This article was originally published by the Chesapeake Bay Journal, an award-winning nonprofit news organization that has been covering environmental issues in the Bay region for more than 30 years.
In Lancaster County Central Park, just steps from a parking lot, a muddy tree-lined path bears the footprints of visitors lugging canoes and kayaks across a brief stretch to the Conestoga River. Known as Reigart’s Landing, the site is one of more than a dozen well-trodden access points along a river that has received decades of ardent attention from recreationists and conservationists alike.
This year, the Conestoga was named the Pennsylvania River of the Year by the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) and the Pennsylvania Organization for Watersheds and Rivers (POWR). “This once-polluted river is an example of what can happen when we prioritize clean, healthy waterways,” DCNR Secretary Cindy Adams Dunn wrote in a January 2026 press release. “Its transformation has made the Conestoga a hub for outdoor recreation, providing a boost to the region and demonstrating that rivers build thriving communities.”
The Conestoga flows for more than 61 miles, beginning at a convergence of streams in westernmost Berks County, at the very edge of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, then meandering across Lancaster County to the Susquehanna River. “What’s beautiful about the river is that it flows through urban, suburban and rural areas,” said Malinda Harnish Clatterbuck, executive director of the Conestoga River Club, a nonprofit dedicated to restoration, education and increased access. And yet, Harnish Clatterbuck noted, the many landscapes the river touches present conservation challenges.
Stormwater running over urban and suburban landscapes picks up trash and pollutants that flow into the Conestoga. The city of Lancaster has a combined sewer system, so sewage from homes and rainwater from storm drains meet in the same pipes on their way to the wastewater treatment plant. About 55 to 65 times each year, heavy rain overwhelms the treatment plant, and untreated water has to be diverted directly into the Conestoga. There are still significant stretches of the river that are impaired and not safe for human contact, especially after heavy rain, said Tom Gilbert, president of the Pennsylvania Environmental Council (PEC).
In more rural areas, the river receives excess sediment and nutrients from the area’s abundant farmland. Lancaster County occupies about 4% of Pennsylvania’s portion of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, yet it accounts for roughly 25% of the sediment and nutrient pollution that the state sends to the Bay, said Brian Gish, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s senior watershed planner for Pennsylvania. “In the context of the Conestoga, we’ve had three centuries of farming practices that weren’t in harmony with the water,” he said.
But the Conestoga also has a deep history of conservationists championing its cause, including renowned freshwater ecologist Ruth Patrick, who in the 1940s demonstrated that water quality along the river could be gauged by the diversity of the organisms it holds.
The Conestoga winning the 2026 River of the Year is a testament to the “energy and engagement” around this waterway, said Gilbert of PEC, which helps facilitate the award by supplying staff and organizational support to POWR.
The goal of the River of the Year program is to increase public awareness about the value of the state’s rivers and to encourage greater care of them. Each year, local organizations nominate the waterways they steward. POWR selects finalists based, in part, on the organization’s capacity to host outreach events. The winner is selected by public voting online.
This year, the Conestoga River Club nominated the river and received a $15,000 DCNR grant that supported an array of events throughout 2026, including trash removal, kayaking outings, and painting along the river’s banks.
Even prior to this year, the Conestoga River Club has led outings to encourage locals to connect with and care for the water. And since the club’s founding in 2020, its volunteers have pulled approximately 47 tons of trash from the river.
Many other federal, state and local groups are rallying to restore the watershed too. “We’re very lucky in Lancaster because there’s a lot of people working with farmers and landowners on this kind of work,” said Ashley Spotts, the Bay Foundation’s Lancaster Restoration Biologist.
Over the past two decades, Spotts and her team have worked with landowners to plant more than 175 acres of forested buffers along the Conestoga and its tributaries. Trees and shrubs help secure streambanks and filter pollutants running off from farms and roadways. Their leaves create shade, which cools the water, providing more suitable habitat for heat-sensitive fish.
Gish helps farmers develop strategies that prevent pollutants from running into the Bay. He emphasizes three especially effective tactics: vegetated streamside buffers, cover crops and no-till farming. Farmers and conservationists really want the same things, Gish said. “No farmer wants to send valuable topsoil down to the Bay. No farmer wants to spend resources on nutrients they apply to their fields, only to have those go down to the Bay.”
The Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association, meanwhile, helps keep industrial pollutants out of the Conestoga by holding facilities accountable for environmental violations. In September, for example, the riverkeeper issued a Notice of Intent to File Citizen Suit against a PVC pipe manufacturer that regularly released effluent above permitted temperature and pollutant concentrations into an unnamed tributary of Mill Creek within the heart of the river’s watershed.
All of these efforts and more are slowly paying off. “There is a change that you can see,” Spotts said. The streamside buffers she planted years ago now host more diverse wildlife. A couple of farmers have reported river otter sightings, indicators of water health. In northwestern Lancaster County, cover crops and no-till or reduced-till planting are now the norm, Gish said.
Data from the Susquehanna River Basin Commission’s monitoring station located 2.6 miles upriver from the Susquehanna show that some pollutants, including nutrients and sediment, have all declined since the 1980s.
“Water quality has been consistently improving,” Gilbert of PEC said. “That’s not only important locally for the communities surrounding the Conestoga, but it’s also important in terms of making progress towards the larger and very important water quality goals [for the] Chesapeake Bay.”
Accessing these cleaner waters will soon be easier. By 2028, the Conestoga River Club will replace the muddy path at Reigart’s Landing with a universally accessible boat launch site, a sort of floating dock. Over the next decade, they aim to install 13 more launch sites along the 32 miles of the Conestoga that are part of the state’s system of water trails.
The club’s goal is to get more people connected to the river, Harnish Clatterbuck said, “so they come to love it, and they’ll want to help in any way they can to keep it clean.”