Times Observer file photo Recreation opportunities, like the Rimrock overlook, were viewed as an important, if ancillary, purpose when the Allegheny National Forest was founded.

The main driver behind the creation of the Allegheny National Forest was to protect the headwaters of the Allegheny River.

The economic benefits – timber – were a secondary consideration.

Recreation might have not been at the top of the list but the ANF’s first superintendent, Loren Bishop, had a sense for the role it might take on.

And at the 50 year mark, that was even more certain.

“While the Allegheny National Forest is producing a crop of timber and protecting the watershed it will be admirably suited to and available for recreation purposes,” Bishop wrote in 1925. “A forested region is most appealing to those who seek out of doors recreation.”

By 1925, some of the places he identified as places that would “beautiful and interesting” tourist places still area – Morrison Run, Kinzua Rd. (Rt. 59), Coal Knob Tower (which is where Jakes Rocks is now) and Hearts Content, which Bishop called “one of the very few remaining samples of old growth pine and hemlock in the whole east. It is a wonderful inspiring site.”

100 years later and it still is.

The 1920s was the start of the automobile boom and the idea of touring the forest was something that Bishop saw as something that could be popular.

“The drive along the Allegheny River from the New York State Line near Corydon, passing Kinzua, Warren, Tidioute and to Tionesta, thence up Tionesta Creek to Sheffield and to Warren is one of the most beautiful in America,” he wrote. “The route can be varied at points, and during the dry portion of the year, usually from April to November, the trip can be made with safety and in comfort in a single day. There are at least 500 miles of good earth roads within or immediately adjacent to the National Forest. The system is being extended and improved as rapidly as practicable. The Forest Service has to date built some 20 miles of earth road.”

To some degree, Bishop is playing the role of prophet in the wilderness (or brush patch). He knew there had been “a noticeable lack of appreciation of the recreational possibilities of the Allegheny region.”

While his message might not have exploded in his own time, he was confident that recreation would become a key use of the ANF.

And some of the arguments he used are similar to what tourism officials are saying now.

“It is certain that the region is destined to become a very important recreational area,” he wrote. “Within a radius of 125 miles of the national forest there resides a population at 8,000,000. The cities of Cleveland, Wheeling, Hagerstown, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Elmira, Ithaca, Rochester, Buffalo and Toronto, together with all the smaller intervening cities, are within a one days motor trip of the forest.

“With the further extension of the highway systems and the completion of the Allegheny purchase program increasing thousands will annually seek the region here to find pleasant and wholesome out of door recreation.”

Managing the nation’s forest to be friendly to recreation uses was “policy,” Bishop said. “Such use does not preclude the growing of timber. Recreational use – hunting, fishing, camping, touring, etcetera – is the one use that anyone, rich or poor, may make of the Forest. For those who wish to campout public camp sites are prepared. Two such sites are now in use on the Allegheny. One at Sandstone Spring between Warren and Tidioute, the other at Loleta, seven miles south of Marienville.”

Perhaps the single greatest way that recreation has impacted this region, though, is hunting and fishing.

“The area is well stocked with game and the streams can be developed to the point where they will rank with the best fishing streams in the East,” Bishop claimed (and with Kinzua Creek on the Forest, he was right here, too).

“In cooperating with the State Game Commission and the State Bureau of Fisheries, the hunting and fishing within the forest is being improved,” he continued. “It is a well recognized fact that with but few exceptions the forest is the natural home of wild animals and that but little in the way of wildlife can persist after forest conditions disappear. In National Forest administration fish and game are considered forestry resources and plans are made for their conservation and propagation.”

In an article for the 50th anniversary, a retired district ranger, Larry Stotz, provided additional details on how specifically fishing and deer hunting had grown on the Forest since its inception.

“Recreationists in increasing numbers were discovering the Allegheny National Forest,” he wrote, when he arrived in 1947.

“The demands for summer home and hunting camp sites on the Forest was increasing. Hunters and fishermen by the thousands filled the Forest on opening days of hunting and fishing seasons.”

He explained that the first buck law was passed in 1907 and the first formal doe season held in 1928.

“By then the herd on the Allegheny was fast outstripping its food supply, and much of the second-growth forest had already grown out of reach of the deer,” Stotz said.

By the close of the 1940s, the Civilian Conservation Corps had constructed the Farnsworth trout hatchery as a “U.S. Fish Cultural Station” while the ANF and Pa. Game Commission partnered on wildlife habitat work on the ANF starting in 1949.

“The major role of the Forest Service in helping to create a proper habitat for wildlife on the Allegheny is to maintain an active timber sale program,” he wrote. Timber and wildlife are interdependent. If both are to provide maximum benefits to man, the annual surplus of each must be harvested.

“Without an annual harvest of deer of both sexes by hunters,” he added, “timber management on the Allegheny National Forest would become next to impossible in the complete absence of the large predators.

Roads provided access needed for hunters and fishermen to get to those locations.

Richard Haussman, an assistant ranger who also wrote for the 50th anniversary, noted how the CCC built “hundreds of miles of roads that were completed during that era” that “aided greatly in the protection and administration of the ANF. They also made these public lands more accessible.”

He also outlined how the National Trails System Act of 1968 brought six new trails with then over 100 miles of new trail to the forest – the North Country Trail, Tanbark, Twin Lakes, Johnnycake, Tracy Ridge and Minister Valley.

“If the Allegheny National Forest does not come to be a national play place,” Bishop concluded, “an area offering exceptional recreational advantages, good hunting, fishing, camping, touring… it will be because of recurrent forest fires.”