PA Honey Hollow National Historic Landmark, Bucks County

Here's an idea! Repair a severely damaged landscape so that in a few decades no one will ever know what it looked like before the forests, marshes, lush pastures, and bucolic barns. That's what's happened at Honey Hollow, a small watershed in the Piedmont section of Bucks County, PA. The main valley is under the management of the Bucks County Audubon Society and the entire watershed to include the Audubon property is preserved as conservation land. It is registered as a National Historic Landmark. For those looking for its soil conservation history, it might not be too easy to find.

One clue you've arrived is the official Pennsylvania Historical Marker.

This area is north of Philadelphia in what is now a pretty built up area. In the 1930s though, this rural valley was considered "out there." Not far from the Delaware River and the town of New Hope, PA, there were six farms that occupied the 700 acre watershed of Honey Hollow Creek. The farmers in the high land lamented that their soils had washed away after decades of intensive farming. The farmers downhill lamented that their fields were being buried by silt and mud every time it rained.

A mold board plow.

The age of horse farming was coming to a close and the age of mechanized farming was just reaching these small valleys of eastern Pennsylvania. Horses could plow places where tractors could not, and generations of horse-drawn moldboard plowing had torn, exposed, and destroyed hillier sections of the valley. Some of the farmers in the valley had switched to small tractors by the 1930s when the Soil Conservation Service was invited to survey the watershed for advice on what to do. Top of their list of recommendations was to stop using horses and stop plowing land with the moldboard plow.

Contour plowing with disc plow.

The farmers listened to what the SCS men had to say and made the switch. They also took all of the recommendations for soil conservation to heart: no more moldboard plows - switch to disc plows that turn only the top layer of soil. They planted cover crops to protect soils from rain and sheet erosion. They build miles of hedgerows to block wind protect hillier ground. The replanted trees and allowed forest to regrow in the steepest sections to protect the stream and close-over gullies with canopy. The farmers of Honey Hollow were the first in the nation to band together to protect a watershed as a cooperative - the Honey Hollow Watershed Association. Their work not only healed the land, but served as a model for hundreds of watersheds restorations across the nation.

Old gully.

I hiked about four miles of trails from the nature center, formerly a grain and equipment barn with a seedy story of its own. I had to look hard to find evidence in the thick woods of its past degradation. Hidden in the sloped hillsides were gullies and wash-outs barely visible under reformed forest soils. Steep banks of silt soils and a stream bed full of tumbled limestone boulders attest to Honey Hollow's flash flood history.

Stockton Sandstone (Triassic sediments) in Honey Hollow stream.

Stream crossing on the trail via Ordovician limestone blocks.

The valley is a relic landscape of an ancient Triassic sea, as is much of this section of northern Bucks County. The sedimentary sandstone rocks tell us that shallow seas received the erosional debris from eroding mountains nearvy. A slight rise in the landscape is all that is left of Buckingham Mountain and it crosses the conservancy lands to the north at the headwaters of Honey Hollow Creek.

American Chestnut sapling.

The hike up the stream bed reveals a forest in recovery. Update from Charlie Davis, Natural History Society of Maryland. " American Beech (Fagus grandifolia) is not considered an early succession plant—it is very tolerant of shade, which is a characteristic of late successional/climax species. It would have been a relict at Honey Hollow that somehow made it through the disturbance of forest clearing. It probably persisted on land that was cut and grazed, but not cleared. American beech suckers tend to be resistant to deer browse, and perhaps similarly for other ruminants." American Beech, considered a pioneer tree (one of the first species to establish in a transitional woodlot), is everywhere on the ridge. In the valley are tulip poplars, maple, sycamore, willow, walnut. There's not much of an understory. Deer are a problem. They nibble down the arrowwood, hazel, and dogwood. I noticed an experimental exclosure on the ridge, a fenced area to keep deer out. It looked as if a healthy understory was establishing in there.

Agricultural fields surrounded with mature hedgerows.

Looking down-valley to the marshes that were once silted fields.

Now a bluebird trail, old fields transition to meadows.

This is a short day hike. Don't expect to spend miles out on the trails. Some of the land is off-limits to hikers, as it contains an outdoor education facility reserved for students. Some of the trails are severely overgrown. A talk with the land manager revealed a need for volunteer trail maintainers. I avoided the overgrown trails and stuck to the forested valley trail. I met up with a small group of day hikers who had no idea of the area's history. They'd seen some signs but didn't understand the significance. "We're just going for a walk in the woods," said one hiker.

