Dineo Dowd loves Patrick Marsh: “It’s like a dream come true to live right next to such a beautiful land. The trails are well maintained and it’s a peaceful land to walk all year around.” Dineo should know; she and her family are Sun Prairie residents and avid explorers of great local places. And she is the Madison representative for Hike It Baby, an organization dedicated to getting families together and out into nature with birth to school-age kids.
We hope it will be welcome news to Dineo and you that on October 31, 2018 we purchased 25 acres on the northwest side of Patrick Marsh on the eastern doorstep of Sun Prairie.
This property was identified as a high priority for acquisition going back to Dane County’s 2003 Patrick Marsh Plan. The land occupies a low hill rising above the wildlife viewing platform and main trail into the wildlife area. Restoration of the property will expand outdoor learning opportunities for students, nesting habitat for waterfowl and grassland birds, and add to the abundance of prairie flowers needed for pollinators like monarch butterflies. It is also a great place to add a scenic overlook and trail tying into the existing trails at the marsh.
Sun Prairie major Paul Esser has been a strong advocate for adding this land to Patrick Marsh. “I am so pleased that the purchase has been finalized. This addition to Patrick Marsh will benefit the people of northeast Dane County for years to come while providing much needed habitat for many members of the wildlife community.”
The City of Sun Prairie will be the long-term owner of the property. Groundswell, Patrick Marsh Conservancy, and our volunteers will partner with the city to plant the land to prairie and add the hiking trail. If you’d like to join our monthly outdoor volunteering activities at Patrick Marsh, please sign-up for our volunteer emails.
We am thankful to the landowner, Tom Hanley, for selling the property to us at discount.
Strong support from the community made this purchase possible. Many thanks to these funders for their financial support: Dane County Conservation Fund, City of Sun Prairie, State of Wisconsin Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program, Town of Bristol, Patrick Marsh Conservancy, Token Creek Watershed Association, Bart and Shirley Klotzbach, Florence Schmitt, Samuel and Lynne Dennis, Jr., and supporters of Groundswell. We are especially grateful for the partnership with Patrick Marsh Conservancy over the years.
This acquisition is a big win for Patrick Marsh. Thanks for your part in making it happen.
Protecting special places forever takes commitment. Thanks to one landowner’s persistence and patience, today 139 acres of scenic upland and wetland habitat were protected forever at French Creek Wildlife Area in Columbia County on September 28, 2018.
For generations, Richard Wilcox’s family has owned and operated their farm adjacent to what we now call French Creek Wildlife Area. In fact, some of the Town of Fort Winnebago’s oldest plat books show the Wilcox family farm, and even the road the farm sits on bears the Wilcox name. Richard decided to sell the farmland to Groundswell to ensure the land his family has enjoyed for generations can be enjoyed by others.
Groundswell will manage the property consistent with the adjacent state land to increase public recreation opportunities at French Creek Wildlife Area.
“Restoring the farmland to native cover will increase bird nesting potential, add habitat complexity to a key stopover area during migration, and decrease nutrient runoff within the watershed.” – Sara Kehrli, DNR Wildlife Biologist.
Funding to purchase the Wilcox Addition to French Creek Wildlife Area was provided by Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program, Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, National Wild Turkey Federation, and supporters of Groundswell.
When it comes to protecting special places, the landowner is the key. We are happy to share with you that one very community-minded landowner just made some great things happen on the west side of Cherokee Marsh.
On July 6, 2018, Peg Whiteside donated to us a perpetual conservation easement over her 90-acre farm, ensuring that the land will remain available for farming even after she no longer owns it. Then she sold to us, at a discount, ten acres of land to allow a group of Hmong farmers to continue to have a place to raise vegetables and flowers. Peg told us that she is “grateful there is a way to protect her farm and also the land that the Hmong farmers have been relying on for the past 20 years.”
