October 2009, Apple and Cheese Festival weekend in Canton, we seized an opportunity to do a self-guided tour of some roads in Pennsylvania State Game Land #12 and some ancillary woods. Some of these roads are normally closed to vehicles. The area is over 24,000 acres of rugged mountain woods which at one time was home to several villages totaling two or three thousand people who worked at semi-bituminous coal mining, lumbering and railroading. The former towns are now nearly gone with little left other than depressions in soil where houses once stood.

There is an old cemetery outside of Barclay which is being cleaned up and repaired by a group of volunteers who have researched the history and some of the folks interred there. There are a sobering number of small children, mostly victims of smallpox and diphtheria, not uncommon in the latter half of the nineteenth century.