The Community Table · Presented by The Churchville Inn

Tyler State Park: The Old Farm Roads Along the Neshaminy

Before it was a park, it was a patchwork of family farms, a dairy herd, and a couple who wanted the land to stay exactly what it was.

Tyler State Park · Newtown, Bucks County

Neshaminy Creek has been shaping this stretch of Bucks County for a very long time. For thousands of years the Lenape lived in small villages along its banks, raising crops and tending the woods, and when colonists arrived in the early eighteenth century, families like the Coopers, the Blakers, and the Twinings built their houses, barns, and mills along the same water, letting the creek turn the wheels at places like Spring Garden Mill.

Between 1919 and 1929, George F. Tyler, a Philadelphia banker, and his wife Stella Elkins Tyler, an artist, bought up roughly two thousand acres of those farms, not to build on them but to keep anyone else from doing so. They revived an Ayrshire dairy herd that ran for another forty years, raised poultry, sheep, and pigs, and built a stable for their twenty-five riding horses. When Stella died in 1963, the estate went to Temple University, the Commonwealth acquired it the following year, and in May of 1974 it opened as the 1,711-acre park we know today.

Once the Tyler family’s farm estate, now 1,711 acres of park

What makes Tyler State Park feel different from most parks is how much of the old life is still in it. The paved trails were once farm roads connecting the mill to the dairy and the stables. The Schofield Ford Covered Bridge, first built in 1874, was lost to arson in 1991 and rebuilt by the community, reopening in 1997. The Spring Garden Mill is now home to the Langhorne Players, a volunteer community theater, and the Tylers’ horse stables house the Tyler Park Center for the Arts, whose Crafts in the Meadow show helps keep it going each fall. In between there are meadows, picnic groves, a thirty-six-hole disc golf course, and, in summer, canoes and kayaks on the quiet water upstream.

This is the season when Tyler is at its best, when the meadows turn gold, the woods along the creek start to color, and the park’s programs pick back up for the months between September and May. It is just up the road from us, which makes for an easy kind of Sunday: a long walk across the covered bridge and along the old farm roads, and then, once the light starts to go, a table at the Inn to finish the day with the people you walked with.

Part of The Community Table series · The Churchville Inn