Pre-European The earliest settlers in Pennsylvania arrived from Asia between 12000
BCE and 8000 BCE, when the glaciers of the Pleistocene
Ice Age were receding. Fluted point spearheads from this era, known as the
Paleo-Indian Period, have been found in most parts of the state. Archeological discoveries at the
Memorial Park Site 36Cn164 near the confluence of the West Branch Susquehanna River and Bald Eagle Creek collectively span about 8,000 years and represent every major prehistoric period from the
Middle Archaic to the
Late Woodland period. Prehistoric cultural periods over that span included the Middle Archaic starting at 6500 BCE; the Late Archaic starting at 3000 BCE; the Early Woodland starting at 1000 BCE; the Middle Woodland starting at 0 CE; and the Late Woodland starting at 900 CE. First contact with Europeans occurred in Pennsylvania between 1500 and 1600 CE.
18th century during the
American Revolutionary War in June and July 1778 In the early 18th century, a tribal confederacy known as the
Six Nations of the Iroquois, headquartered in
New York, ruled the Indian (Native American) tribes of Pennsylvania, including those who lived near what would become Lock Haven. Indian settlements in the area included three
Munsee villages on the Great Island in the West Branch Susquehanna River at the mouth of Bald Eagle Creek. Four Indian trails, the
Great Island Path, the
Great Shamokin Path, the
Bald Eagle Creek Path, and the
Sinnemahoning Path, crossed the island, and a fifth,
Logan's Path, met Bald Eagle Creek Path a few miles upstream near the mouth of
Fishing Creek. During the
French and Indian War (1754–63), colonial militiamen on the
Kittanning Expedition destroyed Munsee property on the Great Island and along the West Branch. By 1763, the Munsee had abandoned their island villages and other villages in the area. With the signing of the first
Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, the British gained control from the Iroquois of lands south of the West Branch. However, European settlers continued to appropriate land, including tracts in and near the future site of Lock Haven, not covered by the treaty. In 1769, Cleary Campbell, the first European settler in the area, built a log cabin near the present site of
Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, and by 1773 William Reed, another settler, had built a cabin surrounded by a stockade and called it Reed's Fort. It was the westernmost of 11 mostly primitive forts along the West Branch;
Fort Augusta, located by the confluence of the
East (or North) and
West branches of the Susquehanna at what is now
Sunbury, was the easternmost and most defensible. In response to settler incursions, and encouraged by the British during the
American Revolution (1775–83), Indians attacked colonists and their settlements along the West Branch. Fort Reed and the other European settlements in the area were temporarily abandoned in 1778 during a general evacuation known as the
Big Runaway. Hundreds of people fled along the river to Fort Augusta, about from Fort Reed; some did not return for five years. In 1784, the second
Treaty of Fort Stanwix, between the Iroquois and the United States, transferred most of the remaining Indian territory in Pennsylvania, including what would become Lock Haven, to the state.
19th century Lock Haven was laid out as a town in 1833, Lock Haven prospered in the 19th century largely because of timber and transportation. The forests of Clinton County and counties upriver held a huge supply of white pine and hemlock as well as oak, ash, maple, poplar, cherry, beech, and magnolia. The wood was used locally for such things as frame houses, shingles, canal boats, and wooden bridges, and whole logs were floated to
Chesapeake Bay and on to
Baltimore, to make
spars for ships.
Log driving and
log rafting, competing forms of transporting logs to
sawmills, began along the West Branch around 1800. By 1830, slightly before the founding of the town, the lumber industry was well established. The
West Branch Canal, which opened in 1834, ran from
Northumberland to Farrandsville, about upstream from Lock Haven. A state-funded extension called the Bald Eagle Cut ran from the West Branch through Lock Haven and
Flemington to Bald Eagle Creek. A privately funded extension, the
Bald Eagle and Spring Creek Navigation, eventually reached
Bellefonte, upstream. Lock Haven's founder, Jeremiah Church, and his brother, Willard, chose the town site in 1833 partly because of the river, the creek, and the canal. Church named the town
Lock Haven because it had a canal
lock and because it was a haven for loggers, boatmen, and other travelers. Over the next quarter century, canal boats wide and long carried passengers and mail as well as cargo such as coal, ashes for lye and soap, firewood, food, furniture, dry goods, and clothing. A rapid increase in Lock Haven's population (to 830 by 1850) followed the opening of the canal. A Lock Haven
log boom, smaller than but otherwise similar to the
Susquehanna Boom at Williamsport, was constructed in 1849. Large cribs of timbers weighted with tons of stone were arranged in the pool behind the
Dunnstown Dam, named for a settlement on the shore opposite Lock Haven. The piers, about from one another, stretched in a line from the dam to a point upriver. Connected by timbers shackled together with iron yokes and rings, the piers anchored an enclosure into which the river current forced floating logs. Workers called
boom rats sorted the captured logs, branded like cattle, for delivery to sawmills and other owners. Lock Haven became the lumber center of Clinton County and the site of many businesses related to forest products. The
Sunbury and Erie Railroad, renamed the Philadelphia and Erie Railroad in 1861, reached Lock Haven in 1859, and with it came a building boom. Hoping that the area's coal, iron ore, white pine, and high-quality clay would produce significant future wealth, railroad investors led by Christopher and John Fallon financed a line to Lock Haven. On the strength of the railroad's potential value to the city, local residents had invested heavily in housing, building large homes between 1854 and 1856. Although the Fallons' coal and iron ventures failed,
Gothic Revival,
Greek Revival, and
Italianate mansions and commercial buildings such as the Fallon House, a large hotel, remained, and the railroad provided a new mode of transport for the ongoing timber era. A second rail line, the
Bald Eagle Valley Railroad, originally organized as the Tyrone and Lock Haven Railroad and completed in the 1860s, linked Lock Haven to
Tyrone, to the southwest. The two rail lines soon became part of the network controlled by the
Pennsylvania Railroad. During the era of
log floating, logjams sometimes occurred when logs struck an obstacle. Log rafts floating down the West Branch had to pass through chutes in canal dams. The rafts were commonly wide—narrow enough to pass through the chutes—and to long. In 1874, a large raft got wedged in the chute of the Dunnstown Dam and caused a jam that blocked the channel from bank to bank with a pile of logs high. The jam eventually trapped another 200 log rafts, and 2 canal boats,
The Mammoth of Newport and
The Sarah Dunbar. In terms of volume, the peak of the lumber era in Pennsylvania arrived in about 1885, when went through the boom at Williamsport. These logs produced a total of of sawed lumber. After that, production steadily declined throughout the state. In the early 1880s, the New York and Pennsylvania Paper Mill in
Castanea Township near Flemington began paper production on the site of a former sawmill; the
paper mill remained a large employer until the end of the 20th century.
