Throughout November, we have been counting down to Thanksgiving by posting daily thanks on Facebook. There is some overlap with our lists from Thanksgiving in 2012 and 2014, and so much more to add – it is amazing how much there is to be grateful for! Here are those daily posts – these were in no particular order, and it is by no means a complete list!

Day 1: … long-time park supervisor James Stokes, Jr. for his years of care for the park. He started work on October 31, 1935 and continued for at least 25 years, and by all accounts really loved Glen Providence Park. He served as park guard, caretaker, supervisor, and park ranger – personally building picnic tables, preparing for concerts, planting trees & flowers, teaching visitors about the plants & wildlife, and creating the 1941 Nature Guide to Glen Providence Park!

Day 2: … the local schools that use Glen Providence Park as an outdoor classroom and for service learning, teaching their students a love of nature, science, art, and more. Thank you Media Elementary School, Springton Lake Middle School, Media Providence Friends School, Penncrest High School – and homeschoolers!

Day 3: … Delaware County Parks & Recreation, for resurfacing the historical WPA stage last summer in time for the park’s 80th anniversary celebration, for their support of our events and activities, and for their many years of caretaking and managing their 621 acres (and growing!) of open space for the public.

Day 4: … all that Chester-Ridley-Crum Watersheds Association has done since 1970 to protect, conserve, and restore the watersheds throughout its 132 square mile stewardship area! Its initiatives include annual streams cleanups, riparian reforestation, advocacy, education, and stream monitoring. We are honored to receive their Organizational Stewardship Award this year!  

Day 5: … our Nature Walk guides and monthly event leaders who volunteered their time in the past two years: the ever-helpful Al Guarente of the Birding Club of Delaware County, Gary Stolz, David Hewitt, Shannon Davidson, Marcia Tate, Stephanie Gaboriault, Kyle Loucks, George Tate, the Media-Upper Providence Free Library, Holly Hoffmann, Aura Lester, and Charles Randall.

Day 6: … Taylor Memorial Arboretum in Wallingford, for generously growing and donating native trees and shrubs each year for habitat restoration plantings by other organizations – including for our past four National Public Lands Days!

Day 7: … the Delaware County Institute of Science, an amazing organization that has been all volunteer since 1833.  It has wonderful scientific and historical collections, and is well worth a visit. Its members have been studying Glen Providence Park since before it was a park – a 1928 Chester Times article about the valley indicated that “Naturalists, from all over the country, attending the Delaware County Institute of Science, make a study of it.”  

Day 8: … EllieReed Lewis and Clifford Butler Lewis, the grandchildren of park donors George and Eleanor Butler –  for sharing their recollections from childhood in Glen Providence Park, and for celebrating the park’s 80th anniversary with us last summer!

Day 9: … our Invasive Plant Removal volunteers, who meet most Friday mornings to work in the park. In the past 4 years, they have cleared over 250 packed contractor bags of invasive plants – keeping trails clear, liberating native plants from strangling vines, improving habitat, and beautifying the park.

Day 10: … those who have made our historical research possible, including the Media Historic Archives, the Delaware County Historical Society, and the Newspaper Archives of Delaware County Library – and Delaware County, PA History for sharing our history-related facebook posts.

Day 11: … the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts for their years of involvement in Glen Providence Park going back to at least 1939 – with hikes, cookouts, award ceremonies, meetings, and community service. In the past few years, Brownie Troop #5248 and Minquas District Boy Scouts have volunteered, and Girl Scout Troop #5037 and Pack 503’s Webelos II have had meetings and outings in the park!

Day 12: … our wonderfully generous Concert Sponsors: Media Recreation Board, Media Rotary Foundation, Diego’s Cantina, Seven Stones Café, Shere-e-Punjab Indian Restaurant, Sterling Pig, and Tagine, who made it possible for us to revive the decades-long tradition of free summer concerts in Glen Providence Park.

Day 13: … Media Lions Club and McCarrin Chiropractic, for continuing Glen Providence Park’s longest-running tradition – the Great Media Easter Egg Hunt started in 1954! The Lions have worked since 1917 to fight blindness, and on many other community projects.

Day 14: … the American Chestnut Foundation, for their work to restore this once-majestic native tree, decimated by blight in the early 1900’s. Chestnuts were called the Sequoias of the east, and we know from T. Chalkley Palmer’s 1889 writings that the park’s eastern hill was once “continuously wooded with oaks and chestnuts.” We have found two surviving trees so far!

Day 15:  … all of the volunteers who have spent their free time working for Glen Providence Park through the years – our dedicated committee members, the dozens of people who have helped at our 17 volunteer days, and all those who volunteered in the park before us.

