Every Scout who ever rode up Route 322 toward camp knows the sign. Brown background, white letters, bolted to a post near the top of Seven Mountains: Poe Valley / Poe Paddy State Parks.
For most of us, that sign meant one thing — the Sand Mountain Road exit was coming up, the car was about to turn, and a week at Seven Mountains Scout Camp was minutes away. We watched for it. We cheered when we saw it. And then, almost without exception, we ignored what it was actually advertising.
Ten miles of gravel
Follow that sign past the camp turnoff and the pavement gives out. State forest roads take over — marked, maintained in season, and swallowed almost immediately by the 198,000-acre Bald Eagle State Forest. Ten miles or so of ridge-and-valley driving later, the trees open onto a lake.
That’s Poe Valley State Park: 620 acres wrapped around 25-acre Poe Lake, sitting in a valley pinched between Big Poe Mountain to the north and Little Poe Mountain to the south. The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources is blunt about the access. There is no entirely paved road to the park. Winter maintenance is not performed. Cell service is unreliable and the department recommends downloading the map before you leave home.
If that sounds like a warning, alumni of this camp will recognize it as something closer to a selling point.
Three more miles down Poe Valley Road brings you to Poe Paddy State Park — 22.73 acres, one of the smallest state parks in Pennsylvania, planted at the confluence of Big Poe Creek and Penns Creek. Two parks, one road, roughly a twenty-minute drive from camp.
Built by the same generation that built camp
Here’s the part that ought to interest anyone who cares about camp history.
Seven Mountains Scout Camp was founded in 1934. In the mid-1930s, a few ridgelines east, the Civilian Conservation Corps established Camp S-63-PA in Poe Valley — 200 young men, Company 1333, working through the Depression.
They cleared brush to cut wildfire risk. They planted trees on ground the lumber companies had stripped bare a generation earlier. They cleaned out streams, cut roads, and built the bridges. Many of the state forest roads that alumni have driven, biked, and gotten lost on are their work.
Then they were asked to build a dam.
None of them had built one before. They did it anyway — two years, two months, and two days from the first shovel. At 4:15 in the morning on December 19, 1937, water went over the spillway at Poe Lake for the first time.
The same corps put up the facilities at Poe Paddy. Walk the dam and spillway today and you are standing on infrastructure that is closing in on ninety years old. The lake was drained and the dam repaired during the 2008 and 2009 seasons, with facilities upgraded in the same window, but the bones underneath are still CCC.
There is a symmetry here worth noticing. In the same decade, in the same mountains, one group of young men was building a camp to teach Scouts the outdoors, and another was rebuilding the outdoors itself. Both projects are still standing.
The ghost town under Poe Paddy
Poe Paddy is small, quiet, and almost entirely unremarkable-looking. It is also built on top of a vanished town.
Poe Mills was a lumber town of the 1880s and 1890s — prosperous, loud, and short-lived. By 1890 it had a population of more than 300. Big Poe Creek was dammed to run a steam sawmill. A railroad reached the area in 1879, and temporary timber lines were thrown up through nearly every mountain valley to haul out what was left of the old-growth white pine and hemlock.
When the timber ran out, the town went with it. In the early 1900s, the same rail line that had carried logs was running scenic excursion trains on a loop from Milroy to Poe Paddy and back. Then that ended too.
What survived is the best reason to make the drive.
The tunnel
Follow the Mid State Trail — orange rectangular blazes — upstream along Penns Creek from the Poe Paddy campground. Cross the pedestrian bridge. Keep going.
Ahead of you is the Paddy Mountain Tunnel: 250 feet of railroad bore cut through solid mountain in the 1870s for the Lewisburg, Centre and Spruce Creek Railroad, which became the Lewisburg and Tyrone around 1880. The crews who dug it included Irish immigrants working with hand tools.
The tunnel curves, so you cannot see straight through it. It was partially unlined natural rock for most of its life until rehabilitation work around 2015 added lining — a project that served hikers on the Mid State Trail and Penns Creek Rail Trail while also protecting the bat colonies that overwinter inside. Look above the walkway on the Mifflin County portal and you will see a grate installed to give the bats their own access.
The walk in is short and flat from the nearest parking. You do not need to be a backpacker to see it. Bring a light.
Green drake season
There is one week a year when Poe Paddy stops being quiet.
Penns Creek is a nationally known trout fishery, and in late May or early June it produces the green drake hatch — mayflies (Ephemera danica) close to an inch long, coming off the water in numbers that turn cautious old brown trout into reckless ones. Fly anglers plan vacations around it. They drive from several states away. They fill every campsite for miles.
If you are bringing a family and want solitude, come in September. If you want to see something genuinely strange and wonderful happen on a Pennsylvania trout stream, come the first week of June and accept that you will be sharing it.
Have a correction, a memory, or a photograph? Contact the Seven Mountains Scout Camp Alumni Association. This piece is part of an ongoing series documenting camp history and the surrounding Seven Mountains region.