The land that is now the park was originally inhabited by the Lenni-Lenape tribe.  In 1681, King Charles II granted the land to William Penn who thereupon conveyed it to various individuals. 

With the coming of the railroad in 1854 and Swarthmore College in 1864, the development of the area speeded up and in 1886, two companies were formed to develop the area of present-day Swarthmore south of the railroad: The Swarthmore Improvement Company and the Swarthmore Construction Company.  The Swarthmore Improvement Company laid out lots in the area now encompassing the park.

Swarthmore Borough was incorporated in 1893, and the next year, 1894, the Borough purchased a 1.5-acre parcel of land (for $1.00) consisting of the part of the present-day park north and east of the two creeks that join together just upstream of Yale Avenue.  Although on maps of the area, that triangle of land is described as a lake, the Borough used the land as a small park and for some years as a dump.[1] After the Borough finished construction of the Chester Road railroad underpass in the 1930s, the building that served as the contractor’s headquarters was moved to this park at approximately the place where there is a large stone chimney today.  There, the building served as the headquarters for the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and the Sea Explorers.  For this reason, that area became known as “the Scout Lot.”

At one point in the 1940s, the estate was divided into two parts for the two families of Wagner’s daughters, Pearl Bastian and Emily Rumble.  The southern part near Yale was owned by the Rumble family and the northern part closer to Cresson Avenue was owned by the Titus family. A line of forsythia dividing the two parts can be seen in the park today.  Along with the houses and forsythia, other evidence of this family estate are the three large stone fire pits the families built for their three houses are now part of the park.

Betsy Morse McCoubrey, who grew up in town and raised her children there until 1970, recalls that throughout the early 1960s, her children played in Little Crum Creek by Dickinson Avenue and beyond. In the creek, they would find crayfish, which they could catch and cook. They would make dams in the creek and swim in the pools they created.  Children would also dig into the side of the creek to find buried treasure, including old bottles, evidence of the fact that the Scout Lot had been used as a dump. Others remember using the Scout House on the property and that the Sea Explorers stored boats there.

Any kind of open land can invite uses beyond a farm. One use the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania considered for the park was a highway. Bill Titus recalls one of the great fears of his childhood was that a highway would be built right through his home. These fears were not unfounded. Included among Titus’s papers are multiple copies of a 1934 plot plan of the farm. A wide right-of-way designated on the map as “Approximate location of proposed By-Pass Road around Swarthmore” shows a proposed road entering the Borough at the intersection of present-day Cresson Lane (then designated on paper as Lakeside Avenue) and Swarthmore Avenue and proceeding in a southern direction, crossing Yale halfway between Swarthmore Avenue and Little Crum Creek.

This highway was part of the so-called Red(Yellow) Route, one of three alternatives for a highway to connect the Pennsylvania Turnpike with I-95. The other two alternatives were the Blue Route and the Green Route.  The Red(Yellow) Route, the most easterly alignment, cut through the western edge of Springfield Township and across the southeastern corner of Swarthmore.  As it turned out, the route that would go through more urbanized areas would have incurred prohibitively high right-of-way and construction costs and thus was rejected.

The second alternative, the Blue Route, went along the Darby Creek and Crum Creek valleys and was deemed by the state to provide the most traffic relief and least community disruption, and thus was the one that was eventually built. (The third alternative, the Green Route, went west of Media. It had the lowest right-of-way and construction costs of the three alternatives, but its alignment was found to provide the least service and traffic relief and so was rejected.)

In 1968, the Rumbles, the children and grandchildren of Anton Wagner, who owned the original farmhouse at 218 Swarthmore Avenue, began to discuss subdividing their share of the property with a developer. They discussed this with their first cousins, the Titus family, also heirs to Anton Wagner, who lived in 200 S. Swarthmore Avenue. That family thereupon considered dividing their property up for development. Among various correspondence between the family and the Borough, in a letter dated September 25, 1968, Mrs. Titus asks Borough Council if it would allow a right-of-way across the Scout Lot from Columbia Avenue so that she could develop two lots she owned close to Little Crum Creek.

Once the property was acquired, the next task was to transform it into a park.  Ed Dunning was the contractor who performed the work to do this.  He was new in the business and Little Crum Creek was his first commission. His primary concern in his design of the park was finding a way to connect/unify the two sides of Little Crum Creek Park (Yale Avenue and the Cresson Lane side.) It was a challenging task, but his work included a paved walkway, a gazebo, two bridges, plantings on both sides of the bridges, an amphitheater, a sitting area on Yale, and elements for bicycles. There were also sitting areas on the two bridges. Over time the sitting areas on the bridges were eliminated, as were the bike elements, and the sitting area on Yale were moved to the present location at the corner of Yale and Swarthmore.

Charles Cresson, whose family had owned the land north of Cresson Lane, hence the name, had moved to his present house on Amherst with his parents in 1960 when he was five.  When Charles was in 9th grade, soon after the Borough had acquired the park, he approached the Borough Manager to offer his services as the gardener.  He was hired immediately and continued as the park gardener until his graduation from Swarthmore High School in 1973. During that time, he said with great pride, that he was able to eliminate the large stand of poison ivy.