Day 16: … the Pennsylvania Amphibian & Reptile Survey (PARS), for their work to gather data for the study and conservation of our amphibians and reptiles, and for leading 3 Herpetology Walks in Glen Providence Park! We’ve documented 18 species in the park so far…

Day 17: … Samuel L. Smedley, who with great foresight and wisdom in 1927 urged regional planning for open space, and spearheaded the creation of Delaware County Parks & Recreation, which was used as a model nationally for its excellent planning. He personally helped create and plan Glen Providence Park.

Day 18: … all of those who appreciate our efforts to preserve and enhance Glen Providence Park – whether by reading our newsletter and website, attending our concerts and nature walks, or saying a kind word when they see us in the park – and of course our Facebook fans!

Day 19: … the Delaware County Conservation District for their guidance, mini-grants, donations, use of their Conservation Trailer, and support for our native plantings over the past 5 years – helping us to combat streamside erosion, restore habitat, provide food for wildlife, and  beautify the park.

Day 20: … our donors, whose generous support enables us to continue our work to improve the park and plan future concerts, plantings, events, and activities!

Day 21: … the array of wildlife, native plants, and all living things in the park, which with the changing seasons provide something new to discover on every walk in Glen Providence Park.

Day 22: … Hedgerow Theatre, for their enchanting performances at the WPA stage – enacting the park’s historical Newlywed Ghost and Witch Stories for Glen Providence’s 80th anniversary last year, and bringing Shakespeare to the park this summer!

Day 23: … T. Chalkley Palmer, 1860-1934, for writing in loving detail about Scroggie Valley in 1889, enabling us all these years later to read about the geology, landscape, flora, and fauna of Glen Providence Park as it was in the 1800′s. He also had remarkable environmental insights for his time. What a gift!

Day 24 of Thanks: We are so thankful for George and Eleanor Butler, who with great generosity and foresight in 1935 donated most of the land for Glen Providence Park as a Bird Sanctuary and Arboretum, to be preserved for future generations. There would be no park without them – we are incredibly grateful!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Since Glen Providence Park was established as a bird sanctuary and arboretum in 1935, Girl and Boy Scouts have been a part of its narrative! The day after work began on the park, a November 1, 1935 article in the Chester Times invited the reader to “Come with your bird glasses, your flower guides, your tree books. Bring the school children and scout groups, and let Nature teach them her ancient lessons.” The Scouts heeded that call, with accounts of Girl and Boy Scouts from across Delaware County visiting the park since the 1930’s.

Articles through the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s recount how Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Brownies, and Cub Scouts held picnics, cookouts, meetings, and ceremonies in the park, including new troop investitures and “a court of awards.” In September 1939, a Rutledge Cub pack had a meeting where “An interesting nature program was presented, which included a spirited contest on trees”(!). That October, a Lansdowne Girl Scout troop took a field trip to the “Bird Sanctuary.” 

Volunteerism

In addition to the many meetings and activities, the Scouts have a record of volunteerism in Glen Providence Park. In 1970, a dozen Upper Providence Boy Scouts conducted a major cleanup behind what was then Skelly contracting and Media Laundry, above the Mountain Laurel Trail – they “piled up enough trash for several truckloads in the park below the guardhouse.” In 1971, as part of a Boy Scout “Conservation Good Turn” program, Minquas District Boy Scouts cleaned up “creeks, streams, and roadways,” in parks including Glen Providence. “The Anti-Litter Day campaign” had the administrative support of the newly formed Chester-Ridley-Crum Watersheds Association. This was a predecessor of CRC’s Annual Streams Cleanup, which is in its 18th year, and still involves many Scouts troops!

In 2005, Kathryn Lenahan from Girl Scout Troop 907 took on an individual project that honored the intent of the park’s dedication as a bird sanctuary. A Penncrest High School graduating senior, she earned a Girl Scouts Gold Award for “designing and building a bird blind for people to enjoy birdlife.” Sadly the bird blind (a small shelter from which you can observe wildlife) near the Kirk Lane entrance was destroyed several years ago, possibly by a fallen limb. We marked its approximate location on our annotated trail map.

It is a possibility that in the 1930’s or 1940’s, the Scouts may have planted a number of trees in the park. We have not found confirmation of this, but we know that the Norway Spruce trees that cover much of the western hill were planted, seemingly since 1935, and that Boy Scouts had planted White Pines along nearby Ridley Creek Road around 1932. We would love to learn more about the Norway Spruce planting!

There is one Norway Spruce in the park that we know was planted by Cub Scouts. Sadly, the tree was planted in 1991 in memory of a Cub Scout from Pack 642.

