FirstEnergy Green Team Replants Construction-Scarred Lands to Help Scout Camp

Damaged years ago by heavy machinery during construction of the rifle range at the Heritage Boy Scout Camp in Farmington, the large field posed a unique challenge for FirstEnergy’s Pennsylvania Green Team: re-establishing a forest where nothing but non-native Japanese grass had gained a toehold.

“We’re trying to make this a forest again,” said Blake Partlow, a resident ranger at the remote scout camp in Fayette County. “Between the invasive grass and the deer, we’ve seen zero growth here in the past five years.”

A dozen Green Team volunteers recently joined park rangers to plant 275 native trees on a stormy morning – including black oak, red bud, persimmon, northern bayberry, spice bush and arrowwood saplings all donated by FirstEnergy. 

View a video of the Green Team at work on FirstEnergy’s You Tube channel.

Jessica Shaffer, a FirstEnergy scientist who spearheads the Green Team, explained how the spice bush would help recreate critical wildlife habitat in the barren field. “These will thicken out into a nice shrub that will grow six to 10 feet wide and six to 10 feet tall. This is a host plant for swallowtail butterflies with pretty yellow flowers that produces red berries for birds.”

Partlow has harvested and dried spice bush berries for a sweet and peppery steak rub. “It’s pretty neat to harvest something in the wild that you can eat,” he said.

Volunteers also planted numerous black oak trees. Shaffer termed oaks “as the most important of the hardwoods” in the woodlands, primarily because their abundant crop of chunky acorns provides a crucial food source for bears, deer, racoons, chipmunks, squirrels and birds including blue jays, woodpeckers and wild turkey.     

Green Teamers encircled each tiny sapling with a tube of plastic mesh zip-tied to a stake – a labor-intensive, but vital, chore to give the plants a fighting chance against the marauding deer that roam the camp’s 2,000 acres.

 “We are very fortunate to have built this relationship with FirstEnergy,” Partow said. “There are a lot of forgotten corners in this camp that need habitat restoration, but there are only a handful of rangers to do the work.”

Since 2020, FirstEnergy’s employees have volunteered countless hours to plant more than 100,000 trees across the utility’s six-state footprint. The Green Teams have already surpassed 16,500 trees planted so far in 2025 toward a goal of 25,000 for the year. More than 4,000 of those trees have been planted in Pennsylvania.

For Jake Marfin, a Transmission Forestry Specialist based in FirstEnergy’s Washington, Pa. facility, the tree-planting marked a homecoming.

“I went to scout camp here from sixth grade until eleventh grade,” Marfin said. “Getting the opportunity to check out my old stomping grounds is great. I get to relive my past and help improve the camp for future generations of scouts.”    

For more information about FirstEnergy’s environmental and corporate responsibility efforts to build a brighter and more sustainable future, visit www.fecorporateresponsibility.com.