Look around Canoe Creek State Park, and you see a lake, brushy fields and woods laced with trails, parking lots and several wood-sided buildings operated by the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

Travel those trails with a guide, and you’ll notice the remnants of much older buildings, the rock faces of quarries, embankments that indicate your trail is running on an old railbed, stumps of telegraph poles, foundations for a trestle, sections of a big concrete half-cylinder.

You realize this popular recreational destination was once a multi-faceted scene of bustling, early-20th century industry.

Jim Fitch of Hollidaysburg saw Canoe Creek for the first time several years ago, after he volunteered to help maintain the trails.

Right away, he began asking questions: What is this? What is that? Why is this here?

And as he pulled one thread and came away with answers, he engaged others, and got more answers, until he was deep into the sketchily known historical quilt for a place that a century ago included two limestone kiln complexes, two limestone mines riddled with a warren of passages, a company house settlement, three branch rail lines that connected with a stem of the Petersburg railroad, a lumber mill, farms, a grist mill and a town that included taverns and churches.

The questions and his pursuit of answers inflamed the imagination of the Philipsburg native who spent most of his life near White Plains, N.Y., before returning with his wife in 2009 to live in a house built by his maternal grandfather.

“In 2012 and 2013, I really started to dig in,” Fitch said. “(And) once you start turning the page, it’s hard to stop.”

Driving a park ATV on the trails Thursday, inspecting the ruins of the Blair kilns, the remains of stone pilings that held a trestle 70 feet above their base, the quarry up the hill from there, the entrance to a barricaded mine on another hill, the remnants of the Hartman kiln complex and the spalling concrete of its engine house, Fitch spoke of the workers that had labored in those places and asked rhetorically, “What were their dreams?”

The industry there was labor-intensive, during an era when the lives and well-being of workers were valued more cheaply than the machinery they operated, according to Fitch.

After the tour, standing next to a preserved dinghy railcar that had operated on the trestle, he gripped the brake and tipping levers and described how men had tilted the car to dump the limestone into the ovens below.

It had to be dangerous.

“They were pretty robust people,” he said.

Their lives overall must have been difficult, he said.

That probably helped account for reports that there were several taverns in nearby Flowing Spring.

It may have been a good life for the owners, he said.

A picture that was part of a recent Fitch presentation at the Blair County Genealogical Society on the history of Canoe Creek shows a stubby steam locomotive in bright sunshine during what appears to be high summer. The locomotive is coupled to a small car that looks like a fat, vertically oriented tank with a pointed top. A “CA” painted on the side of the cab might be the beginning letters of “CANOE.” “HARTMAN” is painted on the locomotive boiler. Workmen are posing.

The one farthest left is seated, possibly on a stool attached to an arm at the back of the cab. Two others are looking out of the unglassed window opening. The one on the left may actually be a child. The other is leaning out, elbow cocked below the sill. Another workman is standing on part of the undercarriage at the front of the locomotive, while a man next to him has one foot on the undercarriage, another on the railbed.

Three stand alongside the locomotive, one in a white shirt with hands in his trouser pockets, another, insouciant, with dark hair, folds his arms and leans his back against the cab, feet crossed at the ankles. Farther forward, an older, larger man poses stiffly, wearing a filthy round-brimmed hat and overalls whose lines are so vertical they might be a slender barrel.

The men closer to the front are darker complected – or maybe their faces are stained with coal dust or ash.

The ones toward the back are not only light-complected, but their clothes are cleaner.

One can imagine the clanking and grinding of the old machinery when the locomotive starts up again, the dusty leaves of the scrubby trees in the background, the sweet smell of coal smoke, the hours going by in the long summer afternoon following a lunch of bread and sausages and the eternal problem of living in the now, between our compromising pasts and the restrictions on our future – our families, our responsibilities, the need to eat, the knowledge we’ll be tired after dinner and our wish to stay warm and comfortable tonight, tomorrow and through the coming years.

Fitch’s curiosity has helped to solidify the park management’s grip on the history of the 958 acres it manages, according to park naturalist Heidi Mullendore, with whom Fitch collaborates.

“Jim has been able to take the old records we have and plow through those,” Mullendore said. “He’s really firmed up the facts.”

He has identified documents – including archival newspaper stories – that back up information that she shares with park visitors, she said.

He’s excelled at linking the kiln operations with the rail lines that served them by bringing in the coal and taking out the lime, she said.

Just as Fitch’s imagination has propelled him to investigate the genesis of the relics in the park, Mullendore’s imagination informs her instruction during the park’s guided hikes. She tries to make it real for her visitors, talking on the way to the Blair kilns about the absence of trees on the hills a century ago, because of logging for charcoal and firewood, about the trains “chugging up the valley,” about blasts from the dynamite that workers dropped down holes drilled from the tops of the quarries, about the ringing tones of pickaxes, about the 24-hour roaring of the ovens.

“The sounds, the sights, the smells,” she said.

She wonders especially about the many immigrants who came to work in the area.

Newspapers are often the source of telling suggestions.

An 1899 note in the Altoona Tribune that was part of Fitch’s presentation to the Genealogical Society spoke of a contractor beginning work on a rail line in Canoe Creek “with about 40 horses and some 50 men.” It continues: “They will have about 100 Italians this week,”

At the society, he introduced that nugget with a warning about a lack of political correctness – pointing out that the writer was making a distinction between men, horses and Italians.

Another newspaper report from the era about a fire in a small house where 13 wedding guests were sleeping stated that no further information was available, because the only survivor couldn’t speak English.

It’s tone made clear the writer didn’t think the misfortune mattered much, given the kind of people who had died.

“It was demeaning,” Fitch said.

The incident also illustrated the poverty of a family forced to cram so many into so restricted a sleeping space in the aftermath of a celebration.

Nowadays, those kind of visitors would go to a hotel, he said.

While Fitch and Mullendore rely mainly on documents, living people occasionally provide word-of-mouth insight, as when a man in his 90s who stopped at the park to learn about family property records revealed that when his father was a child of six, he and a playmate earned a dime a day tending giant vats of boiling water used for cooking the spaghetti that fed

the workers, Mullendore said.

“This (area) must have been hopping,” Fitch said near the end of Thursday’s tour. “It was a very industrious place.”