Scouts today

The involvement of Scouts in the park continues. In 2012 and 2013, we attended a meeting in the park with 3rd grade Brownie Troop 5248 to talk about the Scouts’ history in the park, and the plants and wildlife – then they helped us with a park cleanup and with plantings around the stage! In 2014, the Minquas District Boy Scouts held a spring cleanup in the park with Media Rotary and Penncrest Interact. And just this month, we participated in a meeting in the park with 6th grade Girl Scout Troop 5037 to talk about the park and environmental stewardship, and about ideas for their Silver Award projects next year.

In honor of all that the Scouts have done in the park through the years, on our September 2011 annotated trail map, we nicknamed the park trail along Kirk Lane the Scouts Loop!

If anyone has more information about, or photos of, Scouts and their projects in the park, please contact us via email (using the Contact Us link) or by leaving a comment on this page.

Sources

Chester Times & Daily Times articles researched on the Newspaper Archives of Delaware County Library:

Chester Times:
Club Leaders See New County Park, November 1, 1935
Rutledge Cub Pack No. 7, September 27, 1939
October Days in Lansdowne, October 14, 1939
Rutledge, May 7, 1949
Eight Brownies Get Their ‘Wings’, June 10, 1950
18 Girl Scouts Attend Cookout, October 27, 1950
Media Girl Scouts, October 25, 1951
Ridley Park WSCS Plans Luncheon, June 6, 1955
Troop Enjoys Wiener Roast, October 31, 1957

Daily Times:
Girl Scouts Go Camping, April 16, 1960
Leaders of Patrols Selected, October 27, 1964
Boy Scouts help clean up Glen Providence Park area, December 1, 1970
Scouts to collect litter, June 4, 1971

And:

RTM Honors Girl Scout Gold Award Winner, County Press, May 31, 2005

Throughout November, we have been counting down to Thanksgiving by posting daily thanks on Facebook. There is some overlap with our list from Thanksgiving 2012, and so much more to add – it is amazing how much there is to be grateful for! Here are those daily posts – these were in no particular order, and it is by no means a complete list!

27 Days of Thanks in Glen Providence Park
We are thankful for…

Day 1: … the local schools who use Glen Providence Park as an outdoor classroom, teaching their students a love of nature, science, art and more. Thank you Media Elementary School, Springton Lake Middle School, Media Providence Friends School, Penncrest High School – and homeschoolers!

Day 2: … Clifford Butler Lewis, the grandson of park donors George and Eleanor Butler – for his generosity in sharing his grandparents’ photo albums with us and donating their golf clubs to Springhaven Country Club (which they founded!), and for sharing his recollections from his childhood in Glen Providence Park.

Day 3: … Delaware County Parks & Recreation, for repairing the concert stage (damaged in July from a fallen 110-year-old tree) in time for our August concert this summer, for their support of our events and activities, and for their many years of caretaking and managing their 11 parks with over 600 acres(!) of open space for the public.

Day 4: … Taylor Memorial Arboretum in Wallingford, for generously growing and donating 75 native trees and shrubs this year for habitat restoration plantings by Friends of Heinz Refuge, CRC Watersheds, and Friends of Glen Providence Park.

Day 5: … our wonderfully generous Concert Sponsors: Media Recreation Board, Media Rotary Foundation, Diego’s Cantina, Seven Stones Café, and Shere-e-Punjab Indian Restaurant, who made it possible for us to revive the decades-long tradition of free summer concerts in Glen Providence Park!

Day 6: … Samuel L. Smedley, who with great foresight and wisdom in 1927 urged regional planning for open space, and spearheaded the creation of Delaware County Parks & Recreation, which was used as a model nationally for its excellent planning. He personally helped create and plan Glen Providence Park.

Day 7: … all that Chester-Ridley-Crum Watersheds Association has done for 44 years to protect, conserve, and restore the watersheds throughout its 132 square mile stewardship area! Its initiatives include annual streams cleanups, riparian reforestation, advocacy, education, and stream monitoring.

Day 8: … our Nature Walk guides who volunteered their time to lead our walks this year: the ever-helpful Al Guarente of the Birding Club of Delaware County, John Wenderoth, Ted Cavey, Stephanie Gaboriault, Marcia Tate, Aura Lester, Kyle Loucks, Holly Hoffmann, Chris McNichol, and Charles Randall.

Day 9: … our donors, whose generous support enables us to continue our work to improve the park and plan future concerts, events, and activities!

Day 10: … the Delaware County Conservation District for their guidance, mini-grants, donations, and support for our native plantings over the past 3 years – helping us to combat streamside erosion, restore habitat, provide food for wildlife, and  beautify the park.

