Conservancy buys land to protect biologically diverse French Creek in Erie County
A glacial quirk some 14,000 years ago set in motion an ecological windfall that continues to benefit what is now part of Erie County. Last week the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy announced it had purchased two tracts of land extending its existing landuse protection in the French Creek watershed.
Nearly 400 acres in Venango Township were added to the Conservancy’s West Branch French Creek Conservation Area, expanding the permanently protected zone to about 1,000 acres.
“We selected the West Branch for protection some time ago,” said Charles W. Bier, senior director of conservation science at Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. “This is one of those areas we’ve been trying to protect since 1969.”
French Creek was the subject of an important aquatic biodiversity study published in 1998. With no history of coal extraction in the region and small-town agrarian land use, the water has remained “relatively clean,” he said.
As a result, French Creek is recognized as the most biologically diverse stream of its size in the northeastern United States, containing 88 aquatic species including more than a dozen fish and six freshwater mussels protected on federal or Pennsylvania endangered and threatened species lists.
West Branch French Creek meanders from its headwaters in New York southwest to Wattburg, Pa. There, its waters meet the main branch of French Creek and flow south to its confluence with the Allegheny River near Franklin, and southward through the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to the Gulf of Mexico.
Before the most recent Ice Age, however, French Creek was a broader waterway that formed near the current Clarion River and flowed north to a huge freshwater lake that drained to the northeast via the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean. As the ice mass receded, it dropped vast amounts of glacial drift — clay, silt, sand and gravel — that blocked access to Lake Erie. It created new soil types, wetlands and glacial lakes including Pymatuning,
Conneaut and Sugar lakes, said Mr. Bier, as well as “very unusual” water-holding aquifers.
“Those sand and gravel deposits store a lot of water that keeps feeding off over time into French Creek [and Sandy Creek in Venango County],” he said. “That keeps the water cool, and during drought periods it keeps the creek healthy.”
The French Creek corridor has significant historical value, as well. Several Indian nations inhabited the region for some 2,000 years, leaving prehistoric burial mounds near Meadville and Cochranton. The waterway linked France’s colonial holdings in Canada to military outposts on the Allegheny River as far south as Fort Duquesne.
Western Pennsylvania Conservancy protection does not mean no-trespass preservation, said Mr. Biers. While certain types of land-altering industrial uses are banned in perpetuity, recreational activities including fishing, hunting, hiking, canoeing and photography are permitted.
The West Branch French Creek Conservation Area is a “different type of conservation project for a group like ours,” he said. “Usually we see smaller places that need protection. We’re trying to keep this small river alive. We’re not going to buy the whole watershed. By working high in the watershed we hope to protect the flood plains and wetlands below.”