A Quiet Boomtown: Jamison City, PA., 1889-1912 [Pennsylvania]

xviii, 148 pp. In an age when the American city dominates our concern for national prosperity and the quality and future of our lives there is something to be gained by turning our minds back to a bygone America in which the exploitation of nature underlay the expectation that the human condition would improve with giant strides until all men would enjoy the richness of rural village life unimagined by their grandparents. The easy ability to accept the destruction of a nation's natural resources as a necessary prerequisite to progress and the failure to recognize that by this act they would bring an end to the standards and aspirations which prompted them to begin the cycle characterized the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. In seeking to better their lot they succeeded in ruining its foundations, thereby clearing the way for an urbanism which rendered much of their confidence and many of their ideals obsolete. Jamison City provides a case study in this tragic process. From its emergence as a necessary center for lumbering activities, through its few years of prosperity built on a narrow and inflexible economic base, it enjoyed two decades of well-being, stability, and a belief in its own permanence and then by quick steps quietly collapsed as the forest surrendered to the insatiable demands of the axe and saw. Its residents established homes and a community which embodied their most treasured values and dreams and then , almost on cue, departed the denuded land to face new challenges and such opportunities as they could find in a world they helped to make but did not choose. Not only Jamison City but also the way of life that had given it birth and its character entered a ghostly existence.