Chester County lies just 25 miles west of Philadelphia and 10 miles north of Wilmington, Delaware. Despite its location within a sprawling metropolitan region, Chester County is succeeding in accommodating waves of development without completely sacrificing its rich farmland, natural areas and special places. This success is largely due to the leadership of elected officials and the support of a large cast of characters including state and federal agencies, private land trusts and the citizens themselves.

A covered bridge crosses French Creek, which Chester County is protecting with the help of local land trusts including the French & Pickering Creeks Conservation Trust.

Chester County elected officials and residents have consistently shown support for conservation with their wallets. In 1989, County voters approved a $50-million open space bond by 82 percent. Through a combination of voter-approved bonds and commissioner appropriations, Chester County has so far dedicated more than $170 million to land preservation and leveraged another $215 million in funding from other sources.

In addition to implementing the Pennsylvania Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, the Chester County Agricultural Land Preservation Board runs the Chester County Agricultural Easement Challenge Grant Program in which County money is matched dollar-for-dollar by funding from municipal governments and private non-profit organizations. To date, the voters in 27 of Chester County’s 55 townships have approved land conservation taxes and/or bonds, generating $186 million in preservation funding.

The municipalities of Chester County have also demonstrated a willingness to use a wide range of preservation tools. For example, ten townships in Chester County have adopted transfer of development rights, an implementation technique that encourages development in appropriate places in return for preserving farmland, environmentally-sensitive areas and other open space. This is the largest number of TDR programs in a single county anywhere in the United States. Through easement acquisition, TDR and the work of private land trusts, Chester County had preserved 52,324 acres of farmland by 2007 according to the Farmland Preservation Report, making it the fourth most successful locally operated farmland preservation program in the country.

In response to development threats starting in the 1960s, a group of dedicated citizens formed the Brandywine Conservancy, a private, non-profit environmental organization that has since contributed to the permanent protection of over 40,000 acres of land. Within Chester County, the Brandywine Conservancy owns the 771-acre Laurels Preserve and the 170-acre Waterloo Mills, named for an adjacent 18th Century village listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The French and Pickering Creek Conservation Trust, also formed in 1967, has preserved over 7,000 acres of open space and placed over 60 sites on the National Register of Historic Places. The Trust is currently creating trail corridors on the French and Pickering Creeks, including a ten-mile path from Warwick County Park to Kennedy Covered Bridge.

The 2,452 acres of land in Chester County’s five county parks are supplemented by state and federal recreation sites. Chester County shares French Creek State Park and the Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site with Berks County to the north. State game lands just south of Hopewell Village provide open space for hunting and other outdoor recreation as well as trail corridors, including a portion of the 130-mile-long Horse-shoe hiking and equestrian trail that links Valley Forge west of Philadelphia with the Appalachian Trail near Harrisburg. The Commonwealth also owns and manages the 1,255-acre Clay Creek Preserve State Park donated by the DuPont Company. But Pennsylvania’s biggest contribution to open space in Chester County is the 1,705-acre Marsh Creek State Park, which surrounds 535-acre Marsh Creek Lake.

An open space inventory prepared by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission in 2004 estimated that Chester County’s publicly-owned land (federal, state, county, municipal) totaled 21,901 acres. In addition, this survey estimated privately-owned, protected lands in Chester County at 51,348 acres. The combined total of 73,249 acres represents over 15 percent of the County’s total land area, demonstrating that farmland and open space can be preserved, even in the shadow of a large metropolitan region, when governments, private organizations and average citizens all get involved.