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It's all about Clean Water.  Post your pictures of our events, water conservation, floods, pollution.  Share your memories about the Swatara....  Our projects and areas of interest include the Bordner Cabin, Eagle Scout Projects, PA Conservation Corps, Swatara State Park, Swatara River, Swatara Sojourn, Swatara Water Trail, Tenaska, Swatara Watershed Park, and Water Companies. 

Armar Bordner Cabin

1939-2009

Limited Offer:  Order a commemorative t-shirt of the Armar Bordner cabin today with the above picture and text.  Send requested quantity, size(s), and  check to SWA at 2302 Guilford St., Lebanon PA  17046.  Please be as generous as you can.  "Profits" will go toward restoration projects.

The Bordner Cabin is a "point of interest" on the proposed Heritage Trail in Swatara State Park and a point of interest on the Swatara Water Trail; a place for artists to paint nature; a picnic spot; or a platform for people to sit and gaze at the falls. 

June 12, 2006, SCWA signed and returned a lease to DCNR, which was returned fully executed in August 2006.  We're ready to begin repairs.  Please consider a donation to help purchase supplies and/or volunteer to help with repairs or adopt the cabin for a month.

Who:  Volunteers wanted to help with projects and maintenance at the Bordner Cabin.  Please fill in and forward the Adopt-A-Cabin form.  Also let us know what project(s) you would like to undertake.

Stewards for all months!  J

Adopt-A-Cabin to monitor and spruce up for a month (sweep, pick up litter, pull weeds, deter vandals and graffiti with your presence, and answer questions posed by visitors) Take along a broom, dust pan, hammer and nails:

Many of the cabin users are there Saturday 10-6 and Sunday 12-6 with the heaviest usage 12-4.  Adopt-a-cabin volunteers are encouraged to visit during those hours to garner support and stewardship for the cabin.   

Where: Bordner Cabin—Take Route 72 north from the City of Lebanon.  Continue north through the Lickdale intersection past Swift Trucking.  At the intersection before Bonnie Brook Restaurant, turn right onto Monroe Valley Road (towards the golf course), then left onto Old State Road to Swatara State Park, under the Route 81 bridges to the Appalachian Trail bridge ( a total of 2.7 miles).  Look at your odometer.  Go another 2.7 miles north of the Appalachian Trail Bridge.  The cabin lane is on your right.  Please park along the road and walk up the lane.  Watch the pot holes on the last tenth of a mile.

Architecture   Partners & Projects    Progress   History  Adopt-A-Cabin    Donations    Your Story    Roofing Instructions  Rules

Original Blue Prints

Architecture

The Bordner Cabin is created in the Rustic style of architecture, which is defined by the National Park Service as structures built between 1916 - 1942 such as a log cabin that is so highly stylized in its attempt to be non-intrusive that it attracts the immediate attention of those who are accustomed to the simplicity and frequent sterility of contemporary architecture. It may be built of over-sized, rough-hewn logs and stones with its obviously intensive use of hand labor and its clear rejection of the regularity and symmetry of the industrial world, marking it as the work of another age, the product of an attitude far removed from our own.  Perhaps for the first time in the history of American architecture, a building became an accessory to nature... Early pioneer and regional building techniques were revived because it was thought that a structure employing native materials blended best with the environment... 

A survey of significant rustic structures is needed. Often rustic structures are too young (less than fifty years) to receive proper attention under the current criteria of the National Register of Historic Places. Each year a few disappear and a good many more are hopelessly altered by renovation or remodeling done without sensitivity to the original design. In this regard the authors can only concur with Ms. Wilson: "The rustic timber and stone buildings found in our national parks...represent an important irreplaceable architectural resource which should be used and conserved. "³

Footnotes
1. National Park Service, Park Structures and Facilities (Washington, D.C>: Government Printing Office, 1935), 3.
2. Merrill Ann Wilson, "Rustic Architecture: The National Park Style," Trends, (July August September, 1976), 4-5.
3. Ibid., 7.