Day 11: … the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts for their years of involvement in Glen Providence Park going back to at least 1939 – with hikes, cookouts, award ceremonies, meetings, and community service. In the last 2 years, Brownie Troop #5248 and Minquas District Boy Scouts have volunteered in the park!

Day 12: … the wonderful bands who have performed at our Summer Concert Series the past 3 years: Philadelphia Brass, Springfield Clarinet Quartet, the Obsoleets, Me3, Ken Delmar & the Cheers Big Band, Perseverance Jazz Band, Sonoma Sound, and ViVaCe Strings!

Day 13: … T. Chalkley Palmer, 1860-1934, for writing in loving detail about Scroggie Valley in 1889, enabling us all these years later to read about the geology, landscape, flora, and fauna of Glen Providence Park as it was in the 1800′s! He also had remarkable environmental insights for his time. What a gift!

Day 14: … our Invasive Plant Removal volunteers, who meet most weeks to work in the park. In the past 2 years, they have cleared 179 packed contractor bags (and counting!) of invasive plants – keeping trails clear, liberating native plants from strangling vines, improving habitat, and beautifying the park.

Day 15: … the Delaware County Institute of Science, an amazing organization that has been all volunteer since 1833!  Its members have been studying Glen Providence Park since long before it was a park – a 1928 Chester Times article about the valley indicated that “Naturalists, from all over the country, attending the Delaware County Institute of Science, make a study of it.”

Day 16: … Delaware County Planning for their thoughtful work on the Delaware County Open Space, Recreation & Greenway Plan, and on our neighboring Mineral Hill Area Master Plan. Glen Providence Park and future generations will be better for it!

Day 17: … Transition Town Media, for all they do to build community and resilience, from their FreeStore, to workshops, to their lovely Annual Candlelight Gratitude Banquet for local nonprofits.

Day 18: … long-time park supervisor James Stokes, Jr. for his years of care for the park. He started work on October 31, 1935 and continued for at least 25 years, and by all accounts really loved Glen Providence Park. He served as park guard, care taker, supervisor, and park ranger – personally building picnic tables, preparing for concerts, planting trees & flowers, teaching visitors about the plants & wildlife, and creating the 1941 Nature Guide to Glen Providence Park!

Day 19:  … all of the volunteers who have spent their free time working for Glen Providence Park through the years – our dedicated committee members, the dozens of people who have helped at our 11 volunteer days, and all those who volunteered in the park before us!

Day 20: … those who have made our historical research possible, including the Media Historic Archives, the Delaware County Historical Society, and the Newspaper Archives of Delaware County Library – and Delaware County, PA History for sharing our history-related facebook posts.

Day 21: … the American Chestnut Foundation, for their work to restore this majestic native tree! Chestnuts were called the Sequoias of the east, and they were once the dominant tree species in Glen Providence Park. We have found two surviving trees so far!

Day 22: … the Pennsylvania Amphibian & Reptile Survey (PARS), for their work to gather data for the study and conservation of our amphibians and reptiles! We are glad to have chosen PARS for our 2014 citizen science project.

Day 23: … Media Lions Club and McCarrin Chiropractic, for continuing Glen Providence Park’s longest-running tradition – the Great Media Easter Egg Hunt started in 1954! The Lions have worked since 1917 to fight blindness, and on many other community projects.

Day 24: … the Academy of Natural Sciences, for preserving and researching a wondrous amount of natural history, including early 1900’s microscope slides from Scroggie Run (now Broomall’s Run), and for their generosity and hospitality in showing us those slides.

Day 25: … the array of wildlife, native plants, and other living things in the park, which with the changing seasons provide something new to discover on every walk in Glen Providence Park!

Day 26: … all of those who appreciate our efforts to preserve and enhance Glen Providence Park – our Facebook fans, those who read our newsletter and website, and those who have attended our concerts and history & nature walks!

Thanksgiving Day: We are so thankful for George and Eleanor Butler, who with great generosity and foresight in 1935 donated most of the land for Glen Providence Park as a Bird Sanctuary and Arboretum, to be preserved for future generations.  There would be no park without them – we are incredibly grateful!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Fall is such a beautiful season in Glen Providence Park, and after record rainfall in summer 2013, last autumn was relatively free of extreme weather. I had less time than usual for photo walks in the park, ironically due to taking a 10-week Pennsylvania Master Naturalist course. But we continued to document the park’s plants and animals to create a record that we can refer back to for future comparison, and the walks I did take were usually rewarded with interesting sightings.

