Crew works on Preston Park every Monday morning
BUTLER TWP — Preston Park is a gift that keeps on giving, but it needs some things in return.
In order for the park continually providing activity for people in and around Butler Township, the 88-acre park on South Eberhart Road needs constant work to ensure the human-designed space doesn’t become overgrown.
It’s enough to have kept a group of volunteers busy every Monday morning for the past 15 years and counting. Although the park — which was gifted to Butler Township in 2010 via a memorandum that took effect after Jane Preston’s death — has a foundation that raises funds for its upkeep, the Monday Morning Maintenance Crew is the group that actually keeps it up.
Tony Stagno helped charter the crew in 2011, while still being involved with the Friends of Preston Park Foundation. He still coordinates the group’s weekly work days and on Monday, July 27, passed out a list of projects the crew could work on for a few hours that morning. It followed up on some work done the previous Monday, after the usual conversations to catch-up were dispensed with.
“We trimmed evergreens, the rhododendron, we went around and pulled out any invasives (plants) we saw. Pulled back dead branches,” Stagno said of the July 20 work session. “We actually had three different crews working in different parts of the park.”
Stagno said the crew has always had access to equipment owned by Butler Township, which is stored in the garage of a maintenance building in Preston Park. Some of the crew — made up completely of volunteers — bring their own supplies, such as gloves, rakes and leaf blowers; but the crew has domain over the items in garage, including weed whackers and a decommissioned pickup truck.
Dave Heltzell, another coordinator of the Monday Morning Maintenance Crew, said the group usually has extra gloves for any first-timers who show up to a work session wanting to help out. Newbies can also join a cohort of experienced volunteers to lend their hand to a job they prefer.
The people who show up almost always exceed the coordinators’ expectations.
“Everybody works, the men and the women,” Stagno said.
The maintenance crew July 27 consisted of about a dozen people, most of them longtime volunteers but some just a few weeks into the routine.
They gathered in the parking lot near the restrooms and Druid Circle and chatted about what they have been up to since the previous week. This normally consists of “restaurants we've eaten at and doctors appointments we've had,” Stagno said.
Stagno then read a letter he recently sent to the Butler Garden Club in hopes the crew receives a grant to help maintain the park before passing out a work list for the day. Heltzell took attendance, which is mainly for the purposes of tracking the group’s accomplishments and impact, before leading the crew to the garage to pick up the tools they would need for the day.
On the docket for July 27: clear logs from Druid Circle, the Geography Lesson and Compass Rose; clean the area around McCormick’s Pond; finish mulching the flower box by the garage; clear the area around the North Shore Sequoias; weed whack and clean the pond’s north shore edge for anglers.
“Basically, what we do, I call it yard work,” Stagno said.
Once the volunteers return to the park each year in April after a long winter, the work lists practically make themselves. Stagno, Heltzell and other longtime crew members take note of areas of the park that need trimming or cleaning while they are walking the park during a work session.
They usually keep these Monday morning work sessions going through October, which is also the month the park hosts its annual fun run.
Stagno said the regulars are able to divvy up the work for whatever turnout they get on any given day. After meeting in the park at 9 a.m., the crew usually works until about 11 a.m., because it is a volunteer job. Heltzell also said that people are free to come to as many Monday volunteer sessions as they want.
Butler Township manager Tom Knights said the Monday Morning Maintenance Crew helps rid the park of invasive species and township workers take care of the structural maintenance of the park. He added the township provides the tools the volunteers need, since “they’re generous enough to give their time.”
And when the crew packs it in for the winter, the township takes over the necessary work.
“They've got their own initiatives they worked on for years, mostly controlling invasive species. They do that so basically the township doesn't have to,” Knights said.
Aside from Stagno and Heltzell, a few more charter members of the Monday Morning Maintenance Crew are still at Preston Park pretty much every week of the summer to help keep it nice.
Donna Pflugh is one of those charter members and said she got used to noting the needs to the park even during her casual visits to one of the fields.
After working the maintenance crew for so many years, Pflugh said she has a good grasp on its priorities — which mainly boil down to what area of Preston Park is expected to get more visitation. Shakespeare in the Park, area proms and the fun run in October always dictate the work she and the rest of the crew need to put on the schedule.
“If there’s an event coming up, we try to concentrate on that area,” she said. “Usually in September we’ll start walking the trails. Before prom we clean up the rhododendrons.”
Karen Hepler is another charter member of the Monday Morning Maintenance Crew, and said she initially got involved in the work at Preston Park through her employer, American Glass Research, which would sometimes send staff to the park to help. With the AGR office less than a mile away from Preston Park, it was easy to swing over.
“We used to come over here and see what we could help with,” Hepler said. “That’s where it all started.”
Despite the many longtime volunteers who do the lion’s share of coordinating the work days and know what needs to be done when, there are many other people who show up every week and contribute to the park’s upkeep. While not every one of them stays for four years, some, like Dan Morrow, keep coming because of a family connection to the park.
He said his in-laws worked with Frank Preston and the knowledge of their input is what drives him to return to the park every Monday to help however the coordinators need.
“I decided to work here to honor their history,” Morrow said.
Anyone interested in helping with Preston Park maintenance can simply show up to the park at 9 a.m. any Monday of the summer.
