As State Route 22 passes north and south along the eastern border of New York, it provides a vital transportation corridor between the rural towns of villages of that area, but also gives the traveler a panoramic view of a lovely, hilly topography. Many maps will reference this region's uplands as "Taconic Hills" or "Taconic Mountains". And most references will define "Taconic" as derived from the transcription of the Algonquin expression "Taghkanic" which apparently meant "in the woodlands" or "among the trees". Rather than a result of recent geologic uplift, the appearance of mountains and hills was produced by excavation of the area by Pleistocene glaciers. The exposed rocks of these uplands were formed much further back in time, during what geologists call the "Taconic Orogeny" of half a billion years ago.

Not nearly so old, the settlements of Hebron were established in the late 18th Century and eventually named (like so many other New England and New York communities) using popular biblical place names. Quite renowned for its agricultural enterprise, Hebron faded as US development moved westward. Around 1979, the Village of Granville acquired the parcels along Black Creek for use as an educational nature preserve, initially named "Hebron Nature Preserve" after it's location.

In the decades to follow, the Preserve was developed for nature study as an extension of the programs of Granville's Pember Museum of Natural History. In time, it made sense to represent this relationship by renaming the preserve for "The Pember", and thus connecting the Preserve to Granville's most famous naturalist, Franklin Tanner Pember.

To learn more about Hebron, please consult the excellent summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebron,_New_York
For a brief background on F.T. Pember see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Tanner_Pember