Dr. Edward H. McCleery (1867-1962)
Hamlin Township, McKean County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
A medical doctor by profession, McCleery established a wolf park nearby to breed and care for lobo wolves, a subspecies of gray wolf. Subject to a 1920s elimination program, this wolf was saved from extinction through his efforts. The park served as an education center for scientists and the public. Descendants of this pack survive in Montana and are the only bloodline of an animal that played a major role in western US ecology, history, and lore.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In the early twentieth century, federal eradication campaigns nearly wiped out the lobo, the great gray wolf of the American West, as cattle country treated it as vermin. A Pennsylvania physician, Edward McCleery, gathered surviving wolves and bred them at a park near here, determined to save the strain from extinction. His enclosure became an unlikely refuge and an education center where scientists and curious visitors could see the vanishing animal up close.
Why it matters
McCleery's stubborn preservation kept alive a bloodline of an animal central to the ecology and lore of the American West, long before wildlife conservation was mainstream.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Step back to the early twentieth century, when the American West was still settling its long argument with its own wildlife. Cattle and sheep ranching had spread across vast rangelands, and predators that threatened the herds were treated not as wildlife but as vermin to be destroyed.
No animal drew more of that fury than the lobo, the great gray wolf of the West. Intelligent, far-ranging, and central to the ecology of the plains and mountains, the lobo became the target of organized eradication campaigns in the 1920s. Poison, traps, and bounties were turned against it until the subspecies stood at the very edge of extinction.
This was also the dawn of a different idea. The conservation movement was young and often focused on game animals and grand landscapes, not on saving a hunted predator. To argue that a wolf was worth preserving — that it had a place in the natural order and in the nation's story — put a person well ahead of the mainstream thinking of the day.
People & events
Into that gap stepped an unlikely figure: Edward H. McCleery, a medical doctor, working not in the wide West but in the hills of McKean County, Pennsylvania. Moved by the plight of the vanishing lobo, he set out to do what the eradication programs had made nearly impossible — keep the bloodline alive.
He established a wolf park nearby to breed and care for the animals, gathering survivors of a strain that had been hunted almost to nothing. It was a stubborn, personal mission, carried out far from the ranges where the wolves had roamed, by a man whose profession was healing people rather than saving species.
His park became more than a refuge. It served as an education center where scientists and ordinary, curious visitors alike could see the great wolf up close — an animal most Americans knew only as a shadow in tall tales. In an age bent on erasing the lobo, McCleery built a place devoted to understanding and preserving it.
Its place in the American story
McCleery's quiet persistence kept alive a bloodline of an animal woven deep into the ecology, history, and lore of the American West. Descendants of his pack survive today in Montana, described as the only surviving bloodline of this storied wolf — a living thread back to a creature the nation once tried to wipe out.
His work stands as an early, private act of the conservation ethic that would only later become mainstream. Long before saving predators was widely accepted, he insisted that even a hunted, feared animal deserved a future. That conviction anticipates the way Americans would eventually come to see wolves — not as vermin, but as a vital part of wild country.
There's a lesson here about how preservation often begins: not with a government program, but with one determined person refusing to let something disappear. The survival of a bloodline can hang on exactly that kind of stubbornness, exercised in an unexpected place by an unexpected champion.
If you visit
You've come to a corner of McKean County that once held one of the most improbable refuges in America — a wolf park in the Pennsylvania hills, dedicated to an animal of the far-off West. Stand a moment and let the strangeness of that sink in: the salvation of the lobo running, for a time, through these woods.
Let the marker do what McCleery's park once did — bring the great gray wolf to mind and make it real. Picture the enclosure, the visitors and scientists who came to see a creature vanishing everywhere else, and the doctor who made it his life's second calling.
This is a fine stop for anyone drawn to wildlife and the history of conservation. It sits comfortably on a road trip through Pennsylvania's forested northern tier, and it leaves you with a thought worth carrying down the highway: that a bloodline central to the American West endured, in part, because one man in the East refused to let it end.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Edward H. McCleery
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Ross Leffler School of Conservation
Snyder Township, PA · est. 2014
Deep within State Game Lands 54 once stood the nation's first academy devoted entirely to training game protectors—the officers who would enforce hunting laws and manage wildlife. Established in 1932 and later named for Ross L. Leffler, a longtime Game Commission member and Eisenhower's Assistant Secretary of the Interior, the school marked a turning point in treating conservation as a trained profession rather than casual patrol work. Its graduates helped bring order and science to the stewardship of Pennsylvania's woods and waters.
Philip P. Bliss
Huston Township, PA · est. 1947
Philip P. Bliss was born in a log house near this spot in 1838 and grew up working the family farm and the region's lumber camps until he was sixteen. He went on to become one of the most beloved gospel songwriters and singing evangelists of the nineteenth century, his hymns carried into churches and revival meetings across the country. His life traced the arc from a rough Pennsylvania frontier boyhood to national renown.
George Rosenkrans
Huston Township, PA · est. 1984
George Rosenkrans (1881–1955) spent most of his life in the small community of Penfield, where he served as church organist and became a remarkably prolific composer. Alongside piano works, organ pieces, and hymns, he wrote more than 200 band numbers, including patriotic marches such as "Triumphant Battalions" and "Our Glorious Flag." His music belonged to the golden age of the American community band, when town ensembles were a centerpiece of civic life.
Howard Zahniser
Tionesta Township, PA · est. 2001
Howard Zahniser, who made Tionesta his hometown, was the principal architect of the Wilderness Act of 1964. As executive director of The Wilderness Society and editor of its journal, he drafted and championed the legislation through years of political struggle, writing the law's memorable definition of wilderness as a place 'where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.' He died just months before President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law.