20th and 21st centuries As older forms of transportation such as the canal boat disappeared, new forms arose. One of these, the
electric trolley, began operation in Lock Haven in 1894. The Lock Haven Electric Railway, managed by the Lock Haven Traction Company and after 1900 by the Susquehanna Traction Company, ran passenger trolleys between Lock Haven and
Mill Hall, about to the west. The trolley line extended from the
Philadelphia and Erie Railroad station in Lock Haven to a station of the
Central Railroad of Pennsylvania, which served Mill Hall. The route went through Lock Haven's downtown, close to the Normal School, across town to the trolley car barn on the southwest edge of the city, through Flemington, over the Bald Eagle Canal and Bald Eagle Creek, and on to Mill Hall via what was then known as the Lock Haven, Bellefonte, and
Nittany Valley Turnpike. Plans to extend the line from Mill Hall to Salona, south of Mill Hall, and to
Avis northeast of Lock Haven, were never carried out, and the line remained unconnected to other trolley lines. The system, always financially marginal, declined after
World War I. Losing business to automobiles and buses, it ceased operations around 1930.
William T. Piper Sr. built the
Piper Aircraft Corporation factory in Lock Haven in 1937 after the company's Taylor Aircraft manufacturing plant in
Bradford, Pennsylvania, was destroyed by fire. The factory began operations in a building that once housed a silk mill. As the company grew, the original factory expanded to include engineering and office buildings. Piper remained in the city until 1984, when its new owner,
Lear-Siegler, moved production to
Vero Beach, Florida. The Clinton County Historical Society opened the Piper Aviation Museum at the site of the former factory in 1985, and 10 years later the museum became an independent organization. Karnish Instruments was a privately owned company in Lock Haven that manufactured aircraft parts such as dials and pointers. They coated many of their products with radioactive
paint containing radium-266, allowing them to glow in the dark. The company was established in the late 1940s, at a building near what is now the
William T. Piper Memorial Airport. The company moved to a larger building downtown in 1953, and eventually closed in 1979. In 2007, the
United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, discovered "significant levels" of radioactive contamination at both former Karnish buildings, as well as an adjacent
retirement home. From 2008 to 2018, the affected properties were demolished and the radioactive contamination was cleaned up with government funding.
Floods .|alt=A large, smooth river crossed by a modern bridge. The left bank is tree lined, the right is a levee, a long mountain ridge is in the background. Pennsylvania's streams have frequently flooded. According to William H. Shank, the Native Americans of Pennsylvania warned white settlers that great floods occurred on the Delaware and Susquehanna rivers every 14 years. Shank tested this idea by tabulating the highest floods on record at key points throughout the state over a 200-year period and found that a major flood had occurred, on average, once every 25 years between 1784 and 1972. Big floods recorded at
Harrisburg, on the
main stem of the Susquehanna about downstream from Lock Haven, occurred in 1784, 1865, 1889, 1894, 1902, 1936, and 1972. Readings from the Williamsport
stream gauge, below Lock Haven on the West Branch of the Susquehanna, showed major flooding between 1889 and 1972 in the same years as the Harrisburg station; in addition, a large flood occurred on the West Branch at Williamsport in 1946. Estimated flood-crest readings between 1847 and 1979—based on data from the
National Weather Service flood gauge at Lock Haven—show that flooding likely occurred in the city 19 times in 132 years. The biggest flood occurred on March 18, 1936, when the river crested at , which was about above the flood stage of . The third biggest flood, cresting at in Lock Haven, occurred on June 1, 1889, and coincided with the
Johnstown Flood. The flood demolished Lock Haven's log boom, and millions of feet of stored timber were swept away. The flood damaged the canals, which were subsequently abandoned, and destroyed the last of the canal boats based in the city. The most damaging Lock Haven flood was caused by the remnants of
Hurricane Agnes in 1972. The storm, just below hurricane strength when it reached the region, made landfall on June 22 near
Panama City, Florida. Agnes merged with a non-tropical low on June 23, and the combined system affected the northeastern United States until June 25. The combination produced widespread rains of with local amounts up to in western
Schuylkill County, about southeast of Lock Haven. At Lock Haven, the river crested on June 23 at , second only to the 1936 crest. The flood greatly damaged the paper mill and Piper Aircraft. and again 2004, when rainfall from the remnants of
Hurricane Ivan threatened the city. ==Geography==