George Washington Sears, an early conservationist who wrote under the pen name "Nessmuk", was one of the first to criticize the Pennsylvania lumber industry and its destruction of forests and creeks. In his 1884 book "Woodcraft" he wrote of the Pine Creek watershed where A huge tannery ... poisons and blackens the stream with chemicals, bark and ooze. ... The once fine covers and thickets are converted into fields thickly dotted with blackened stumps. And, to crown the desolation, heavy laden trains of 'The Pine Creek and Jersey Shore R.R.' go thundering almost hourly ... Of course, this is progress; but, whether backward or forward, had better be decided sixty years hence. Nessmuk's words went mostly unheeded in his lifetime and did not prevent the clearcutting of almost all the virgin forests in Pennsylvania.