A Small Watershed’s Great Big Lesson for All of Us

From Forest to Conestoga

A Small Watershed’s Big Lesson in Restoration, Resilience, and Shared Stewardship

By Diane Huskinson

Hope Springs 

One summer day, while walking along the stream that runs through his farm, Curvin Shirk spotted something he’d never seen before. Could it be? He dug around the bank, and sure enough, there it was: water emerging from the earth, flowing down toward the stream. The spring’s pulse was steady and strong. The water, cool. After Curvin cleared away some of the sediment, watercress (an aquatic edible plant) soon began growing around it.

Curvin was excited. The trees he’d planted were doing their job, cooling the stream with sprinkled shade and providing a healthy dose of leaf litter. And now this. The spring had likely been there all along, but not until the livestock were fenced out and the forest buffer planted could this muddy patch reveal its true form. 

The transformation happened neither by accident nor overnight nor at the hands of one person. Decades in the making, it’s the result of one community’s grand plan to restore its land and water. 

Curvin is one of seven landowners along the unnamed tributary that joins their properties. They’re friends and neighbors. Most are members of the Plain community. And together, with help from conservation partners, they’ve created an unbroken stretch of forest buffer that connects the forested hills to Little Conestoga Creek in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. 

Without even a name, it’s an unassuming little stream. But it’s got a great big story.

Changing Fate

Curvin’s stream connects a watershed, nicknamed Hammertown (after a nearby road), that stretches a mere 1.5 square miles. Any pollution here might seem like a drop in the river it eventually flows into. But the drops add up across Pennsylvania’s headwater streams, which account for 80% of the state’s stream miles. Across the United States, the picture is similar: Most U.S. streams are headwater streams. And so, the fate of American rivers and their wildlife begins here in this Lancaster County stream and in thousands of others like it.

Forty or so years ago, Hammertown’s fate started to change, as conservation groups cultivated relationships with some of the farmers. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) was the first to reach out, offering free well-water testing. As the farmers got to know conservation workers, like Greg Heigel from the Lancaster County Conservation District and Ashley Spotts from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), trust and friendship grew. One farmer, Raymond King, even invited Heigel and Spotts to join the preparations for his daughter’s Amish wedding.

That early work laid the foundation for NRCS, CBF, the conservation district, and Stroud Water Research Center to help the watershed’s landowners and farmers protect their soil and restore their stream. The first trees were planted in 2009 on Benuel Zook’s farm. Fifteen years later, the unbroken stretch of buffer was finally complete. Some trees came via the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program. Some, via CBF’s Keystone 10 Million Trees Partnership. And some, via the Stroud Center’s Farm Stewardship Program.

Two thousand trees across 13 acres make up this forested corridor that cools and feeds the stream, adds vital habitat, stabilizes streambanks, and reduces runoff. It makes the stream more resilient to a changing climate, pollution, flooding, and drought.

The scale of the buffer in such a small watershed is significant and so are the other improvements that make up the restoration effort: Manure and fertilizer management, livestock fencing, and soil conservation practices reduce land-use pressures on the stream.

“All of us who grew up in Lancaster got used to brown, muddy streams. If you wanted to see cleaner water, you went north,” says Matt Ehrhart, director of watershed restoration at the Stroud Center. “This idea that if we do it right, we can have productive, economically viable farms growing food and also have wild trout in our streams is just such a huge deal, but it’s not possible without a lot of work.” 

Doing it right means following the science of what works to restore freshwater ecosystems and clean water, and that requires aggregation and partnership.

Understanding Water

Stream degradation is often the result of multiple pressures: Chemical and thermal pollution, stormwater runoff, erosion, deforestation, physical disturbance, and climate change are all common culprits. It makes sense, then, that removing only one or two in isolated parcels of land will yield disappointing results. In recent decades, states like Pennsylvania have tried and failed to remove more streams from impairment lists than they add — lists that tell us which streams aren’t healthy enough for fishing, swimming, and drinking. Why the struggle?

Stroud Center scientists and restoration experts argue progress has languished because of too much investment in strategies that don‘t restore functional stream ecosystems (reengineering of channels and floodplains) and not enough investment in ones that do (changing how people use their land and water).

Hammertown is an investment in the latter. An intensive array of practices aimed at reducing runoff and physical disturbance, producing ecological uplift, and restoring natural stream function combine across an entire watershed — though small it may be — to make a big impact: conditions that, in time, allow the stream to heal itself.

Understanding Each Other

Lancaster County, like much of rural America, holds many conservative values and rich cultural and religious traditions: family farming, fiscal responsibility, communal worship, love of God and creation.

But development continues all around, inching closer with every new shopping center and residential neighborhood. Budgets keep shrinking. And the streams that supply drinking water keep getting dirtier. 

So, to preserve their way of life, Hammertown’s farming community recognized the need for progress. Some began serving on Caernarvon Township’s Ag Advisory Committee. 

“There’s an openness among the farmers to new ideas and different viewpoints, in part because of the Ag Advisory Committee,” says Lamonte Garber, watershed restoration coordinator at the Stroud Center. “They’re used to getting together and talking with each other about priorities for their local community. They want to be involved because they recognize this place is special.” 

When conservation groups offered to help, farmers stepped up, agreeing to make changes on their farms. And now, the township’s broader community has joined the effort, extending the forest buffer even further downstream.

Jeremy Weaver, who consults on nutrient management planning, says, “If we can all work together, trust each other, stop talking at each other, and just listen to each other, that’s how we make progress. That’s how we protect our water.”

Spotts explains what that looks like: “It’s really important that they know we are here to help. If there are maintenance concerns or any questions, there are all of these organizations working together and trying to make this easier for the landowners and farmers.”

A Stream Reborn

Since before the start of the project, Stroud Center scientists have been monitoring the health and transformation of the stream. Early data look promising, and anecdotally, Garber has observed the presence of new life, including mayflies (a hallmark of healthy streams), which he hadn’t seen there before. 

If research can confirm what he suspects, it will not only show the effectiveness of a whole-watershed approach to restoration; it will also demonstrate a restoration timeline. 

Terry Martin, who oversees clean water projects for the township, says, “Testing is so important. It helps to verify our successes.”

In the meantime, the farmers are enjoying their stream. David Smucker happily mows his buffer. Then, there’s the rock in Raymond King’s stretch of the creek, where he sits and thinks and watches his grandchildren play. And on hot summer days, Curvin Shirk walks down to the newfound spring on his property and marvels at the cool air rising above the creek. “The trees are making that happen,” he says. 

If there’s new life to be found, it’s here, in Hammertown. 

Learn More
To learn how you can partner with the Stroud Center on community-led land and stream stewardship, email buffers@stroudcenter.org.