a small portion of the town and all (or most) of the former tannery in Sullivan County. We have an article about Jamison City under FEATURES, so there is no purpose in duplicating that information here, except to say that Col. John Jameson and three partners purchased the farms and woodlands where Jamison City is now located and laid out the area as part of the Jamison City Land Company. The company purchased approximately 217 acres in Columbia County between March, 1888, and December, 1889. Twenty acres were also purchased in Sullivan County.
The tannery was built in 1889 by Corcoran, Richards and Wheeler. Col. Corcoran was one of three partners in the Jamison City Land Company, an owner of the Elk Tanning Company of Ridgeway, Pennsylvania, and owned a considerable amount of land in Sullivan County. The "great flood of 1889" devastated Williamsport and wiped out his mill, lumberyard and other businesses in that town. Jamison City concurrently experienced hard times during 1889 as unemployment and debts mounted. Col. Corcoran by the end of the year faced bankruptcy and litigation. He sold the lumber company and the tannery to Thomas E. Proctor in March, 1890, who ran the business until 1893, when he sold to the United Stated Leather Company. The tannery had a capacity of 666 sides per day. For a time, George W. Lambert was superintendent and Clayton N. Wilbur was general foreman.
The Columbia County/Sullivan County line divided the town. The tannery and about a dozen dwelling houses were located in Sullivan County, and the sawmill and business portion of the town consisting of a hotel and several stores were in Columbia County, giving that county nearly the whole population of the town, while the timber and bark which supplies the tannery and sawmill nearly all come from Sullivan County.
Primeval forests covered the hills around Jamison City (which the local residents have always referred to as "mountains") when the tannery was first built, since few pioneers ever used an axe on the side hills until Proctor made the woods resound with the blows of the lumbermen and the noises of the tannery.
Construction of the tannery began thanks to the Elk Tanning Company and the promised arrival of a railroad from Bloomsburg. The following year, 1889, a number of key events took place in Jamison City. The Pennsylvania Central Lumber Company began construction of a lumber mill, the tannery was ready for operation and the Bloomsburg and Sullivan railroad began operations from Bloomsburg to Jamison City via Benton and other immediate stops. The railroad continued to run until the tannery shut down in 1925. The tannery was in operation for nearly thirty-five years, and shipped the last carload of leather on November 4, 1925, the same day the company announced that it would close and dismantle its buildings.
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The houses that were built to shelter the tannery workers were generally all of the same pattern, unpainted, two-story "company" houses, slapped together as cheaply as possible as if the winter weather was not a problem, with no lath or plaster or plumbing of any kind. |
Water came from wells and hand pumps, and a pail of drinking water with dipper graced every residence. There was always a little house in the rear of each residence with a well-worn path running to it. Bathing took place in the family wash-tubs, mostly on Saturday nights, although during the warmer summer months kids loved to swim in various "swimming holes" in the creek--but only in the stream above the tannery, since Fishing Creek was polluted south through the Borough of Benton, Bill Mather told me, from the discharge of tannic acid into the creek.
The tannery and the houses spread out in the valley
Proctor built thirteen two-story frame houses behind the tannery-heating plant in Sullivan County beside Blackberry Run, one red house for the tannery superintendent, and houses rented to German-speaking laborers in an area often called Germantown. The tannery workers mostly lived in this area, which was described as Catherine Casey Chapin as "dark and looked alike" while the Superintendent and the bookkeepers lived in Jamison City.
The vision of Catherine Chapin regarding Jamison City is interesting reading. You can find it here.
Jamison City had lots of tannin, an important ingredient in the process of tanning leather, thanks to the availability of hemlock trees. Tannin, a bitter chemical which protects trees against destructive insects, comes naturally in hemlock. People have extracted the tannin from trees dating back to ancient times. The Chinese used tannin over three thousand years ago to preserve leather. Tannin is in tea plants and we can see the effect when we steep tea in hot water. Tannins are also found in wine, particularly red wine. The use of tannin in making leather dates back to the first tannery in America, built in 1630 in Virginia. Some local lakes, including Painter Den Pond, have a high concentration of tannic acid. The hemlock bark was used so extensively by the tanners of the 1800's in the United States that the tree almost became extinct in the northeastern U.S. Today, the tanning industry has moved into the use of synthetic tanning agents and our stands of hemlock are returning.
