In the summer of 1891, ninety Italian laborers shoveled, picked, and blasted the new Fahnestock and Tiadaghton railroad into the steep canyon wall across Pine Creek. Local businessman Creon B. Farr had purchased 3,000 acres of virgin hemlock near the rim of the canyon and needed a way to move it to the New York Central Railroad and on to Corning, New York, for processing. His plan included a dangerously steep switchback railroad grade up the canyon wall and a 240-foot bridge over Pine Creek. On the other side of the creek, Wellsboro entrepreneur Leonard Harrison was building a sawmill to process his timber, sending logs down the canyon wall in narrow slides until they crashed into the creek below. A small town named Tiadaghton grew around these short-lived operations, and at its height it had two stores, a post office, a hotel, a one-room school, and more than twenty homes. Harrison's mill burned to the ground in 1906, and Farr departed after his timber resource was exhausted. Six families still lived there in 1936, but the closing of the post office sealed the town's fate.