Special Reserve
Legacy on offer at the Winnie Palmer Nature Reserve
Some legacies are viewed through museum glass, some in statues or monuments, while others are experiences that are meant to be shared across generations. The Winnie Palmer Nature Reserve in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, is among the latter. Aligned with the longstanding local institution of Saint Vincent College, the Reserve’s place as a community center and natural healing space tells a story that goes deeper than the legend that is Arnold and Winnie Palmer, right to the heart of a family’s commitment to community, and a community’s commitment to itself “She loved flowers, beautiful gardens, and she loved community,” says Amy Palmer Saunders, chair of the Arnold & Winnie Palmer Foundation, talking about her mother, Winnie. “Her commitment to both of those things meant that when there was an opportunity to prevent something from happening that she felt truly would have polluted the view and the vision for Saint Vincent College and the Basilica, and spoiled the nature that surrounded it, she felt it was important to the community to save that.”
As part of its commitment to children’s health, youth character development and nature-focused wellness, the Arnold & Winnie Palmer Foundation supports the Reserve, among numerous other efforts. The roughly 50-acre property adjacent to Saint Vincent College originally was slated for development, but the community balked when the nature-rich meadow came up for potential demolition. Winnie was among those who believed that the space should be preserved for the community, and so she spoke up.
As Amy told Kingdom some years ago, “It was a difficult situation for my mom. Not only did she have strong feelings of opposition to large commercial developments, but she was sensitive to the community desires and she would never want her actions to result in hard feelings among her neighbors.”
Those neighbors included Ned Nakles Sr. and Emmett Boyle, two local investors who owned the land and who were in talks to sell it to a developer. A large retail space was
planned for the site, but Winnie, working with the college and with others, planned a better solution. Sadly, both Winnie and Nakles died in 1999, before the Reserve came to fruition, but in the end there were no hard feelings. In fact, as Kingdom reported previously, Nakles’ wife, Barbara, recalled a warmth between the two and a shared commitment to community.
“They’d become friends on the Art Conservation Trust,” she told us, “and they shared a lot of the same feelings. Truly, the property had been available for many years to the first developer, but it started turning out as if it was simply meant to end up something different. The Winnie Palmer Nature Reserve just turned out to be the right thing to do.”
More than just preventing the development and keeping the land in its natural state, organizers and supporters of the Reserve project wanted to ensure the land’s value to the community could be sincerely appreciated. So, plans to turn it into an educational healing space took shape. Amy and her husband, Roy, led an effort to have an old barn on the property restored and relocated to serve as a learning center, a blockhouse was restored, Chicago artist Julie Amrani designed a sculpture to reflect Winnie’s love of nature and reading, and the firm of Sweringen, Earl and Dietrick was hired to help transform the site. Environmental Architects, they threaded walking paths through the property that lead to Saint Vincent College, they built a butterfly garden close to the barn, and they ensured wildflowers, local fruit trees and seasonal perennials would frame the property for generations to come. When the grand opening was celebrated just before Arnold Palmer’s birthday in 2007, Palmer commented that “Winnie would have been delighted to see what has happened to this piece of land that she helped protect for the community. I feel sure that this beautiful park would have exceeded her fondest dreams and that the community’s appreciation of it and Winnie will only grow over the years.”
Indeed it has. Today, more than just being a protected environmental space, the Reserve is a treasured community asset, one in line with Winnie’s perspective and with the mission of Saint Vincent College.
Speaking with Kingdom some years ago, Archabbot Douglas R. Nowicki, O.S.B., who served as Archabbot of Saint Vincent Archabbey and as Chancellor of Saint Vincent College and Seminary, explained the college’s perspective on a complete education: “We believe, certainly, that the education of the mind is an important part of the experience here,” he said, “but equally important is an education that reflects values in terms of the way we live our lives.”
Those values—shared by the college, the Palmers and so many in the Latrobe area and beyond—are manifested in the Reserve, but they also are promoted by the Reserve, and not just to locals. The nature-focused educational programming offered to children and families in the barn has established a kind of blueprint for other potential projects beyond Latrobe, and so the Reserve’s impact could travel quite far.
“It turned into something I don’t think even my mother could have envisioned, it’s just wonderful,” Amy says. “She was certainly very big on education, and she was big on nature and wellness, so all of those things connected in a way that created something that now really embodies the mission of the Arnold & Winnie Palmer Foundation. This kind of project, in some ways it very much tells the story of my parents’ lives. It sets the tone for purposefulness.”