On August 6, 1977, a dozen generous and happy people launched the North Branch Restoration Project. It inspired similar work at hundreds of sites, engaging hundreds of thousands of people, a history that continues to expand today.
That first day, a dozen of us gathered seeds of smooth phlox on unprotected land adjacent to Somme Prairie. August is a strange time of year to start. But it was the first weekend day after we finally got the approval of Forest Preserve staff to do this work - initially cutting small brush and planting locally gathered seeds.
There seem to be no photos of day one. But the two photos below shows us the following Saturday planting those seeds in Miami and Wayside Forest Preserves.
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| We planted those precious, hard to find seeds one at a time. |
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| The seeds did great, but it took five years for them to grow big enough to flower. |
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| We were initially called the North Branch Prairie Project, and the site that inspired us was the little 2-acre Grade A prairie at Somme. But it didn't look like this when we first saw it. |
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| It was full of shrubs and trees, with the quality areas scattered among them. |
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| Bit by bit we cut brush and burned, and the quality area increased. |
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| Another natural area that inspired us was the rich Bunker Hill oak woodland. But it took us a while to learn (and then to convince others) that it too deserved fire, invasives control, and other stewardship. |
In time we wistfully removed "Prairie" from our name and became the North Branch Restoration Project.
Every North Branch site - indeed every stewardship site - deserves a good curating and presentation of its history. These treasures and the work to restore them are important heritage.
How fun that you were gathering smooth phlox seeds that day, and you could do it without previously bonneting them. Impeccable timing.
ReplyDeleteShould we start planning the party for the 50th anniversary? Hell yes!!
Good points. Although there was no "impeccable timing." Those were just the seeds that were ripe the first day we were authorized to do this work - and following a Sierra Club meeting, where all the volunteers were recruited.
DeletePlanning is already underway for the 50th anniversary celebration of the NBRP. Some current planners were involved in the 40th anniversary celebration in 2017. New members are always welcome to join the planning group. So reach out if any if the readers of this post are interested in developing ways to mark this significant anniversary.
DeleteIt's hard to keep any organization going for that long & still be healthy enough to consistently accomplish so much. Truly inspiring. Was anyone else in the Midwest doing similar work in 1977?
ReplyDeleteWe never heard of any. Not only in the midwest but anywhere on the planet. The whole idea of ecological restoration was new, and started on prairies in the Midwest. There had previously been volunteer tenders of public gardens. But that's a very different thing. Dr. Betz had been a volunteer and recruited other people to work on prairie cemeteries. But this may have been the first such effort on public conservation land. Betz was getting started at Fermilab at this time. I also imagined that the Wisconsin Arboretum prairies had volunteers working on them. But I was told that that work had been mostly done by staff and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Probably the Nature Preserves Commission's work included volunteers tending high-quality preserves, but perhaps not restoring damaged areas? There's a lot of history in this that would be worth studying and writing up.
DeleteAldo Leopold instigated Curtis Prairie, at the U of Wisconsin in the 1930s and Ray Schulenberg, one of the Prairie Pioneers (the others were Dr Robert Francis Betz, Floyd Swink, and Dick Young ) started the Schulenberg Prairie at Morton Arboretum in 1963. But the North Branch Restoration Project took it to an entirely different level, with Steve Packard, as he once told me 'planting congregations of stewards' across northeastern Illinois.
ReplyDeleteI once asked Ray how he inspired volunteers in the early years and, if I remember right, he corrected me. He explained that the work initially was very difficult and technical, and that staff people needed to do it, the staff people being Arb staff and grad student interns.
DeletePerhaps what we did that was new was to seek to build a community and a movement that was its own inspiration and leadership. It was great that Forest Preserve leadership at the time let us do that.
I remember one day, early on, Fermilab announced a volunteer day to prep the many kinds of seeds they'd gathered. I attended, to see what I could learn. People just stood around for a while. Dr. Betz had forgotten to come and no one could reach him. No one there knew how to tell the seeds apart or what to do with them. I knew a little and offered what leadership I could. But there seemed not to be other volunteer leaders.