White Clay Creek State Park set to build new $9M nature center preserving history and expanding educational resources

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Nestled within the serene expanse of White Clay Creek State Park stands the Chambers House. While the farmhouse built in the early 1800s holds historical significance, it has struggled to accommodate the needs of a growing and diverse community.

Originally constructed as a family residence, its conversion into the Chambers House Nature Center has highlighted the building’s limitations. But a $9 million initiative to build a new nature center could hold the solution to modernizing.

White Clay Creek State Park is rich with history. Its expansion began in the late 1960s when the state started acquiring lands to address overdevelopment concerns in northern Delaware. What was once a small recreational area became Walter S. Carpenter State Park in 1975, and 20 years later, it was renamed White Clay Creek State Park. With contributions from the du Pont family and others, the park now spans over 3,600 acres with about 37 miles of trails.

Advocates and volunteers from Friends of White Clay Creek State Park have been pivotal in addressing the park’s growing needs and championing the creation of a new nature center. David Koppeser, president of the group, described efforts to secure support and funding for the project.

“The Friends have been involved in the committees that look at what the needs are,”  Koppeser said. “We’ve been involved in discussing with our legislators what is going to be adequate funding for this kind of project, because we’re always in competition for funding and we just want to make sure that this park gets a nature center that’s going to meet the needs of the community in the future.”

Today, White Clay Creek State Park serves as a vital protected area and recreational hub in northern Delaware. It offers a range of amenities, including trails, fishing docks, a disc golf course and a pavilion. Its educational programs cater to school groups, scouts and summer camps.

However, the current nature center’s limitations have made it increasingly difficult to support the park’s expanding role.

“The current nature center is in a farmhouse built around 1810 to serve the needs of the family. As such, of course, it is a house and not an area that is conducive to having the number of students that want to come for the programs that are there,” Koppeser explained. “It is a great historic structure and has those merits, but as far as allowing proper programming for our schools and to help with the summer camp programs, it really was not adequate. It didn’t have the sufficient indoor space to meet the needs if the weather turned bad.”

These shortcomings — combined with increasing visitation and programming demands — have sparked a $9 million initiative to design and construct a new, state-of-the-art nature center.

The new nature center is a central feature of the White Clay Creek master plan, and according to Brooks Cahall, environmental program administrator with Delaware State Parks, it involved significant public input to identify the park’s most pressing needs.

“We’ll have an exhibit space, which will be new, you know, tell kind of the story of White Clay Creek State Park,” Cahall said. “We will also have two classrooms. Those classrooms will be able to open up into one larger space if you wanted to, we’ll have some outdoor classroom components to that, as well. There’s a small area for nature center staff, and then there will be some outside restrooms for not only, you know, visitors to the nature center, but also [for] trail users.”

The project’s design also prioritizes environmental sustainability.

“We had to stay away from [the floodplain], eliminate any wetland impact,” Cahall said. “We have some rare plants in the area as well that we’ve also made note of and worked around and buffered so that we’re, you know, minimizing our impacts all around.”

The Chambers House will transition into a historical exhibit, offering visitors a glimpse into 19th-century life, while the new nature center will serve as a hub for education and recreation. Officials plan to break ground in late 2025, with an anticipated opening in spring 2027.