Lycoming County
Williamsport, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Formed April 13, 1795 out of Northumberland County. The name (from a Delaware Indian word) honors Lycoming Creek. Williamsport, the county seat, became a borough, 1806, and a city, 1866. Once a great lumbering center. Birthplace of Little League Baseball.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Carved from Northumberland County in 1795 and named for a creek bearing a Delaware Indian word, Lycoming County rose on the wealth of the surrounding forests. By the mid-1800s Williamsport stood among the greatest lumbering centers in the nation, its sawmills feeding a booming young republic. A very different kind of fame arrived later when the county became the birthplace of Little League Baseball.
Why it matters
The county traces the arc of the Pennsylvania frontier from Indian place-names through the timber boom that helped build America, to an enduring national pastime for children.
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Related events
- · Founding of Little League Baseball
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Muncy Mills
Muncy Creek Township, PA · est. 1947
Around 1772 John Alward raised this valley's first gristmill, a cornerstone of any frontier settlement where neighbors brought grain to be ground into flour and meal. Burned by Native raiders in 1779 amid the Revolution's border warfare, it was rebuilt again and again—new mills rising in 1783 and 1800—and the last of them ground on until 1872, a full century of milling on one spot.
Montour County
Danville, PA · est. 1982
Carved from Columbia County in 1850, Montour County took its name from Madame Montour, the influential Native interpreter and diplomat who moved between Indigenous nations and colonial officials. In the industrial age its seat, Danville, became a cradle of American iron, where the first iron T-rails for the nation's booming railroads were manufactured. The county also claims Christopher Sholes, born here, whose later work produced the typewriter that transformed the modern office.
Dietrick Lamade
Williamsport, PA · est. 1996
German-born publisher Dietrick Lamade founded the Sunday Grit in Williamsport in 1882, building it from this site after 1889 into one of the country's best-known "family newspapers." He grew Grit on a deliberate formula: upbeat "good news," content tuned to rural readers, and a nationwide army of young paperboys who sold it door to door. For generations of small-town and farm households, Grit was a weekly window on the wider world.
Peter Herdic
Williamsport, PA · est. 1996
Peter Herdic was a driving force behind Williamsport's rise as the self-proclaimed "lumber capital of the world." As a mill owner and president of the Susquehanna Boom — the great log-catching works on the river — he helped turn the city's timber wealth into the mansions of "Millionaire's Row," many of which he built. An inventor as well, he patented the "herdic," a low, rear-entry public carriage, and made his own home at No. 407.