Submerged Elk County town surfaces
The Army Corps of Engineers flooded a Pennsylvania valley town to create a lake. Many years later, a drought brought the place back.
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By TED ANTHONY
The Sunday Patriot-News
Oct. 27, 1991
AMID INSTANTER’S RUINS, Pa.
After two generations under the waters of a man-made dam, a piece of the past has surfaced for a drought-induced curtain call: The village of Instanter is back.
Once a bustling company town in remote northern Elk County, Instanter is no more. Economic downturns idled its tannery seven decades ago, people scattered and finally it was flooded when the government dammed up the Clarion River.
Now, 43 years after the government orchestrated its artificial Atlantis, the water level behind the East Branch Dam has slipped to a trickle, revealing a ghost from the past that should be nine fathoms under water.
“It’s like visiting Greek or Roman ruins,” said Gary Froelich, a district resource manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, which administers the lake.
Riverbed silt has long since obliterated Instanter’s dirt streets. Yet the Clarion’s chill waters have preserved foundations, bricks, bottles and a few stray tannery hides from the hamlet that once boasted 500 people.
“I loved it. If there was some way a man could earn a living there, I’d go back,” said Instanter native Frank Nitsche, 84, who now lives in nearby Wilcox. From his hometown he has only a swatch of brittle leather, six browned photos and his memories.
Anglers and recreation-seekers at Elk State Park first spotted Instanter late in the summer, when drought conditions kept the lake from replenishing and slowly revealed pieces of the old tannery.
“We were just up on patrol and saw brick piles, some bolts and old foundations in the water,” recalled John J. Kolodziejski, a park ranger.
Now only a brown trickle snakes through what was once a town. And people like 11-year-old Justin Riekofsky of nearby Johnsonburg scour the parched valley for pieces of history.
“There’s a lot of people come up here, looking, thinking back,” said Justin’s father, Skip, watching the boy troll the brick piles that once were the tannery’s smokestacks.
What Corps officials term a “dramatic drop of water” has left the East Branch water level 52 feet below normal, and gridlocked everything from boating to the local water supply.
John Reed, a spokesman for the Corps’ Pittsburgh district, said the construction of artificial lakes and dams has forced the relocation of old graveyards and flooded dozens of small Pennsylvania neighborhoods over the years.
“There’s probably lots not necessarily whole towns, but communities, houses, churches, that type of thing,” Reed said.
Drought effects have touched some of those. On the Youghiogheny River Lake near the Maryland border, Reed said, plummeting water levels have revealed some long-submerged bridges.
The Instanter that’s now part of the Clarion River was the second Elk County town to go by that name, local records show. Originally called New Instanter after its namesake, an early-1800s community seven miles north, it quickly shed the “New.”
Shortly after, the new tannery opened, followed by a company store, a sawmill and the chemical plant up the road in Straight. Neighborhoods, Howe’s Hotel, a ballclub and a band followed suit.
It was “a lively little town and enjoyed a high degree of friendship and hospitality,” George S. and Margaret Rupprecht wrote in a history of Elk County.
A generation later, in 1926, the Elk Tanning Company closed and the town began to wither.
Enter the federal government, which starting in 1948 purchased 52 tracts of land and claimed 11 by eminent domain, then dammed up the valley and flooded it.
Nitsche, who worked at the tannery until the day its whistle blew the final time, couldn’t watch.
“Everybody moved out and they tore the houses down, see,” he said. “Then they ruined paradise.”
Four decades later, the curious and the sentimental are returning. They park their cars on a boat ramp, walk into the ankle-deep mud that should be the Clarion River’s East Branch, and glimpse their heritage.
“It’s a natural drawing card right now,” Froelich said. “A lot of people in this area have relatives, friends who worked at the tannery, knew this and that here’s the general store, here’s so-and-so’s house.
“You can act like you’re revisiting Mayberry R.F.D.”
Published in The Sunday Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Oct. 27, 1991.