Update on ID:  Canada Horsebalm (Collinsonia canadensis) (Thanks, Charlie! NHS/MD) 

Trumpet Creeper vine in bloom.

Milkweed and Monarch caterpillar.

For an environmental historian, this landscape is exciting and full of secrets. I was pretty impressed that the day hikers had no idea as to the land's history. To them it was a walk in the woods. To farmers like P. Alston Waring and his neighbors in 1939, the deforested, wasted land was bleak and in need of emergency treatment. Their hard work and commitment really paid off. I had to search hard for erosional features and noted that the forests blocks most of the views except from the highest vantage points over the fields and lower marshes.  Waring notes in a small booklet for the Bucks County Watershed Conservancy (1972) that in 1702 a moldboard plow first broke ground here. In 1939, he writes that the farmers of Honey Hollow (himself included) "changes square fields to contoured strips, planted wildlife hedges and built ponds. Now man was working in harmony with nature."

Colonial Revivalist barn, built in 1935, now the Audubon visitor center.

Spring house, circa 1850.

National Historic Landmark marker and fire hydrant (left)

The farm that is now the Audubon Center has its own fun history and is worth investigating. Some of the trail signs highlight this story, but I found more interpretive signs by (with permission) rooting around in a storage area of the barn. The land was purchased by a rich (although criminal) investor from Philadelphia in the early 1930s. This was the age of the rich gentleman estatesmen who, like those bankers and real estate men of the pre-2008 crash, didn't know what to do with their millions of ill-earned cash dollars. "Honest" Bob Boltz hired an expensive Colonial Revivalist architect to build his estate house and barn. He hired landscape designers to install underground pumping systems to supply water from a pond to the house and barn with a system of buried pumps and pipes. Fire hydrants appear like weeds in the middle of fields and along the trail. "Honest" Bob knew that the feds were on his trail in the 1940s and he simple disappeared only to be caught and arrested in the late 1940s for his crimes of embezzlement and extortion. I giggled a little at the parallels of history.

Boltz Barn interior built in 1935, now a nature center.

A random fire hydrant from the 1930s underground water system installation.

Current entrance is just down the road from "Honest" Bob Boltz's estate house.

My favorite part of this short hike was discovering the water wheel house, nearly hidden from sight at the lower pond. I thrashed through some thorny vines to find the trail that took me over the raceway to the simple stone shed that housed the wheel and a family of black vultures. The building is in bad shape and the roof is nearly gone, covered for now with a plastic tarp. This is a shame but it takes a lot of money to preserve these old structures and keep them in shape. It was clear to me that the Audubon Society could use some help in this regard. [ Read this as "Please Send Money!" ] As I approached, the vultures, including their "cute" single fledgling youngster hopped obligingly up from their tarp-covered roost to flap loudly to a nearby locust tree. Once I had taken a few pictures inside and made my quick exit they loudly flapped back.

Momma (or Poppa?) Black Vulture exiting the roost as I approached the water wheel house.

Water wheel house, raceway, and nearly dislodged wooden wheel.

Rotting in the woods, but making for a great vulture nesting site.

My hike lasted less than two hours, but it was worth the two hour drive up just to be in this landscape that I've studied about but never visited. It was a great look at a fully restored agricultural landscape that is still being farmed, carefully and with great stewardship. The greatest threat this watershed faces now is encroaching development. Strip malls, busy streets, clogged tourist shopping districts, and McMansions are at the edges of the conservancy lands. It's worth the trip though, especially if you have the time ( I didn't) to go a few miles further to New Hope and hike along the canal trail on the Delaware - for me, another hike for another day.

Notes:

Bucks County Audubon Society. Thanks to Dave for getting me oriented to the site and allowing me to dig around in the back storage area of the barn. http://www.bcas.org/

A nice little 1972 booklet that BCAS let me have (it doesn't appear yet in PDF format online) was P. Alston Waring's "Inventory of Natural Resources," a collection of natural history inventories done by local biologists Lester Thomas (Chief Naturalist Bucks County Parks); David Benner, Professor of Horticulture, Delaware Valley College; George Carmichael, Pennbury High School biology teacher; Joe Pearson, Ornithologist; Elizabeth Rex Thomas, Biologist; Charlotte Gantz, Entomologist; Charles Child, Artist; and Malcolm Crooks, Honey Hollow farmer and founder of the conservation district at Honey Hollow.

I mention all of the contributors because I know some of this blog's readers are conservation historians and will recognize a few important names from Pennsylvania conservation history!