Tourism, timber, and manufacturing: Rural restructuring, commodification, and institutional relationships in Forest County, Pennsylvania

This dissertation utilized a rural restructuring framework to examine how shifts from Fordist to post-Fordist development and economic policy have affected the use of local land resources in Forest County, Pennsylvania for production (i.e. manufacturing, resource extraction) and for consumption (i.e. nature-based recreation, permanent/seasonal residences).; I conducted field research in Forest County and the Allegheny National Forest from June 1997–January 1999. I used multiple data sources including documentary/archival evidence, semi-structured interviews, oral histories, participant-observation on the county's ecotourism and hunting and fishing museum projects, and data collected with a survey of the demographics and psychographics of county visitors.; Private investment decisions and state policies affected the recreational, residential, and commodity land uses in Forest County. During the Fordist era, hunting camp development by regional, urban blue-collar workers was largely compatible with state timber production. In the post-Fordist period, decentralized production and state policies which encouraged local entrepreneurship in tourism production influenced recreational uses. Amenity-based recreation, attractive to professionals from the Rust Belt's economically restructured cities, increased in relative importance to the dominant hunting tourism.; The shift from Fordist production to post-Fordist consumption should not be considered absolute. Forest County has always had a productive and consumptive landscape and currently has elements of pre-Fordist, Fordist, and post-Fordist economies. While the shift towards an amenity landscape mirrors that of the middle-class, privately-owned U.K. countryside, my research highlights the importance of public land ownership, the material characteristics of the rural resource, and class in maintaining rural production. In rural, resource extraction-oriented areas of the U.S., multiple-use state agencies are dominant land owners. The existence of publicly-held rural land has slowed the transition to an amenity countryside compared to the privately-held U.K. Productive land uses may continue because the material characteristics of the resource behoove extraction. Even though there is increasing demand for recreation and residential development, simultaneous pressure exists to cut hardwood trees reaching economic maturity now. The rise in amenity-based recreation and residential use portends both a need to provide and market new ecotourism services to a changing clientele and a need to address rising conflicts with ongoing timber production.