Peter Herdic (1824–1888) was a lumber baron, entrepreneur, inventor, politician, and philanthropist in Victorian era Williamsport, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, in the United States.

[2] Herdic left his mother's farm in 1846 and arrived in Lycoming County later that same year, where he settled in Cogan House Township.

[5] Peter Herdic died on February 2, 1888, as the result of a concussion sustained when he slipped and fell on ice while inspecting his waterworks in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.

After leaving his mother's farm in 1846, Peter Herdic settled along Lycoming Creek in Cogan House Township, Pennsylvania, just north of Williamsport.

Peter Herdic moved to Williamsport in 1854, which was then a small village of 1,700 people surrounded by vast stands of virgin hemlock, white pine and various hardwoods.

The approximately 60 sawmills along the river between Lycoming and Loyalsock Creeks operated day and night on a year-round basis.

They made Williamsport, "The Lumber Capital of the World" with the highest number of millionaires per capita of any city in the United States.

Local saloon keepers reported that Herdic would leave $10 and $20 bills among the bottles of their taverns for anybody that would vote for him in the election.

He divested himself of the Williamsport Passenger Railway Company in 1879, a time in Herdic's life when he lost most of his wealth (only to reacquire most of it soon after).

He would regain his wealth soon after by leading the building of various waterworks in several U.S. cities including Selinsgrove and Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, Orlando, Florida, and Cairo, Illinois.

During an inspection tour of one of his business ventures in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania in late January or early February 1888, Herdic slipped on an icy walkway, fell down an embankment and hit the back of his head, causing inflammation to the brain.

Still in his early to mid-sixties at the time of his death and leaving a wife and three children, his body was returned home to Pennsylvania, where it was interred at the Wildwood Cemetery in Lycoming County following funeral services.

The Peter Herdic House, his personal mansion at 407 West Fourth Street stands today as a fine dining restaurant.

[17] It is an example of Italian Villa architecture with ornate plaster moldings and arches, a curving mahogany stairway and acanthus columns.

[17] The Weightman Block was also renovated in the late 1990s it currently houses several small businesses on the ground floors with numerous apartments above.

An editorial in the Williamsport Sun Gazette on March 4, 1988, marking the 100th anniversary of his death stated, "Historians have been unable to settle on Herdic as a hero or a scoundrel for his financial dealings so he remains somewhere in-between a century later.