Ricketts Glen State Park is a 13,193-acre (5,280 ha) state park situated primarily within Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, United States, with its remaining territory extending into neighboring Columbia and Sullivan counties. Ricketts Glen is a National Natural Landmark known for its old-growth forest and 24 named waterfalls along Kitchen Creek, which flows down the Allegheny Front escarpment from the Allegheny Plateau to the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians. The park is near the borough of Benton on Pennsylvania Route 118 and Pennsylvania Route 487, and is in five townships: Sugarloaf in Columbia County, Fairmount and Ross in Luzerne County, and Colley and Davidson in Sullivan County.
Ricketts Glen's land was once home to Native Americans. From 1822 to 1827, a turnpike was built along the course of PA 487 in what is now the park, where two squatters harvested cherry trees to make bed frames from about 1830 to 1860. The park's waterfalls were one of the main attractions for a hotel from 1873 to 1903; the park is named for the hotel's proprietor, R. Bruce Ricketts, who built the trail along the waterfalls. By the 1890s Ricketts owned or controlled over and made his fortune clearcutting almost all of that land, including much of what is now the park; however he preserved about of virgin forest in the creek's three glens. The sawmill was at the village of Ricketts, which was mostly north of the park. After his death in 1918, Ricketts' heirs began selling land to the state for Pennsylvania State Game Lands.
Plans to make Ricketts Glen a national park in the 1930s were ended by budget issues and the Second World War; Pennsylvania began purchasing the land in 1942 and fully opened Ricketts Glen State Park in 1944. The Benton Air Force Station, a Cold War radar installation in the park, operated from 1951 to 1975 and still serves as airport radar for nearby Wilkes-Barre and as the Red Rock Job Corps Center. Improvements since the creation of the state park include a new dam for the Lake Jean, the breaching of two other dams Ricketts built, trail modifications, and a fire tower. In 1999 Hurricane Floyd briefly closed the park and downed thousands of trees; helicopter logging protected the ecosystem while harvesting lumber worth nearly $7 million, some of which paid for a new park office in 2001.
The park offers hiking, ten cabins, camping (one of the two camping areas is on a peninsula in the lake), horseback riding, and hunting. Lake Jean is used for swimming, fishing, canoeing and kayaking. In winter there is cross-country skiing, ice fishing on the lake, and ice climbing on the frozen falls. The Glens Natural Area has eight named waterfalls in Glen Leigh and ten in Ganoga Glen, these come together at Waters Meet; downstream in Ricketts Glen there are four to six named waterfalls. The park has four rock formations from the Devonian and Carboniferous periods, and is home to a wide variety of plants and animals. It was named an Important Bird Area by the Pennsylvania Audubon Society and is an Important Mammal Area too. Ricketts Glen State Park was chosen by the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) and its Bureau of State Parks as one of "25 Must-See Pennsylvania State Parks".
History
Native Americans
Ricketts Glen State Park is in Pennsylvania, where humans have lived since at least 10000 BC. The first settlers in the state were Paleo-Indian nomadic hunters known from their stone tools.Kent, Smith, McCann, pp. 4, 7–11, 85–96, 195–201.Wallace (2005), pp. 4–12, 84–89, 99–105, 145–148, 157–164. The hunter-gatherers of the Archaic period, which lasted locally from 7000 to 1000 BC, used a greater variety of more sophisticated stone artifacts. The Woodland period marked the gradual transition to semi-permanent villages and horticulture, between 1000 BC and 1500 AD. Archeological evidence found in the state from this time includes a range of pottery types and styles, burial mounds, pipes, bows and arrows, and ornaments.
The park is in the Susquehanna River drainage basin, the earliest recorded inhabitants of which were the Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannocks. They were a matriarchal society that lived in stockaded villages of large longhouses, but their numbers were greatly reduced by disease and warfare with the Five Nations of the Iroquois, and by 1675 they had died out, moved away, or been assimilated into other tribes.
After the demise of the Susquehannocks, the lands of the Susquehanna River valley were under the nominal control of the Iroquois, who also lived in longhouses, primarily in what is now the state of New York. The Iroquois had a strong confederacy which gave them power beyond their numbers.Wallace (1987), pp. 66–72, 130–132. To fill the void left by the demise of the Susquehannocks, the Iroquois encouraged displaced tribes from the east to settle in the Susquehanna watershed, including the Shawnee and Lenape (or Delaware).Donehoo, pp. 154–155, 215–219.
The French and Indian War (1754–1763) and subsequent colonial expansion encouraged the migration of many Native Americans westward to the Ohio River basin. On November 5, 1768, the British acquired land, known in Pennsylvania as the New Purchase, from the Iroquois in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix; this included what is now Ricketts Glen State Park.Wallace (2005), p. 159. After the American Revolutionary War, Native Americans almost entirely left Pennsylvania.Wallace (2005), pp. 136–141. About 1890 a Native American pot, decorated in the style of "the peoples of the Susquehanna region", was found under a rock ledge on Kitchen Creek by Murray Reynolds, for whom a waterfall is named.Wren, p. 56, Plate No. 7.