George Wesley Childs (1854-1927, was President of the Elk Tanning Company of Ridgeway, and later became head of the Central Leather Company. While at Ridgeway, he was the person who developed a process for extracting tanning liquids from hemlock and "rock" oak tree bark.
The Jamison City tannery began operations shortly after the Bloomsburg and Sullivan Railroad reached Jamison City. With the advent of railroad service, carloads of bricks necessary for construction of the huge brick chimney of the tannery began arriving.
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I was not able to conclusively determine how the bricks got to Jamison City, but Bill Mather confirmed that he thought they came by train. The brick tannery stack in the background as spring arrives at the foot of Huckleberry Mountain. |
The railroad made possible the importation of raw hides and exportation of leather. The aura of hustle and spirit of progress that swept Jamison City at the turn of the 1890s attracted necessary capital and labor. Both the community and the tannery opened on a confident note. The tannery buoyed the spirits of the upper Fishingcreek valley. A bright future seemed to await the Jamison City Valley.
Workers at the Tannery
Picture courtesy of Monica Diltz
The Elk Tanning Company's tannery near Blackberry Run north of Jamison City was one of the largest in the state with a capacity to strip over 600 hides every eight hours. Hides came in on the Bloomsburg and Sullivan Railroad, since it was cheaper to bring hides to the bark than it was to take the bark to the hides. It was said that "it cost as much to ship a hide from Bloomsburg to Jamison City as it did to ship said hide from Chicago to Bloomsburg." The price for shipping hides is unclear, but a Bloomsburg and Sullivan Company letter dated July 25, 1888, offered Col. Corcoran the rate of $2.60 per ton for bark from Central to Philadelphia via the Pennsylvania Railroad. It appears as though the Bloomsburg and Sullivan Railroad would have survived longer if it had been more reasonable on their freight charges.
The bark for the Jamison City tannery, according to a 1910 article in the Argus. came from "every place within a radius of one hundred miles where trees are felled and pealed; from fifty different towns, representing as many different mountains ranges and twice as many mountain streams, from the cool heights of the Allegheny system to the desert bottoms in the far west of this state." Although this claim was made by the Argus, this seems highly unlikely, and Bill Mather agreed.
The men who stacked the wood had to be constantly mindful of worms, fire and cave-ins. The man known as the "bark piler" arranged his stacks close to each other, while attempting to preclude the possibility of a draft blowing between them. With no draft to fan the flames, a blaze would have a hard time getting started and would be apt even with a dry surface of the bark to eat into, to smolder and go out.
Workers at the tannery. Picture courtesy of Monica Diltz.
The waiting bark looked "hoary and wrinkled," according to one account, crushed by tons of bark and yet looking like the bark would rest there forever as if the bark had been stacked, then forgotten. The bark actually was rarely allowed to remain in the stack more than two years from the cutting, since worms that impregnated the bark were always a problem. Bark was constantly stacked in the big sheds, then taken as the factory had need of it. Train-car loads would arrive, then switch to a waiting track beside the main-rail line. These bark sheds lasted long after the tannery closed and the stone foundations are still in a decent state of repair.
The hide shed as it looked in April, 2007. Note the high windows that were used to throw the hides off the train cars and into the shed.
The Jamison City tannery made out better than others in Sullivan County. Michael Meylert started the first large tannery in Sullivan County in the area of Laporte. It had a succession of owners. James McFarlane & Co., purchased ten thousand acres of timber lands in 1865-66 in and around Laporte Township and built a number of buildings there. In 1868, this firm built the Thorndale tannery, about four miles east of Laporte. Hides, leather and supplies were hauled to and from Muncy, a distance of 28 and 32 miles. The two tanneries and an estimated thirty thousand acres of land eventually were sold to the United States Leather Company. The company abandoned the Thorndale tannery in 1894. The Thorndale location became a true ghost town and tracks laid by the Lehigh Valley Railroad from Lopez to Thorndale were also abandoned.
