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 Patti Dente
My Opinion and Neighbors
 Charlie Fullington
Fire Call by Charlie
 Niki Scrudato
Let Me Explain
 Cindy DeLuca
Library Letters
 Judy Linder
Makes You Wonder
 Jana L. Atwell
Nature Notes
 Tony Fordiani
The Not So Great One
Alvin Hall
YesterdayTanning:
More Than The Sun Or A Bed With Ultra-Violet Lights, Part I
Over the last few years, northern Monroe county has lost many old buildings associated with the history of Barrett, Paradise, Price and other townships—The Golden Goose, Cook’s Touch, Cappuccino’s Restaurant. Within the last fifty years, other buildings have succumbed to fire or the wrecking ball or simple neglect—The Henryville House, Monomonock Lodge, Onowa Lodge, The Inn at Buck Hill. None was more important to the economic development of Barrett Township in the nineteenth century than the Pine Knob Inn. What!? You ask, had the Pine Knob Inn to do with economic development? I remember the charming dining room, the excellent food, and a back room filled with delectable desserts. What did those things have to do with economic development?
Before it became the Pine Knob Inn, the elegant building on Route 447 was the home of Gilbert Palen, co-founder of the Canadensis Tannery in the 1850’s. The Pine Knob Inn burned, twice, two years ago. It is no more; however, the large white Italianate house next to it was part of this same story. It was the home of George Northrup, Palen’s partner in founding the tannery, and his wife, Sarah Gould Northrup. Sarah was sister to Jay Gould who also dabbled in tanning before becoming one of the most important “robber barons” at the end of the century. Before spending time on the Palen and Northrup partnership; however, it might be a good idea to provide the reader a background in tanning.
Tanning was, and is, the complex process by which animal hides are converted into leather. Since animal hides of all types will rot and degrade in other ways if left as they come from various animals, something must be done to preserve them and make them useful. They can simply be dried after removing all the remaining flesh, but this produces a semi-pliable material known as rawhide that is not useful for much. Native Americans had only a limited knowledge of making animal skins useful. They did produce a soft, useful “buckskin,” developed from dried deer hides by rubbing brain matter to the dried skin. Europeans, probably through trial and error, learned how to tan leather very early, thereby producing a much more useful material. Leather was so important that tanning was among the first useful crafts developed.
After colonization, two types of tanning developed in the settlements. The first and, at least initially, the more wide-spread was “domestic” (for want of a better term) tanning. In this craft, perhaps only one local farmer would develop the skills and assemble the equipment necessary to tan sufficient leather to meet his family’s needs. Since tanning required special knowledge and tools, this farmer also produced a small surplus that could be sold or bartered to his neighbors. The second type, and eventually the craft that provided leather for the increasing needs of a growing country, was “commercial” tanning. Individuals with knowledge of tanning and the capital to invest in large tanning plants, or tanneries, soon came to dominate the craft. Until the mid-19th century, tanning was very much a closed craft with sons learning the craft from their fathers and sons and daughters marrying members of other tanning families. Marriages to first or second cousins. Some have compared these relationships to the practices of European landed families. Both Palen and Northrup belonged to such a family, Palen as a direct descendent and Northrup by marriage..
In addition to the knowledge of the tanning process and the capital to develop tanneries, three or four things were necessary in order for tanning to prosper in a particular area. Raw materials were of first importance, a source of animal hides and the substances used to convert them to leather. Since cattle, or any other live stock for that matter, were not raised in northeastern Pennsylvania in quantity, hides had to be imported from elsewhere. This meant that access to reliable transportation was essential for a tannery to succeed. It is no coincidence that the railroad reached northeastern Pennsylvania in the early 1850’s with a stop at Cresco. Tanning followed by the end of the decade. Transportation was also important for getting finished leather to market.
The other raw material required in vast quantities was tree bark, not just any bark, but the bark of the eastern hemlock and oak trees. It took approximately 2000 pounds of bark to produce 100 to 150 pounds of finished leather. The bark contained tannin, a substance without which leather could not be produced. A rough estimate was that it took the bark of four trees, on average, to tan one cow hide into leather. Limestone was also required to “leach” raw hides to remove the hair and open the pours so the tanning liquid could penetrate them.
Tanneries had two basic ways to get the bark needed. They could either purchase the land on which the hemlock and oak grew and harvest the timber and bark themselves or they could purchase the already harvested bark from the land-owners. Palen and Northrup used the latter method exclusively while the White Tannery in Mountainhome used the former. Purchasing the land and standing timber had a couple of major advantages over merely purchasing the bark. Once the bark was removed, land owners had the right to sell the downed timber and, of course, had the land itself. The choice Palen and Northrup made had serious consequences in the 1870’s.
It is something of a myth that tanners were not interested in the timber felled for bark. Certainly not all of the downed timber was used for lumber but not all of it was allowed to rot on the cleared land. Timber that could be easily transported found its way to saw mills. The remainder did go to waste. In all cases, trees that had been stripped of their bark for tannin had to remain where they fell for at least a year. They were too slippery, or “snotty” in the common parlance, to be handled safely.
Harvesting the bark used for tanning was back breaking labor, especially in the time before power tools. Palen was originally attracted to Monroe County by the hundreds of acres of forest dominated by the eastern hemlock, the preferred source of bark. These trees, most in virgin woods, reached one hundred to one hundred fifty feet in height and could be more than two feet in diameter, although any tree over six inches in diameter was likely to be cut. The trunks were straight and without branches for the first two-thirds to three-quarters of their height. In the largest trees, the bark could be up to three inches thick at the base thinning to one inch closer to the crown.
Peeling the bark was a craft as well as hard work. In addition to saws and axes, the peelers primary tool was an iron instrument between ten and twelve inches long and approximately semi-circular in design called a “spud.” It was squared off on one end and finished like a flat spoon at the other, the end of the tool that was forced between the bark and the woody part of the tree trunk. The peeler started by scoring completely around the tree as close to the ground as possible then measuring precisely four feet up the trunk. A straight score connected these two rings and the bark was “peeled” from the tree using the spud and a mallet. Care was taken not to damage the bark. Following this initial peel, the tree was felled. The remainder of the bark was removed in four foot slabs using the same method. Following a period of drying with the fleshy side up, the bark was transported to the tannery on wagons pulled by teams of four horses each. Palen and Northrup had a total of fifteen draft horses for this purpose. In the tannery yard, bark was stacked into “sheds,” although this word is misleading. The piles were actually nearly solid stacks of bark that could be one hundred or more feet in length, up to 25 feet wide and over 12 feet high. Since hemlock bark was harvested in the spring, beginning in April, and since hemlock trees preferred steeply sloped habitat in mountain creek ravines, the reader can only imagine the difficulty of the work involved. However, once the bark reached the tannery, the work had just begun.
(Author’s Note: Next month I’ll take a close look at the Canadensis Tannery, Gilbert Palen and George Northrop, and the development of the village of Canadensis.)
 John Cafarelli
Gnus of the Day
 Phil Dente
Humorous Happenings
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