History of Fowlers Hollow State Park

During 1901, the Perry Lumber Company began logging operations in the area by building a narrow gauge logging railroad along the unused Path Valley Railroad grade from New Germantown to what is now Big Spring State Forest Picnic Area. The railroad then expanded south into Bowman Hollow and around the end of Rising Mountain into what is now Fowlers Hollow State Park.

The company engine was named the Alfarata after the American Indian princess in the poem “the Blue Juniata.”

The company did not have a large, stationary sawmill, but used five portable sawmills, one of which was used in Fowlers Hollow. The loggers cut lumber and shipped hemlock bark to the Newport Extract Plant.

By 1905, the lumber was exhausted and the Perry Lumber Company sold all of its equipment. In 1907, the company sold 2,573 acres to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

In the early 1930s, unemployed local men, through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), constructed many of the facilities in Fowlers Hollow State Park.