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There was no doubt where the tannery was located as visitors made their way up the narrow valley leading through Jamison City. The unmistakable tannery smoke stack rose in the distance. The aroma of the woods must have been everywhere, especially with the pungent smell of the hemlock. Photographs show neatly stacked piles of bark thirty feet or so in the air, and accounts from the time indicate someone estimated that there were 9,000 tons of bark awaiting its fate in the dipping vats of the Elk Tanning Company. |
Samuel Seward hauling a load of bark to the tannery with his two horses, one white, one black, and with a young man riding on the wagon. The team of horses that pulled the trees out of the woods is standing beside the wagon. The boy is believed to be his son, Ken. Samuel lived on a farm just south of Red Rock Corners and was the grandfather of Russ, Marvin and Marion Seward. Ken was Alfred's brother, the father of Russ, Marvin, and Marvin. The horses shown in the picture are square-built horses, working horses, but small in stature. Logging and hauling bark required power in a horse and these horses appeared to have the power.
--Picture courtesy of Gary Beach
Although workers in the tannery were paid what appears to be an acceptable wage, times were tough. By way of illustration, here is a one-liner from an issue of an Argus in 1910 about life in Jamison City: "F. J. Hess had new potatoes for dinner last Sunday, who can beat that?"
Workers had their moments of fun, as shown in the following picture of a July 4 parade.
Picture courtesy of Bill Mather, Jamison City
An article in the New York Times from November 12, 1916, titled Higher Pay, Shorter Hours talked about tannery pay. The article stated that "Fifteen thousand employees of the Elk Tanning Company in this locality (Ridgeway, Pennsylvania) have received an advance in wages of 25 cents a day, according to an announcement made here today. They will also work nine hours a day instead of ten. Officials of the Curtis Leather Company announced that 700 employees of their company would receive an increase in wages. Skilled workman will hereafter receive $4.50 for nine hours work and common laborers $3.25. Woman employees will receive $2.25."
Picture courtesy of Jim Fox
Superintendents of the Tannery included men by the name of Samuel A. Goodhue, Gus Owen, William Metz, William Plank. The last superintendent was a man by the name of McMann. Franklin Hopper rolled the first hide in the new tannery and also the last one in 1925.
The Tannery in Jamison City was under the control of several related companies, including the United States Leather Company (often referred to as the Leather Trust) and two of its subsidiaries, the Union Tanning Company and the Elk Tanning Company.
In 1892, several years after the tannery began operation, the Central Pennsylvania Lumber Company completed its sawmill in Jamison City and employed about a hundred men year round, and I've seen some estimates of 500 men during the spring of the year. The lumber mill was in operation about 30 years. The bark that was pealed from hemlock was taken to the tannery.
Cross-cut saws were used to fell the hemlock trees, although this was not part of the tannery operation. There were not always enough cross-cut saws for all the men. These men would have to chop the tree down and fit it, meaning he would go along the tree about every three or four feet making a ring around the tree with his ax. The next man was called a "fitter." The fitter would take what was called a "spud" and pry off the piece of bark continuing until the entire tree was peeled. The men peeled from the bottom of the tree to where the limbs got too numerous where they would stop and go to the next tree.
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Local farmers like Samuel Seward would take their timber stands and put up a sawmill and would peel bark. Getting the bark to the tannery was a back-breaking job. |
In early times the hemlock trees
Stood stately, tall, and trim.
Their branches reached a hundred feet
Above the forest dim.
Bitter tannin kept away
The insects that might taste
Tender hemlock shoots or twigs
And kept them safe from waste.
--Loretta Kuse
After the bark was cut from the hemlock trees, the huge trees were left to rot. As a young boy, I can remember scrambling up mounds of what appeared to be ground in Davidson Township, Sullivan County. It was years later that I discovered the pencil-shaped mounds were fallen hemlock trees covered with ground and vegetation following years of decay. Many of those mounds remain in parts of Sullivan County, although only half as high as they were 50 or 60 years ago. Hemlock logs remaining in the woods had to be burned by settlers in order to clear land for farming. The moist logs had to be piled high in order to get them dry enough to burn.
