On a Saturday morning, the small lot next to Christ's Lutheran Church on East Pennsylvania Avenue fills up fast. Dogs on leashes, a stroller or two, someone with a thermos who clearly does this every week. Everybody heads down the same paved stretch along Pennsylvania Avenue, follows Sandy Run creek for a while, and turns around at some point that feels like "far enough." Then they drive home.
What almost none of them do is keep going. Because the trail they just walked is not the preserve. It's the entrance to the preserve.
The Loop Everybody Already Knows
Piszek Preserve is the wooded strip most Oreland residents picture when someone mentions "the trail by the church." The entrance sits at 700 East Pennsylvania Avenue, in a small parking lot next to Christ's Lutheran Church, and the path drops down along the avenue into the woods before running alongside Sandy Run creek. It's a hard-surface trail, which is why it draws strollers as easily as it draws dog walkers, and it's a genuine birding hotspot, the kind of detail that gets repeated by the same three neighbors every spring when the warblers come through.
This is a fine walk. It's also a fraction of what's actually back there.
What's Waiting at the Other End of Springfield Manor
Piszek Preserve covers 36 acres of woodland, wetland, and meadow, but it wasn't always that size, and it wasn't assembled from one direction. Wissahickon Trails started working with what was then the Montgomery County Lands Trust back in 2004 to protect the land along Sandy Run. In 2013, the Piszek family donated 33 acres of woods and meadow to lock the corridor in permanently. Three years later, in 2016, a neighbor named Alan Gnessin added another 3 acres to extend it further. The result is a preserve that straddles two townships, Upper Dublin and Springfield, and sits next to the Emlen House, an 18th-century estate where George Washington's troops wintered.
Here's the part that changes how you should think about this trail: the church lot is only one of two entrances. The second is on Oreland Mill Road, at the entrance to the Springfield Manor development, and it opens onto a much longer stretch of the same preserve, the Extended Willow Trail. That trail runs 2.0 miles out and back, about a 46-minute walk according to AllTrails, and it's rated for hiking, birding, and even horseback riding, with a note that you're unlikely to run into much foot traffic once you're on it.
Compare that to the loop off Pennsylvania Avenue, which most people walk for ten or fifteen minutes before turning back. The Springfield Manor side alone is four times that distance, on the same 36 acres, and most of the people using the church entrance every weekend have never set foot on it.
If you're mapping out a longer walk, the two entrances break down like this:
- Christ's Lutheran Church, 700 E. Pennsylvania Ave. Hard-surface, mostly flat, good for strollers and casual leash walks. This is the version everyone already knows.
- Oreland Mill Road, at Springfield Manor. Quieter, more wooded, and the access point for the full Extended Willow Trail. This is the version almost nobody uses.
The Other Sandy Run, and the Navy's Neighbor
Sandy Run creek gives its name to more than one thing in Oreland, and the overlap trips people up constantly. Sandy Run Country Club, at 200 East Valley Green Road, is a private course built in 1923 by architect J. Franklin Meehan, 72 par, 6,625 yards. It has nothing to do with Sandy Run Park, a public 14-acre spot that most residents treat as a short walking-and-fishing stop rather than a destination hike.
What makes Sandy Run Park genuinely strange is what it shares the ground with. The same 14-acre facility is used by the U.S. Navy for underwater sonar testing, which is not something you'd guess from the parking lot. The public walking path itself is a short one, a 0.4-mile out-and-back that AllTrails clocks at about 8 minutes, easy enough for fishing trips and, based on trail notes, quiet enough that snowshoeing is a listed activity in winter. It's a five-minute stop, not a destination, but it's worth knowing which Sandy Run you mean before you tell a neighbor where you walked.
Where the Walk Actually Ends
Whichever entrance you use, most people end up circling back toward Pennsylvania Avenue for food, and Oreland's strip near the train tracks does the job well. Penn Restaurant, at 208 Pennsylvania Avenue, is a cash-only diner that's been serving breakfast and lunch since well before most of the current trail regulars moved in. The Italian French toast is the dish locals mention first, and the cheesesteak omelette is the kind of menu item that only makes sense in a town this close to Philadelphia. A few doors down, Rosario's Pizza has built a loyal local following with more than 150 reviews averaging 4.6 stars, and Baker's Kitchen, on Bruce Road, is a small bakery neighbors point newcomers toward for something sweet to carry home.
The train station itself is worth a glance on the way. The current Oreland station building on the SEPTA Lansdale/Doylestown Line went up in 1931, replacing a station that had stood there since 1890. If you're parking near the tracks instead of at one of the preserve's own lots, SEPTA's surface lot runs $2 a day, seven days a week, which is a different arrangement than the small dedicated lot by the church, and worth knowing before you feed a meter that doesn't need feeding.
Why the Second Half Stays Empty
None of this is a secret exactly. It's on the Wissahickon Trails map, and anyone who's looked at AllTrails has seen the Extended Willow Trail listed right next to the shorter loop. But Oreland's daily rhythm runs along Bruce Road and the train schedule, not along Sandy Run creek, and habits form around whatever's closest to the parking you already use. The church lot is five minutes from the station. Oreland Mill Road takes an extra few minutes of driving to reach, and that's usually enough to keep people on the familiar half of a preserve that's twice the size they think it is.
The name of the town itself traces back to the same land. In 1686, Thomas Fitzwater found lime deposits nearby and built a kiln to process them, work that caught William Penn's attention by 1693 and led Penn to order a highway built from the Delaware River port to that kiln. That road became Limekiln Pike, still running through the area today, and the lime and ore deposits gave Oreland its name. The creek corridor people walk on weekends now sits on ground that's been worked, named, and quietly protected for more than three centuries, which is a longer memory than most trail apps bother to mention.
If you've only ever parked by the church, the other half of Piszek Preserve is a short drive and a longer walk away, and it's been there the whole time.
For more of the small, specific details that make a town worth living in, Diane Reddington keeps a close eye on Oreland and the surrounding Montgomery County suburbs. Let's Connect.
