every now and then we should think about people who have made Western Pennsylvania a good place to live. One of these is Frank W. Preston (1896-1989), in his off hours a respected ornithologist, ecologist, geologist, glaciologist and a leader in Pennsylvania’s nature conservancy work. His day job occupied him as scientist, research engineer and entrepreneur in glass technology.
I became interested in Preston when I read his introduction to his book “Drainage Changes in the Late Pleistocene in Central Western Pennsylvania” — “At the capitulation of Germany in World War II, I suggested to my wife that we celebrate by looking at the terminal moraine of the Wisconsin glacier some 10 miles from home ….” What kind of guy celebrates the end of a war by traipsing through swamps and creeks and farmers’ fields and abandoned mines looking for a glacier’s terminal moraine?
The kind of guy whose curiosity had been stifled by four years of gas rationing! He recognized that Butler County’s topography had largely been carved by glacial activity and decided to check it out. His temperament and curiosity spawned two state parks.
Frank Preston was born in 1896 in Leicester, England, which itself had been carved by glaciers. He earned a degree in civil engineering by examination (not by attending classes!) from the University of London in 1916 and worked for a civil engineering firm. His later degrees from the University of London (doctorates in 1925 and 1951) were likewise earned by examination and published research — again, with Preston not attending classes. His work with lenses in surveying equipment led to work with lenses in aerial photography (a subject of much interest to England’s War Department in World War I). There are two stories as to his exemption from military service: One is that his employer told the draft board that his work with lenses was invaluable and necessary for the war effort; the second is that he was near-sighted and colorblind. Preston wrote to his draft board that he would serve “in anything useful” and suggested only a brief exemption.
He first traveled to the U.S. in 1920 at his employer’s behest to work with George Eastman (of Eastman Kodak). He again traveled to the U.S., settled in Butler and founded Preston Laboratories in 1927. Some of his lab’s work with Corning Glass led to the glass-melting manufacturing technology used in making Corelle dinnerware. When he decided to retire in 1959, he sold his business to two of his employees, who renamed it American Glass Research. This is now part of AGR International, and its website credits its founding as Preston Laboratories.
Preston built his lab on 88 acres on Eberhart Road near Butler. Research labs for chemists and physicists, a machine shop and an administration building soon occupied the site, along with two ponds formed by damming the stream that flowed across the property. The lab’s payroll included up to 75 employees as well as a resident ornithologist. Preston justified the presence of the ornithologist by the “cross fertilization of ideas in a group of physicists, chemists and engineers.”
Today these grounds are open to the public as Preston Park and Arboretum. I walked several miles of its trails; when you visit Preston Park, notice the diversity of trees and the geometric designs outlined by their locations. There also is a healthy patch of prairie grass — one of two patches in Pennsylvania (the other at the Jennings Environmental Center near Slippery Rock). Preston and his wife, Jane (whose interests included gardening, alternative medicine and vegetarianism), willed the property to Butler as a park, specifying that no mining or timbering or drilling for natural gas would ever occur on the property.
Preston’s day job entailed full days, but I’m intrigued with how he spent his off hours — especially those that he devoted to “looking at the terminal moraine.” His search for traces of the ice that covered large swaths of North America more than 12,000 years ago yielded more than an understanding of glaciation. He, along with Jane and friends Edmund Walls Arthur, Carl Leathers and John McCormick, saw the damage that strip mining had done to Butler County.
He learned that present-day marshes often lay in areas that had been prehistoric glacial spillways. These were often “kettle holes” — formed when huge blocks of ice melted more slowly than the surrounding ice. As the blocks of ice melted, they became ponds or small lakes and often were fed by streams. Millennia later some of these areas continue to be catch basins for water; Preston looked for specific plants and animals that thrive in unexpected places and learned that cattail marshes and even the long-billed marsh wren were giveaways for a site of a glacial lake.
I haven’t found reports of the conversations of him and his friends, but Preston must have been there when the idea came to them: build a dam across Muddy Creek to form a lake occupying part of the area that millennia ago was covered by a huge glacial lake, create a state park around it, and create another state park around the gorge created from the waters rushing from a melting glacier.
In the 1950s this land was known as the Muddy Creek Swamp — swampy and, at best, marginal farmland. They worked with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, acquired tracts of land, lobbied lawmakers in Harrisburg, sealed mines, capped more than 400 oil and gas wells and graded and backfilled numerous strip mines. (You can see a wall of one of the strip mines along the hill above the large parking lot at the Pleasant Valley picnic area.)
Preston bought some of the land tracts and donated them to the nascent park. Recognizing the landforms that surrounded the prehistoric lake that once filled the site, he and his team used them when creating the boundaries for the present-day lake. All they needed to do was build a dam and block the side exits that drained the older lake.
Preston paid close attention when workmen dug the foundations for the Route 528 bridge that spans the eastern stretch of Lake Arthur; deep in the holes for the foundations he found glacial sediments and rued that the prehistoric rootlets that were buried with them were too small for radiocarbon (C-14) dating at that time. Preston estimated that the lake (dubbed Lake Watts by researchers) that lay in front of the glacier 20,000 years ago had a surface area of 21.5 square miles; present-day Lake Arthur has a surface area of 6 square miles.
Moraine State Park was almost named Preston State Park in his honor. Preston insisted that the park be named “Moraine” because of the area’s glacial history. He also insisted that the new lake be named Lake Arthur after his friend Edmund Watts Arthur. The Frank Preston Conservation Area (the remote eastern section of Moraine State Park) encompasses three arms of the lake and acres of land where wildlife thrive.
Frank Preston’s extraordinary gift was that he was able to “see the big picture” — how can myriad details be related to a larger entity? He found traces of three lakes that formed in front of the glacial front, estimated their size and depth, thought of the land ruined by strip mining, talked with farmers unable to prosper because of marshy fields — and considered the advantages of re-creating the lake, surrounding it with public park land, setting aside areas for native plants havens for wildlife, and then set about to make it all happen.
Today Moraine State Park and Lake Arthur are here for our enjoyment — as well as McConnells Mill State Park and the Jennings Environmental Center — because of his vision, hard work and generosity.
Katie Doyle (4thedyls@earthlink.net) lives in Mt. Lebanon. She wrote “The Gospel in Glass,” a book about the stained-glass windows at Beverly Heights Presbyterian. The book is available at the Mt. Lebanon Historical Society.
First Published: April 18, 2021, 9:00 a.m.
