A new nature preserve opened this year in a wooded valley in Bloomingdale, Ohio, about an hour west of Pittsburgh. The Hellbender Preserve provides education not only about eastern hellbender salamanders but also American history.
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Hellbenders are not cute little salamanders
They’re slimy and brown, grow over two feet long, and can live 50 years. According to folklore, hellbenders were named by early European settlers who said they looked as if they crawled out of hell and are bent on going back.
They breathe using loose flaps of thick wrinkled skin running along their sides, and all of this leads to some unflattering nicknames.
“There’s old lasagna sides. There’s a snot otter, Allegheny alligator. There’s a lot of different names for them,” said Aaron Dodds, project manager at the Jefferson County Soil and Water Conservation District, which created and manages the preserve.
As Dodds walked on a path that runs beside Cross Creek, a tributary of the Ohio River, he said this hilly Appalachian area is perfect for them because it’s heavily wooded, with lots of large boulders, and steep terrain.
While their populations have declined dramatically over the last 30 years, they’re doing well here.
“On this property is the largest population of eastern hellbenders in the state of Ohio,” Dodds said. “So we were looking at a way to preserve and protect the watershed.”
Still, visitors to the preserve likely won’t see one; hellbenders are usually nocturnal and live under rocks.
The males build their nests and care for the young.
“The female goes from nest to nest to lay eggs. She’ll go in and mate with the male, and the male will kick her out because if she sees eggs from another female, she’ll try to consume them,” Dodds explained.
“So a lot of times when you see the females, they’re pretty beat up and gnarly from fighting,” he said.
Despite that, hellbenders have been around for a long time, more than 160 million years according to fossil records. Dodds says they’ve lasted so long because they are hearty, but they’re also sensitive to water quality.
“They can’t handle pollutants, and they can’t really handle heavy sediment,” he said.
Last year, the US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing them as endangered throughout their 15-state range, which would help protect their habitat. That process is less certain now, with changes to the Endangered Species Act planned by the Trump administration.
Stories of American history at the preserve
As the creek curves, a large stone railroad bridge comes into view, revealing another aspect of this 120-acre preserve: its history along the Panhandle Railroad Corridor. At one time, it connected Pittsburgh to Chicago and St. Louis.
Back in 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln was on a train moving through here on his way to a fundraiser in Pittsburgh, and then to his inauguration in Washington, D.C. It had rained for two weeks.
“The raging stream and ice flows were going through here and knocked out a sycamore tree,” Dodds said. “And the sycamore came down and hit one of the [supports] on the old wooden railroad trestle.”
Dodds said his office found old newspaper articles in the Pennsylvania State Archives describing what happened. There is a sign up by the bridge to tell this story.
The trestle began to sway, and Lincoln’s handlers worried it would collapse. So, Lincoln got off the train and walked across the trestle.
“One report has him falling, Lincoln getting halfway across the bridge, and falling to a knee. Another one has him falling flat on his face,” Dodds said.
Of course, Lincoln did make it across. Once president, Lincoln ordered that the wooden trestle be replaced with a stone structure, which is what is here today.
This isn’t the only piece of American history in this small preserve.
It’s also home to Tunnel Number 8 of that old panhandle railroad, which Irish and later African American workers built. Many died in the process. Some workers carved their initials in the stone. Dodds calls it the “ghost wall.”
“Throughout the day, especially this time of year in the fall and the winter, as the sun hits it, you will see different names appear and disappear because of the different shading of the light,” he said.
The preserve drew 25,000 visitors in the first six months after it opened in April, according to Dodds. It’s a rare tourist attraction in Jefferson County, which is better known for agriculture and fracking.
It’s one of four new natural areas the conservation district has been working to open.
“We get hit a lot of times with the lack of resources for people to get out and understand the nature around them,” Dodds said. “So we put an effort out to open these spaces up so people can come and enjoy nature, and then kind of get immersed into it and then become better stewards of the world around them.”
The Hellbender Preserve includes information signs about the history of the railroad here, the Lincoln Bridge, and, of course, about hellbenders. It’s open to the public from dawn to dusk year-round.
