On a cool Saturday morning in April, clusters of walkers, hikers, and bikers passed along the metal bike bridge in the Wissahickon Valley Park. Below them, volunteers were busy collecting rusted car parts and bags of garbage from the brush below.
The scene takes Shawn Green back to the first time he volunteered on the trails about nine years ago. He was helping plant saplings when he found a turntable buried in the ground.
“It just doesn’t surprise me anymore,” he said. “But some trash, I wonder, what is the story that is attached to this, how did this particular item get out to the woods?”
Green is now Director of Field Stewardship for the Friends of the Wissahickon (FOW), a mostly volunteer group dedicated to protecting and maintaining the Philly landmark. This year marks a century since the organization was first founded in 1924.
“We’ve come a long way in a hundred years,” Green said. “We started off as just a small volunteer-based community organization, and now we have a paid staff, tons and tons of volunteer opportunities, and I see us continuing down that path. Every year, we see more people coming to the Wissahickon, finding us, and working with us.”
The Wissahickon watershed encompasses 64 square miles in Montgomery and Philadelphia counties. The creek’s humble beginnings originate in a Lowe’s parking lot just north of the Montgomeryville Mall. As part of the larger Delaware River watershed, its 23-mile journey eventually ends in the Schuylkill River, the main source of drinking water for more than 350,000 Philadelphians.
FOW’s stewardship now includes mitigating climate change impact
Average annual rainfall in the region is expected to increase between 5 and 12 percent over the next 30 years, according to a report from Drexel University, with extreme storms and flooding becoming increasingly common. As a result, flooding in the neighborhoods surrounding the Wissahickon can mean oil, fertilizers, pesticides, and other pollutants find their way into the creek. Increased development and use of non-porous pavement worsen the issue with higher population density and heavy machinery.
“We’re really concerned about runoff in particular, flooding in particular, and the flooding is exacerbated by paving and new developments on the Roxborough side of the creek,” said David Contosta, the co-author of a four-volume book titled “Metropolitan Paradise” about the history and future of the greater Wissahickon Valley.
It’s one part of why cleanups can be so important– they remove potential pollutants from the area. A volunteer recently found a can of anti-rust spray near the creek, which could contain pollutants such as zinc, aerosols, and volatile organic compounds.
John Jensen works for the Philadelphia Water Department’s Green City, Clean Waters team, monitoring Philadelphia’s stormwater management systems. The city’s ambitious plan to create eco-friendly stormwater management systems is most known for its hundreds of rain gardens, designed to redirect heavy rain away from the more than 100,000 stormwater inlets. But Jensen’s job also includes building and maintaining wetlands and wet meadows in the Wissahickon Valley Park.
All of these serve the purpose of diverting rainwater from the overwhelmed stormwater system and into a basin that feeds surrounding plant life. The systems also help remove pollution.
“When you stir up chocolate milk and kind of let it settle, it’s like that– you stir up the water and let the solid bits kind of settle,” Jensen said. “The plants are able to take up some of the particles instead of it all going into the waterways.”
Climate change also jeopardizes plant life in the Wissahickon. Warming poses a threat to native species, including sugar maples and white pine, which may not survive in a warmer climate. It adds additional stress to ash trees, which have been decimated by the emerald ash borer. And it could further impact Pennsylvania’s state tree, the hemlock, which is already at risk due to hemlock wooly adelgid attacks.
FOW’S long history of overcoming environmental challenges
The Wissahickon has faced immense challenges throughout its history. As European settlers arrived throughout the 1600s and 1700s, the Lenape tribe was pushed westward, out of the area through a combination of land purchases and colonization.
Logging decimated much of the Wissahickon after this period. Quarries and mills producing wood, grains, and paper sprung up throughout the following two centuries, dumping additional pollutants like sulfuric acid, soda ash, muriatic acid, limes, dyes, wood pulp, and animal byproducts into the water and soil.
In addition to pollution issues, much of the land had been used for agriculture. Without the trees and other native plant species, the area was vulnerable to erosion and flash floods.
Beginning in the 1860s, the Fairmount Park Commission began acquiring land in the area as part of an effort to improve the quality of Philadelphia’s water supply. The city demolished most of the mills and other buildings, and began repopulating the forest with a combination of native and invasive species.
While the land was still recovering from pollution and deforestation, a new threat emerged: the automobile. From the late 1890s into the early 1900s, people began driving through the park– both on what was then known as the Wissahickon Turnpike, as well as some of the hiking trails.
In response to a proposal to widen the road, community members signed a petition and protested to protect the watershed. Opponents to the road widening efforts used horses and buggies to block car traffic. In 1921, the Fairmount Park Commission responded to the protests by banning cars from what is now called Forbidden Drive.
But, the struggles weren’t over yet. Within a few years, a chestnut blight emerged that threatened the American chestnut tree and longtime community traditions associated with it. For example, Contosta said children would be let out of school early to participate in the chestnut harvest. The American chestnut was once the most common tree in Pennsylvania’s forests, but within 40 years they were virtually wiped out. Only a few American chestnuts survive in the state, but scientists are working on disease resistant varieties.
The rapid decimation of the well-loved tree led conservationists to form the Friends of the Wissahickon in 1924. While their main goal was protecting and restoring the tree population, they also wanted to protect the park from traffic, neighborhood expansion and other threats that continue to this day.
Solutions-oriented legacy continues into FOW’s second century
With this legacy in mind, FOW members are hopeful and determined that the park can weather the latest set of challenges caused by climate change. Volunteer crew leader Kent Peterman emphasized how resilient the environment is, and how it can bounce back with a little human help.
“To imagine what this was like in the early years, when it was an area for mill work, lots of environmental damage around that, it’s largely gone,” Peterman said. “Just kind of recognizing how the park with some help, with proper direction, can come back and be restored.”
Finding creative solutions may not involve equestrian-led street takeovers any longer, but it remains a focus for FOW Director of Field Stewardship Shawn Green.
During the COVID lockdowns, FOW staff weren’t sure how they could continue to take care of the park. So they created the WissaHERO campaign, where community members could pick up a cleanup kit, clean along the trails on their own time, and file an online field report about what they saw and found. The program continues to this day, with about 200 cleaning sessions logged last year under the program.
Green also developed the crew leader program, where volunteers are assigned to small sections of the park each year to look after trails and take care of planting sites. It’s now in its third year, and both individual crew leaders and groups monitor sections through an adopt-a-trail model that spans the entirety of the park.
Green said these successful programs have given him a new found optimism.
“I had to shift into, if we didn’t do what we did today, it would have been worse,” he said. “My philosophy is, make it better than it was. You’re never gonna be able to make it perfect, but if you can, make it better.”
He isn’t alone in his shift to optimism– research shows that spending time in nature can help reduce blood pressure, stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as improve focus and overall well being. It has also been found to be particularly important for those living in urbanized areas, who have less access to nature in general.
“I spend nine hours a day in front of a computer, on video calls, so part of the pleasure out here is both being out in the park but also doing something physical, helping improve a space that I use a lot,” said FOW volunteer crew leader Mike Mergen.
Mergen said he thinks of his daughter, and hopes that the forest will be standing long into her adulthood, so she can continue the legacy of all of the volunteers before her.
“She’s ten, and so my hope is that in fifty years, she’ll be out here volunteering and stewarding the park,” he said.
Learn more about the Friends of the Wissahickon by visiting their website, https://fow.org/.
