Pat Leary is a forthright champion of the rural lifestyle, encouraging people to “leave a gentle footprint as they walk the earth.”
Leary practices what he preaches.
At home in his beloved Georges Valley, Leary and his wife, Julie Mason, grow much of their own food, sharing with neighbors who share alike with them.
Leary leaves his gentle footprint on the broader community as board president of the Penns Valley Conservation Association.
The association serves as a steward “for the natural and cultural communities” of the Upper Penns Creek watershed, which comprises the mainstem of Penns Creek and its four major tributaries: Elk Creek, Pine Creek, Sinking Creek, and Muddy Creek, plus a host of smaller waterways. They join and flow into the Susquehanna River, which in turn flows into the Chesapeake Bay.
Leary cites a chance meeting with a stranger in Cleveland that helps illustrate the importance of Penns Creek not just to the environment, but to the region’s economy.
“I had a Penns Valley sweatshirt on in a restaurant and I was approached by a guy who said, ‘Penns Valley! That’s Penns Creek, right?’ He and five buddies come to Penns Creek every spring to fish and they rent a place to stay. They hit the local restaurants and all that, and they fish. He wasn’t the only person I’ve met who has recognized a Penns Valley article of clothing and made a comment like that.”
Since its founding in the mid-1990s, the PVCA and community partners have completed more than 150 watershed projects, including bank stabilization, watershed assessments, wetland restoration, invasive plant removal, riparian buffer planting, and streambank fencing, to name just a few. The association’s website (pennsvalley.net) features an interactive pin map highlighting its work over more than two decades.
The PVCA was honored in 2021 with a Governor’s Award for Environmental Excellence for its stream restoration work on a section of Muddy Creek.
The organization began with the concern local residents had about the potential impacts mining activity would have on the water quality of Penns Creek and its tributaries.
“Since then, the focus has been on maintaining clean streams for the most part,” Leary says. “But also doing what they can to foster a rural community, because rural communities are different than urban communities. It’s a style of life which is woefully underappreciated.”
Leary, who grew up in Pittsburgh, developed an appreciation for rural central Pennsylvania after starting as a student at Penn State in 1969. (He refers to the university as “that little school west of here.”) He’s been in the county ever since, working in the building trades (“I just like making things work”) and serving as a Gregg Township supervisor from 2005-2013.
The PVCA, which has about 200 paid members, does its work with only two staffers (a director and an environmental educator); otherwise, the association relies on several dozen active volunteers, says Leary, who has served on the board since 2020.
Leary takes great pride in those volunteers.
“They work long and hard,” he says. “You can’t be anything but proud of the folks who are doing all that work, promoting the rural lifestyle.”
Here’s more from our conversation:
What’s your passion for doing this work with PVCA?
Leary: We only have one planet. There’s no Planet B.
What do you love about Penns Valley in particular?
Leary: My first wedding was in the early eighties and my late wife and I, when we were looking for a place, we looked around the top end of Huntingdon County, all around Centre County, and there was a place a little east of here in Georges Valley where we found what was a neglected homestead, and so we … [added] water, electricity, and stuff like that to it. The place spoke to us. It’s a gentle little valley, Georges Valley. The tides of time bypassed it a whole lot. It was always a little backwater, which is OK. …
The people of the valley have always looked after each other, supported each other. And it’s a community. At one time, back in the eighties, it seemed like you had to have seven generations here before you were considered a local. That seems to have greatly fallen by the wayside since then, which is nice because we’re all people.
What do you see as the biggest threat to this rural area that you cherish so much?
Leary: Hyper-development. Potter Township has had some pretty significant development going on. Along Route 45 in Gregg Township, before you get to Spring Mills, there’s some housing developments up on the hill above Sinking Creek. But for the most part, people who move into the valley are either picking up older houses and fixing them or buying a chunk of land and basically building a house that they could live on.
We have a wonderful group of farmers in the valley, and there are people like us. We get called homesteaders, my wife and I, because we have chickens and a couple ducks, and we have the garden. We grow to live, and an awful lot of people out this way do that. The best way to eat is out of your back yard, and the second-best way to eat is out of your neighbor’s back yard. We transfer our abundance to other people, and other people transfer their abundance to us back and forth in a giving community.
How does the PVCA give to the community?
Leary: The PVCA is quite adept at giving to the community, as far as maintaining a clean environment. And the other thing PVCA does is we provide an environmental educator to the local school district at no cost to the taxpayers. As far as we understand, we’re the only group in the state that does that. Our Crickfest fundraiser [held in September] and the Riversongs [spring music festival] fundraiser and other things we do basically is to support that activity, because there’s grant money available [for activities to take care of streams].
We’ve been pretty good over the years at getting grant money because we can justify through history that we are able to do work that improves the stream flow and the quality of the stream. And for Penns Creek that’s paramount, because people come in to fish here and spend a lot of money, a lot more money than people might imagine.
Does the association take a position on how you balance growth with maintaining the rural character of the area?
Leary: We just do what we can to provide the backbone; the watershed is the backbone. Without good water, you can’t have a good life.
What do you want to tackle over the next year?
Leary: We’re trying to get some money for some stream plantings, site plantings, riparian buffer work on Pine Creek. That is a Class A stream. [The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission defines a Class A stream as supporting a population of naturally produced trout of sufficient size and abundance to support a long-term and rewarding sport fishery.]
What can individuals, whether they’re residents here or visitors, do to preserve the watershed and keep this area as beautiful as it is?
Leary: Live cleanly. The major thing we put out on the curb to pick up is cat litter. We grow a bunch of what we eat and what we don’t grow, we get from neighbors. There’s not much we bring in from the outside world. People just need to have a gentle footprint as they walk the earth. Just because you might want something doesn’t mean you actually need it. And if you live light, you might live longer. But then again, I can’t guarantee that. But what you do live will be good—good for your neighbors, good for the earth, and good for yourself. T&G
Mark Brackenbury is a former editor of Town&Gown.
