Creveling Lakes

🏛️The era

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the wooded ridges and cold streams of northeastern Pennsylvania looked deceptively wild. In truth, the state's woods and waters were under strain. Generations of logging had stripped hillsides, and decades of unregulated hunting and fishing — market gunning, netting, and taking game in any season — had thinned wildlife that once seemed endless.

This was the Progressive Era, a time when Americans began to believe that problems on this scale could be solved with expertise, organization, and law. Conservation was one of its signature causes. Pennsylvania was an early mover: it created a state fish commission and, in the 1890s, a game commission, and it began writing the seasons, limits, and licensing rules that would let depleted populations recover.

Forkston Township sits in exactly the kind of country these reforms were meant to protect — the Endless Mountains region of Wyoming County, a landscape of hemlock hollows, trout water, and second-growth forest slowly healing from the timber era. A pair of lakes tucked into these hills was a fitting place to honor a man remembered for that work.

👥People & events

The marker here honors J. Q. Reveling, remembered on it as the "Dean of Pennsylvania Sportsmen" and the "Father of Game and Fish Codes." Those two titles tell you how his own era saw him: not as a trophy hunter, but as an elder statesman of the outdoors and a hand in shaping the rules that govern hunting and fishing in the state.

Behind titles like these usually stands a particular kind of Progressive-Era figure — the sportsman-reformer. These were hunters and anglers who loved the field enough to want it regulated, and who pressed lawmakers to trade short-term freedom for long-term abundance. Their fingerprints are on the codes that define open seasons, bag limits, and licenses.

The historical record for a local figure like this is thin, and it's worth being honest about that. What endures is the tribute itself: a community that chose to attach his name and his life's cause to a lasting feature of the land. Naming lakes for someone is a deliberate act of memory — a decision that this person, and what he stood for, deserved to be pointed to for generations.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The story told on this small marker is really the story of how America learned to manage its wild places. Across the country in these decades, the same reckoning was unfolding: wildlife that had seemed limitless was vanishing, and a broad conservation movement rose to answer it — from national parks and forests down to state game laws.

What makes the American approach distinctive is who drove it. Much of the push came from sportsmen themselves, people who hunted and fished and concluded that the woods and waters were a public trust, not a private free-for-all. That idea — that wildlife belongs to everyone and must be conserved for future generations — became the backbone of American wildlife management and still shapes it today.

Honoring a man as the "Father" of a state's game and fish codes captures that shift in a single phrase. It marks the moment when protecting fish and game stopped being a matter of personal restraint and became a matter of law, funded and enforced on behalf of the whole public.

🧭If you visit

Come for the quiet. Creveling Lakes sit in the folded hills of Forkston Township, deep in the Endless Mountains country of Wyoming County, where the appeal is less a single monument than the setting itself — still water, wooded shoreline, and the kind of stillness the conservation movement was created to preserve.

As you look out over the lakes, let the dedication reframe what you're seeing. This is working conservation land in the broadest sense: the trout in the water and the game in the surrounding woods are here, in part, because of the seasons and limits that reformers like the man honored here helped put into law. The calm view is not an accident of nature but the result of a century of deliberate stewardship.

This is a rewarding stop to fold into a slow drive through northeastern Pennsylvania's mountains, best paired with the region's state forests, trout streams, and small towns. Bring a map and a full tank — these are back roads — and treat it as a chance to stand somewhere that marks a big national idea in a very local, very peaceful way.

A note for the curious: you may see the name rendered in more than one way in local sources, so don't be surprised by small spelling differences between the lakes and the man they remember.