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CHURCHVILLE
Churchville Nature Center Offers Harmony with Natural World
By Daniel Wilkinson

You don’t hear towns called Smoketown very often anymore. And if you do you might think they’re sitting outside under tents barbequing up spare ribs. But back before 1816, the small town of Churchville in Bucks County was called just that—smoketown. But not for ribs, but because the non-smoking settlers referred to it that way after witnessing the early Holland Dutch’s fondness for tobacco and their long-stemmed pipes. That name changed to Churchville though with the construction of the North and Southampton Reformed Church on Bristol Road, which is still celebrating mass.

Then the town blossomed around 1880 along with America’s love of the railroad, which fueled the town’s growth. Then the second Churchville Station, which is still standing today but is now used as a private residence, was built in 1892, and the rest is history.

Today it’s hard to find solitude and some peace in a town and county that once had sprawling wooded areas but now has sprawling development, so local residents head out to the Churchville Nature Center to find a natural haven from the frenzied, go-go rush of American life. Ryan Cook has experienced it firsthand.

A few years ago, he had an epiphany while at the center. Until then, his mind had been laden by the trial-and-error frivolities of adolescence. MTV swirled in the back of his mind while he worked at the local grocery store.

So, when his parents signed him up for the Lenape Native American Village workshop, a painstaking recreation of the lives the Lenape people lived during the 1500s, he offered up excuses. I have to work, he said. I have homework due. His parents gave that a good laugh.

But when he was making his way through the different stations—from lessons on pottery making to hunting with bow and arrows—he had a change of heart.

“It definitely makes you appreciate how Indians lived with nature, and it made me reflect on the way I live,” said Cook, who later spent a year in college studying to be a zoologist. “I always thought I needed all these material things that they made me happy, but I realized that there were more important things. I wouldn’t call it life changing, but it definitely made me rethink the way I looked at things.”

The Lenape Village is just one of many different educational opportunities available at the Churchville Nature Center that echo that sentiment of a working relationship with nature. Nestled on 54 acres tracing the Churchville Reservoir, the center encompasses lake, meadow, pond, wet marsh and woodland ecosystems. The center takes advantage of each habitat offering opportunities for arborists, bird watching, canoeing, hiking, maple sugar production and preservation. But the Center also maintains 700 acres of wildlife habitat in the Churchville Greenway, the area surrounding the Churchville reservoir.

“Parks and preserves like the Churchville Nature Center are extremely important today. These are islands in a sea of development,” Naturalist Marlin Corn said on the center’s Web site. “These are the last refuges, the last strongholds, for our local wildlife to survive and thrive. Just as importantly, these are places for people to come and observe this wildlife and nature firsthand.”

The center focuses on educational programs for kids of all ages. For children under 5, they offer aquatic ecology programs where students have the opportunity to help catch and identify various pond inhabitants to better understand the diversity of ecosystems. Older students receive crash courses in water testing and tree and reptile identification. In “Lay of the Land” workshops, students learn to use cues from the natural world, such as the stars, sun and wind, to orient themselves when lost in the woods.

The center’s two miles of trails are open year round from sunrise to sunset. For more information regarding the center’s other programs, call 215.357.4005 or visit www.churchvillenaturecenter.org. 

THE Facts About Churchville

• Population: 4,469

• Median age: 41

• Total housing units: 1,375

• Mean travel time to work: 32.3 minutes

• Median household income: $102,400

• Education of Population 25 years and over (2,916): High school graduate or higher, 2,718. Bachelor’s degree or higher, 1,149.

• Churchville Elementary School: 81.7 percent of students were proficient in reading with a state goal of 63 percent, and 85.7 percent were proficient in math with a state goal of 56 percent.

Daniel Wilkinson is a staff writer for Curious Parents.