Early European inhabitants
Ricketts Glen State Park is in five townships in three counties. After the 1768 purchase, the land became part of Northumberland County, but was soon divided among other counties. Most of the park is in Luzerne County, which was formed in 1786 from part of Northumberland County. Within Luzerne County, the majority of the park, including all of the waterfalls and most of Lake Jean, is in Fairmount Township, which was settled in 1792 and incorporated in 1834; the easternmost part of the park is in Ross Township, which was settled in 1795 and incorporated in 1842. The northwest part of the park is in Sullivan County, which was formed in 1847 from Lycoming County; Davidson Township was settled by 1808 and incorporated in 1833, while Colley Township, which has the park office and part of Lake Jean, was settled in the early 19th century and incorporated in 1849. A small part of the southwest part of the park is in Sugarloaf Township in Columbia County; the township was settled in 1792 and incorporated in 1812, the next year Columbia County was formed from Northumberland County.Richter, pp. 3–46.
A hunter named Robinson was the first inhabitant in the area whose name is known; around 1800 he had a cabin on the shores of Long Pond (now called Lake Ganoga), which is less than northwest of the park. The first development within the park was the construction of the Susquehanna and Tioga Turnpike, which was built from 1822 to 1827 between the Pennsylvania communities of Berwick in the south and Towanda in the north. The turnpike, which Pennsylvania Route 487 mostly follows through the park, had daily stagecoach service from 1827 to 1851; the northbound stagecoach left Berwick in the morning and stopped for lunch at the Long Pond Tavern on the lake about noon.Petrillo, pp. 40–43.
The earliest settlers in what became the park were two squatters who built sawmills to make bed frames from cherry trees they cut for lumber. One squatter, Jesse Dodson, cut trees from around 1830 to 1860 and built a mill and the dam for what became Lake Rose in 1842. Dodson also built a dam south of Mud Pond, near what became Lake Jean; both dams were on the Ganoga Glen branch of Kitchen Creek, and each was used to make a "log splash pond". The other squatter, named Sickler, also built a mill and log dam, at what became Lake Leigh on the Glen Leigh branch of Kitchen Creek. Sickler was active from 1838 to about 1860.Petrillo, p. 68.
In 1865, a well was drilled at the Dodson mill site, after a Mr. Hadley fraudulently added oil to springs in what became the park. Hadley, who had hoped that investors would think petroleum was present, got the Wheeler & Wilson sewing machine company to invest $40,000 () in his scheme. In the next two years they drilled two wells, one deep at the former Dodson sawmill at Lake Rose and the other deep near the Ricketts mansion. No oil was ever found, and Hadley eventually fled to Canada.Tomasak, p. 44
R. Bruce Ricketts
While on a hunting trip on Loyalsock Creek north of the park in 1850, brothers Elijah and Clemuel Ricketts were frustrated at having to spend the night on a hotel's parlor floor. In 1851 or 1853 they bought , including what is now Lake Ganoga and some of the park, as their own hunting preserve, and built a stone house on the lake shore by 1852 or 1855. The stone house served as their lodge and as a tavern; it was known as "Ricketts Folly" for its isolated location in the wilderness. Clemuel died in 1858 and Elijah bought his share of the land and house. The Ricketts family was not aware of the glens and their waterfalls until about 1865, when they were discovered by two guests from the stone house who went fishing and wandered down Kitchen Creek.
Elijah's son Robert Bruce Ricketts, for whom the park is named, joined the Union Army as a private at the outbreak of the American Civil War and rose through the ranks to become a colonel in the artillery. After the war, R. Bruce Ricketts returned to Pennsylvania and in 1869 began purchasing the land around the lake from his father. By 1873 he controlled or owned , and eventually this grew to more than , including the glens and waterfalls and most of the park.
While the stone house had served as a home and inn since its construction, in 1872 R. Bruce Ricketts built a three-story wooden addition north of the house. The addition used lumber from a sawmill Ricketts and his partners operated from 1872 to 1875, about southeast of the stone house. The North Mountain House hotel opened in 1873; Ricketts' brother Frank, for whom a park waterfall is named, managed it from then until 1898. Many of the hotel's guests were Ricketts' friends and relations, who arrived after school let out in June and stayed all summer until school resumed in September. In 1876 and 1877, Ricketts ran the first summer school in the United States at his house and hotel; one of the teachers was Joseph Rothrock, later known as the "Father of Forestry" in Pennsylvania.
The waterfalls and Ganoga Lake were the hotel's biggest attractions. By 1875 Ricketts had named the tallest waterfall Ganoga Falls; he eventually named 22 of the waterfalls. Ricketts gave most of them Native American names, and named others for relatives and friends.Bachelder, pp. 186–189.Tomasak, p. 85. Ricketts renamed Long Pond as Ganoga Lake in 1881. The name Ganoga was suggested by Pennsylvania senator Charles R. Buckalew; it is an Iroquoian word which Buckalew said meant "water on the mountain" in the Seneca language. Donehoo's A History of the Indian Villages and Place Names in Pennsylvania identifies it as a Cayuga language word meaning "place of floating oil" and the name of a Cayuga village in New York.Donehoo, pp. 63–64. Whatever the meaning, Ricketts also named the glen with the tallest waterfall in the park "Ganoga".