Hides that came in on the railroad were stored in the "hide house" that could store a reported 27 boxcar loads. After the railroad backed up beside the hide house, the hides were thrown inside the building through the upper doors in the side of the building. The hides were later stripped of their hair by a shift of forty laborers working during the daylight hours, cleaning as many as 600 hides every eight hours. The hide house is still standing beside the main road that leads into Sullivan County from Columbia County, its rock foundation still very solid, although the roof and the hinged windows through which the hides were thrown are rusted badly..
Hides were taken next to the "Beam House" where some forty men split the hides and removed the hair. The 654-foot main tanning building had 348 vats in which the hides were dipped for two weeks, then oiled and taken to a drying area. Twenty-three men and their teams were required to move the thirty-six tons of bark a day. They also sold the ash to local farmers for $1.50 a load.
The dry hides that ended up in Jamison City were the consistency of a warped board, shipped here from as far away as South America. Some references indicated that some South American cattle were slaughtered not for the meat but for the hides, a process as wasteful as felling the gigantic hemlocks and then only using the bark. The hides were dried in some fashion, shipped to the tannery, and ended up in the hide house to soak in what some workers referred to as "liquor," made from sugar, ground and tanned hemlock bark, and then soaked for days. When the hides came out of the hide house, they were soft and flimsy, still covered with hair, with a very rank odor.
Hair was removed from the hides by placing the hides on a "big board" and scraping off the hair.
Another solution followed, then the hides proceeded to the "rockers," for an up and down beating. The hides were then dried, taken to something called a "rolling raft." Hides were eventually moved to the main building, a reported 654 feet long, containing 348 vats and other processing equipment. Hides were tanned and dried using exhaust steam and overhead fans. Giant rollers flattened the hides into a finished product after they had dried. Power for the tannery, and the tanning liquid came from ground hemlock bark. Each day's operation required tons of bark and the labor of many men and their teams of horses.
The creases were taken out of the thick hides through a rolling process, resulting in wide pieces of leather. The hides were then loaded on railcars and shipped to shoe factories where the sole leathers were cut out and pieces for harnesses were made. History from other tanneries owned by the same company reported that it took "110 days from the time the dry hide was thrown in the liquor in the tannery 'til it came out a piece of dry leather at the end of the (line)."
Part of the tannery was destroyed by a blaze in March, 1895. In the spring of 1896, a timber fire in the hills above Jamison City burned for weeks destroying thousands of trees and threatened to destroy Jamison City in a fire local residents insisted could have been deliberately set. For two weeks, workers from the tannery and the saw mill fought fires without pay.
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The remains of the 160-foot brick tower for the tannery heating plant is still a landmark at the Sullivan County end of Jamison City. |
Thomas E. Proctor owned at least six tanneries in Pennsylvania. Proctor became president of the huge United States Leather Company during 1893 when it was organized by the principal sole leather manufacturers. The company reorganized as the Central Leather Company in 1905 with Edward C. Hoyt as president. Hoyt learned the trade in the tannery of the Hoyt Brothers, which was acquired by and folded into the United States Leather Company in 1893. The Union Tanning Company, a subsidiary of the United States Leather Company, continued the operation of the tannery from 1894 when Proctor died. The Elk Tanning Company took over the company ten years later.
Central Leather Company, made up of the United States Leather Company and other minor companies, accounted for about 1/3 of the U.S. sole leather production. The major meat packers entered the tanning industry on a large scale and became the dominant force in the industry. The counterpart in lighter upper leathers was the American Hide and Leather Company, formed in 1899. This group of 23 firms probably controlled about a third of the total U.S. output of lighter leathers.
