Landrus

Landrus was the sawmill town that ran on electricity before most of America had it. Henry Landrus's Blossburg Coal Company operation founded the Tioga County settlement in 1882 — the lumber camp where the world's first electric-powered coal mine and the first electrified lumber camp ran on the same hillside, a hundred residents at its peak in the forest that had been nothing but forest.

The town died with the resource — the timber played out, the railroads changed course, and between 1910 and 1915 Landrus emptied into the Tioga State Forest that now covers it. The post office closed in 1914; the foundations and the mine workings went back under the second growth, the Bear Run Trail running over where the town was.

The file keeps the anomaly — a lumber-and-coal town that was technologically ahead of its time, gone in thirty years, the state forest over the site where the first electric mine ran. The ghost town's register is the industrial archaeology: the camp where the future arrived early and left early, the forest that took it back.

Landrus is the archive's electric file — the Tioga County lumber town with the world's first electric coal mine, abandoned to the state forest by 1915, the foundations under the second growth where the future briefly lived.