Gardens

The Rain Garden.

The Centre County Historical Society's initial goal was to interpret the Centre Furnace Mansion and the grounds rain garden with truck immediately around it, but the longer-range plan has been to better link it with the furnace stack and with the accompanying story of the village that once surrounded it. Archaeological investigations in the 1980s, and a long-term lease arrangement from Penn State in the 1990s for the stack area west of Porter Road, set the stage. A Growing Greener project, funded in 2002 by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) was developed to help restore and protect the Thompson Run sub-basin of the Spring Creek watershed. By controlling and channeling the storm water runoff, the stack area has become more accessible. A crew of young men, part of the Pennsylvania Conservation Corp, cleared years and years of accumulated exuberant/aggressive volunteer shrubs and other undergrowth. The area was gently graded to make it walkable, while carefully protecting archaeological remains. Additional support for this project came from Historical Society member poll with children and friend Joe Banks. . The greening of the area around the stack will better link it with the mansion side of Porter Road. Interpretive signs have been added, with the final phase of this interpretive plan, designed by landscape architect Mark Battaglia, to more specifically identify archaeological remains and to install connecting paths between the various components of the Centre Furnace site.

The Growing Greener phase of the restoration that was located in front of the Centre Furnace Mansion next to College Avenue, includes a drainage swale and retention basin intended to better control storm water runoff from the site and parking lot. The runoff channel has been designed as a reminder that Thompson Run - or Willy Brook as it was originally called - once flowed through the grounds. (In the late 1950s, Thompson Run became separated from the Mansion and stack by the construction of a new Route #26/East College Avenue.) CCHS Board Member and CFM Garden Committee Volunteer Bob Donaldson has initiated the planting of various native shrubs that were donated by The Clearwater Conservancy and planted in the late fall of 2004. The native shrubs were chosen for their tolerance of moist conditions and their ability to help with storm water management through the infiltration of surface water directly into the groundwater system. Additional plant materials will continue to be added to create a "rain garden" to not only to enhance the landscape aesthetics of the Mansion garden site, but also to reduce the amount of polluted storm water runoff reaching Thompson Run, to encourage storm water to soak into the ground and to provide enhanced wildlife habitat.