The largest American independently owned sole-leather manufacturer at the time of the Jamison City Tannery was on South Monroe Street, Titusville. It was constructed in 1899 for the Queen City Tannery. Raw hides for the Titusville operation were imported from Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and India. Finished leather for soles was exported to boot and shoe firms in Britain, Germany, France, and Japan. The United States Leather Company purchased the Queen City Tannery in 1905. The dry hides were hauled on the last part of their trip to the Titusville tannery by wagon and four-horse teams. The finished product was brought back the same way. At least, the Jamison City tannery had the benefit of the railroad. On August, 1915, the once-mammoth plant in Titusville ceased operations.
Throughout the nineties and into twentieth century, the Jamison City tannery operated at capacity most of the time, although an occasional fire or flood produced short-term suspensions or slowed production. By 1910, the tannery started facing the challenge of obsolescence as competing tanneries improved their production techniques. Bill Mather said that when the tannery eventually closed in 1925, it still had a two-year supply of hemlock on site. He noted that prior to finally closing, the tannery began closing for short periods of time as it and the workers fell on hard times.
The residents of Jamison City, when the tannery began its decline, could not come up with enough capital to maintain an economic structure in a single-industry environment. Many other communities, in other times and places, have been victims of similar circumstances, including the mining ghost town of Pueblo, Colorado.
Jamison City probably had about 350 residents and about 85 houses in 1893. You can find the exact population of Jamison City in 1901 by going here. In 1970, the population had dwindled to fourteen families. Whatever logic there was in the way that the lumbering operations took place is lost on me. An estimated 200,000 acres of virgin timber were sacrificed in pursuit of profit. The decline may have started earlier than some think. An account in the Argus from 1910 indicated the "supply of bark at the Jamison City tannery is a little slow at present. As high as 20,000 tons have been stored in its spacious sheds, now there is scarcely half that quantity."
When the announcement was made of the closing of the tannery, a sense of gloom spread over the settlement at the base of Huckleberry Mountain, and quickly spread through the upper end of Columbia County and the lower end of Sullivan County. Closing meant the loss of a payroll of something like $10,000 each month, a huge sum for the year 1925 and a terrible economic loss for a community. It meant the immediate loss of jobs for 110 men directly employed in the lumber business and for large numbers employed in ancillary businesses like hotels, stores and related industries.
After 1925, the machinery was sold at auction and the tannery building was bought and dismantled by Webb Wright, Bloomsburg. Three months later, a local headline read, "$50.00 for a home finds few takers in Jamison City."
After the lumber mill closed, the tannery continued to operate until it closed in 1925. From then on, Jamison City had virtually no role in the local economy. No more would the mill whistle be heard, the fights with the wood hicks on Saturday night were a matter of history. Within two years, four of the five bars in town closed. The hide house remains, as does the square smokestack of the tannery. Vegetation covers the rest and hides a great deal of history.
We don't know the exact number employed in Jamison City in the tanning business. Most numbers are higher than we suspect were actually employed there. Using Columbia County records, however, we know that in 1910, there were 58 "manufacturing establishments in the county, employing 4,992 'hands' of which 3,015 are males." In the lumber industry, strangely enough, there were as many men as women employed--233 of each, and four were under the age of 16.
Today, Jamison City has a number of comfortable, private residences, a restaurant and bar, and the "Featherbed & Breakfast" housed in a circa 1881 restored Victorian rooming house. the one main street in Jamison City is paved, a stark difference from the short-lived plank road--probably constructed from hemlock--that the community once had.
We have used numerous references in this report from the Argus newspaper, official records, manuscripts, and interviews, including conversations with Bill Mather, former Postmaster of Benton and a life-long resident of Jamison City. A Quiet Boomtown: Jamison City, Pennsylvania, 1889-1912, by Craig A. Newton and James R. Sperry (Bloomsburg: The Columbia County Historical Society, 1972) is an excellent source of information on the community. Also see Dewing, Arthur S. Corporation Promotions and Reorganizations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914, for information on the United States Leather Company. Brad Cole provided some of the information about the tanning industry and specific companies. Other readers contributed pictures and personal memories, with acknowledgement of that fact where mentioned.
Take the time to slowly drive the streets of Jamison City and look--really look--at the remnants of the past still preserved in the community. Enjoy and remember what once was.
