Until it became a borough in 1991, Bear Creek Village was part of Bear Creek Township, founded in 1856. The history of the region begins in 1779, however, with the march of General John Sullivan and his troops on their way from Easton to Iroquois territory in New York. Ordered by General George Washington to retaliate for the Native American and Tory attack on settlers in Wyoming Valley in July 1778, Sullivan and his men cut a road from Easton through Bear Creek to Wilkes-Barre. The road, later known as Sullivan's Trail and the Wilkes-Barre and Easton Turnpike, opened the Wyoming Valley and other regions of Northeastern Pennsylvania for development. The Bear Creek region remained undeveloped, however, as it was not suitable for farming. It was the lumber industry which would begin to transform Bear Creek.

In the first years of the 19th century, the vast forests of pine and hemlock timberlands in Bear Creek were the focus of considerable interest as the market for timber increased in large cities along the Atlantic coast. A man named Oliver Helme built the first sawmill on Bear Creek in 1800. By 1815, Philadelphia merchant John Stoddard laid out Stoddardsville, along the Lehigh River, as a center for the milling of both grain and lumber. In 1818, Josiah White, with Stoddard's financial backing, began construction of the Lehigh Navigation System as a challenge to the Susquehanna and Schuylkill River routes to East Coast markets. The two Philadelphia capitalists intended to monopolize the transportation of grain, timber and coal down the Lehigh to the Delaware River at Easton, and thence to Philadelphia.

By the 1830's, lumbering was taking place on a massive scale throughout the region. The industry was further developed by the completion of the Upper Grand Section of the Lehigh Navigation between Mauch Chunk and White Haven in 1838. White Haven rapidly became one of the lumber centers of the United States since the downstream navigation system of the Upper Lehigh River between Stoddardsville and White Haven enabled lumber merchants to transport timber cut in the Poconos to markets in the Lehigh Valley and Philadelphia. At the industry's peak, there were six major sawmills operating on the Lehigh Navigation at White Haven.

During the 1840's, Isaac Lewis (Albert Lewis' uncle) and his brother Abijah Lewis (Albert Lewis' father) obtained and lumbered land in the region, including a section of Bear Creek Township. While the business was plagued by financial difficulties, causing the sale of land shares to partners, the Lewis brothers did manage to purchase a sawmill in White Haven in 1852. Isaac Lewis engaged in stripping bark from hemlock trees through the mid-1850s, selling the product to a Gouldsboro tannery owned by Zadock Pratt and Jay Gould (later to become one of the nation's infamous "robber barons").

By 1860, Pennsylvania, with over 28 million acres of land (much of which was densely forested) had become America's lumbering champion. This was the period when Albert Lewis entered the lumber business. Operating from his home in Bear Creek, Lewis purchased large tracts of land through the 1860's and 1870's, in association with Edwin Shortz, Jr. and Calvin E. Brodhead, in Kidder and Lehigh Townships in Carbon County. From the 1870s through the 1880s, John P. Crellin and Albert Lewis developed the lumber industry in the White Haven and Bear Creek region. Between 1870 and 1880, Lewis was a contract lumberman in Bear Creek and Stoddardsville, and in 1876 he purchased 13,000 acres along Bowman's Creek between Noxen and Ricketts Glen in the opposite corner of Luzerne County. On February 4, 1880, Lewis and his partner Brodhead purchased over 12,000 acres in Bear Creek Township, which included most of the timberland north of the Wilkes-Barre-Easton Turnpike (today's Route 115). In 1883, he added all the lands south of the turnpike to Carbon County. An agreement with the Lehigh Valley Railroad allowed Lewis to construct a branch rail line from above White Haven to Bear Creek Village.

To serve his lumber industry, Lewis modified existing dams or built new dams on Bear Creek; extended the railroad to Beaupland, north of the village; and built sawmills at Beaupland and the settlements of California and Meadow Run. By the close of 1883, Lewis was the second largest lumber producer on the Lehigh River. However, the huge Lehigh River lumber industry was already in decline, and by 1893 the lumber business closed. Albert Lewis remained a major lumberman until 1912, but he focused on his lands in the Bowman's Creek region of the Endless Mountains, and his mills at Harvey's Lake, Noxen, and Stull.