There were flurries of fall migration in late September and early October, including some additions to our Park Bird List – bringing us to 103 species by the end of November! Sightings included Magnolia Warbler, Philadelphia Vireo ( species #102), Northern Parula, and Chestnut-sided Warbler (#103!) – as always, thank you to Al Guarente of the Birding Club of Delaware County for confirming our new ID’s.

Some of the smallest discoveries are the most enchanting, including what we called a “star-bellied” fungi, an elegantly fuzzy caterpillar on a native blackberry leaf, and adorable baby Wood Frogs. These aptly named forest-dwelling frogs breed in vernal pools (ephemeral wetlands) – we saw several baby Wood Frogs last October.

That Pennsylvania Master Naturalist course helped me ID species in the park, such as the native and enigmatically-named Hog Peanut vine, Amphicarpaea bracteata. At one of the classes, Rose Tree Park Hawkwatch’s Holly Merker taught us that the Red-tailed Hawk’s “scream” is often used with video footage of Bald Eagles, because its scream is more intimidating than the eagle’s. You can frequently hear the Red-tailed Hawk in the park, as it is our most common hawk species!

Fall brings school classes that use Glen Providence Park as an outdoor classroom. In October, we encountered Penncrest High School 9th grade Environmental Science students conducting their annual pond studies in the park. In November, we helped Media Providence Friends School 5th graders install educational plant tags they had created for our National Public Lands Day plantings. The students were enthusiastic and had fun – what a wonderful service learning project!

In November we had a treat walking through the park with Clifford Butler Lewis, the grandson of park founders George and Eleanor Butler!  It was wonderful to hear his recollections from growing up here. We photographed Cliff by the (now dry) Eleanor Reed Butler waterfall, which was one of the park’s original structures, and was later renovated in 1949 in honor of Cliff’s grandmother. It was Eleanor Butler who specified that Glen Providence Park was to be preserved as a Bird Sanctuary and Arboretum!

You can click on any photo below for a closer look, and scroll through them all – and you can also view them on our flickr page! There are more pictures in our facebook albums, and in our Fall 1.1 Acre Project photos. You can compare our 2013 autumn to other years in my photojournals for September, October and November 2011, and from Fall 2012.

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Glen Providence Park has had lots of T.L.C. from volunteers this Spring, with 3 park cleanups and regular Invasive Plant Removal days! We held our usual two Friends of Glen Providence Park cleanups in March and May, and the Rotary Club of Media held its Rotarians at Work Day in the park in April, along with members of Boy Scouts and Penncrest Interact! In addition, County Parks & Recreation has cleared debris on several occasions, including removing a fallen tree that was damming the stream and flooding the Shingle Mill Trail.

Friends of Glen Providence Park started out on March 15 on a crisp but beautiful morning for our annual Early Spring Cleanup – it’s a great time of year to see and access any trash that has blown off trail, before the foliage emerges to obscure it. We had a great haul – 10 adults and 2 kids removed 13 bags of trash and recyclables, some odd pieces of metal and lumber, and 3 bags of invasive bamboo!

After the cold and incredibly snowy winter, our semi-weekly Invasives Plant Removal crew started up again in April. So far this year, we have removed over 20 packed contractor bags of invasive plants from along the park’s trails! We also re-opened the trail on either side of a brush pile blocking a trail by the pond – the brush was left from the removal of the 100 year old oak tree that fell clear across the pond during Hurricane Irene in 2011. This cleared the way for Rotarians at Work Day the next day…

At Rotarians at Work Day on April 26, volunteers efficiently dispatched of the whole brush pile, completely re-opening the trail! That morning, more than 20 volunteers from the Rotary Club of Media, Penncrest Interact Club, and Minquas District Boy Scouts of America also did spring cleaning of the stage and pavilion, cleared several bags of trash that had been dumped behind a property along the edge of the park decades ago, and cleared trash along trails.

Just this weekend on May 3, Friends of Glen Providence Park participated in the 17th Annual CRC Watersheds Streams Cleanup! It was another beautiful morning, and the 14 adults and 3 kids who came out had fun as we made our way along the stream and trails. Some of the odder trash included a paddle, mattress springs, and a seemingly antique spoon. We removed 16 bags of trash and invasive garlic mustard and multi-flora rose.

Cumulatively, those are a lot of volunteer hours spent in the park – all part of a long history of volunteerism that dates back to the park’s beginnings.

A tremendous thank you Delaware County Parks & Recreation for maintaining the park, and to all of the volunteers from Friends of Glen Providence Park, Rotary Club of Media, Boy Scouts, Penncrest Interact, and CRC Watersheds!

You can see photos of some of the volunteers and their spoils below!