Good news! For 2018, we upgraded our geotrail to an official Geocaching GeoTour! Learn more about Pennsylvania's Clearfield County GeoTour, which offers a series of 5 related geocaching adventures: Forgotten Clearfield, Hometown Heroes, Waterways, Cemeteries, and Parks and Recreation. Codes are hidden within each cache. Collect 25 codes from across all 5 series and you qualify for a collectible prize. If you complete all 5 and have your passport validated, you can receive a trackable geocoin
Clearfield County is full of old and historical locations, buildings, and remnants of by gone eras. Come and cache Clearfield County to learn about it's rich history through ghost towns, abandoned cemeteries Civil War uprising and it's rich Native American presence.
The first settler in the Lumber City area was Henry Hile in 1835. In 1858 Lumber City became the third borough incorporated from Penn Township along the north side of the West Branch of the Susquehanna River. For many years it was a thriving metropolis of the lumber industry. The timber was rafted in, and Lumber City had a grist mill, saw mills run by water from dams on the river, a foundry, shook shop, and splint mill for preparing wood for matches. The second leading industry as agriculture. The town included a bank, schools, general stores, post office, train station, Churches, hotels, and two doctors. In 1906 the George S. Good Fire Brick Company was opened and operated until about 1960.
In 1960, the US Army Corp of Engineers bought land withing the borough for its backwaters for the flood control dam they were building outside of Curwensville. A few buildings were relocated located to higher ground but most were raised. The loved ones buried at the Lumber City Cemetary were relocated by the Corp of Engineers to various other cemetaries in the area. Other effects of the construction of the dam was moving the highway and railroad to higher ground, and tearing down the old iron bridge and building a higher modern bridge. The US Corp of Engineers and the Pennsylvania Game Commission formed a cooperative for the land between the present railroad tracks and the river just upstream of the Lumber City Bridge. The Game Commission maintains several food plots (from the orginal farm fields below the town) and it is open to the public. The old orginial highway is still there and makes for a nice walk to the cache. If you get off the beaten path you can find a few of the orginal foundations, although most that are still there are covered in forest debris now. There are also six old hand dug wells above the road (but NOT around the cache) that shows the history. By looking at old maps of the town, each of these wells would have been on a separate home plot. Please enjoy the visit to this Ghoast town.
