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Early European settlers to eastern Pennsylvania found some of the richest farmland imaginable upon their arrival. The farmers eagerly spread across the rolling hills of this bounteous land but one area consistently stymied their agricultural ambitions. In the southwestern corner of Chester County the ground was covered with prairie grasses and stunted pine trees. A light-colored green rock was so close to the surface that every shovel seemed to clank against it. Since no crops would grow here, the settlers called the region 'barrens.'
They had discovered a rare serpentine barrens. Serpentine rock, colored green by the mineral olivine, is found in quantity in only a few places in the world; Newfoundland, California and eastern Pennsylvania and Maryland chief among them. Serpentine is a rock born deep in the earth, beneath ancient ocean bottoms, that worked its way to the surface through movements in the Earth's plates.
After it was discovered in 1828, the attractive stone was pulled from the earth and used to build farmhouses and barns throughout Chester County. Many of the government buildings in West Chester were constructed with the green serpentine stone. By 1880 the Wood Mine excavated to extract the stone was 800 feet deep and the largest in the world. Chrome, asbestos, quartz and were also mined here.
Today, much of the serpentine barrens are part of Nottingham Park, the oldest of Chester County's parks, dedicated in 1963. There are 8 hiking trails covering Nottingham Park's 650 acres, which can all be covered in a day's hiking. One of the trails is an interpretive nature trail that describes the serpentine barrens and visits abandoned quarries.
Hiking through the serpentine barrens is an experience more akin to the Midwestern prairies than Eastern woodlands. The stone that has pushed all the way through the earth's crust to the surface gives the soil a high temperature, inhospitable to vegetation. Also, serpentine produces soil laced with magnesium, chromium and other metals toxic to most plants.
The only trees that survive here are slow-growing pitch pines. More than four dozen species of grass cover the ground. Some of the unusual plants found here include the serpentine aster, a summer-blooming white flower that is extremely rare and native only in the barrens, and the round-leaved flamethrower which is a succulent that stores water in its stems.
In addition to the rare plant life, the insects that survive on the grasses are found nowhere else on the eastern seaboard. Nine species of moths and butterflies that are rarely seen in Pennsylvania live in the serpentine barrens. The rough green snake, normally a denizen of warmer climates, makes a home in the heated soil. Even native bobcats have been spotted in the serpentine barrens.
This desert-like habitat actually requires fire in order to prosper and often times at Nottingham a hiker will encounter a charred section of trees managed in a controlled burn. Any long periods without fire can invite invasion by competing forest plants that will destroy the barrens. More lethal to the fragile barrens is suburban sprawl that has gnawed away much of this unique land, making the public lands preserved in Nottingham Park all the more valuable.
Nottingham County Park is just north of the Pennsylvania-Maryland state line off of Route 1.
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