Peg’s farm sits on a hill overlooking Cherokee Marsh. It is made up of some of the best soil in the nation. It is also an important link in the landscape between Cherokee Marsh and our Westport Drumlin preserve. According to Tom Wilson, Town of Westport Administrator, “The conservation easement in the Village of Waunakee near the corner of River Road and Bong Road helps the Village and Westport meet our joint goal of maintaining open space between Waunakee and DeForest.” Even more, the conservation easement allows us to create a hiking trail that will link the marsh and the drumlin.
Several Hmong farmers have been long-term tenants on Peg’s farm. Knowing that minority and immigrant farmers sometimes face barriers to long-term land access, Peg turned to us to find a way for the farmers to continue to work the land after she retires from farming. Could we help? Thanks to Peg’s generosity, an anonymous donor, and a grant from the Dane County Conservation Fund (under its innovative Agriculture, Gardening, and Foraging initiative), we are able to do so by purchasing ten acres from Peg. Now we hope to work with the farmers to add a well and sheds to the property.
Your support makes it possible for Groundswell to pursue opportunities like these, where we use our land protection skills to help meet community needs. If you have ideas of other places we can put our land protection tools to use, please let us know. And the next time you meet a conservation-minded farmer or landowner, please thank them!
On June 26, 2018, we protected 95 acres of wetland along the Yahara River on the north side of Cherokee Marsh. This important acquisition connects a 160-acre block of county and state land near Hwy. 19 and the Yahara River with the bulk of the public conservation lands at the marsh.
Our thanks go to the Wisconsin Laborers’ Apprenticeship and Training Fund for selling the land to us. According to Craig Ziegler, Director of the Training Center, “We felt it was important to have the wetland that we owned be left in its natural state. What better way to have that done than to put it into conservation.”
This purchase is the latest in a six decade-long effort to protect the 3,600-acre wetland complex that is Cherokee Marsh. (Thanks to the Friends of Cherokee Marsh for figuring out that the Cherokee Marsh wetlands – extending from the northeast tip of Lake Mendota to just north of DeForest, and including Token Creek — cover that many acres).
In the late 1950s, the Dane County Conservation League, the City of Madison, and the State Conservation Department (now the DNR) developed a plan for state ownership of about 3,000 acres of the marsh, at an estimated cost of $250,000 spread over 20 to 30 years. At that time only 120 acres had been acquired. In 1981 a plan was adopted by DNR, Dane County, the City of Madison, and Towns of Burke, Westport, and Windsor to protect 3,000 acres of the core wetland and up to 3,000 additional acres of adjacent upland. Every year we get closer to that goal, but the price tag has increased, to say the least.
Conservation of great places like Cherokee Marsh doesn’t happen by accident. Since the first acquisition, the DNR, Dane County, City of Madison, Groundswell, Friends of Cherokee Marsh, the Towns of Westport and Burke, the Village of Windsor, and Madison Metropolitan Sewage District have worked to assemble an incredible public conservation landscape on the northern doorstep of Madison. It is an accomplishment we can all be very proud of.
Funding to purchase the Wisconsin Laborer’s property was provided by Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program, North American Wetlands Conservation Act, Dane County Conservation Fund, Friends of Cherokee Marsh, and supporters of Groundswell.
Thanks to everyone who made this success possible. Perseverance pays off.
Good news that today, May 25, 2018, we permanently protected 43 acres of land rising above Lake Wisconsin in the Town of Lodi, Columbia County. Thanks to the generosity and foresights of the landowners, Tim and Terri Escher, our perpetual conservation easement now permanently prevents development of this property.
This latest conservation easement is located between two other conservation easements. Together, all three easements that we hold form a corridor of conserved land that extends across 182 acres of upland woods, prairie remnants, wetlands, and 3,000 feet of mostly undeveloped shoreline on Lake Wisconsin. These lands are not open to the public but they protect beautiful scenery that will be enjoyed forever by boaters on the lake. The easements also help maintain water quality by restricting the disturbance of soil and sediment that might otherwise end up in the lake.
Conservation easements are flexible land protection tools that help landowners and communities meet conservation goals. They provide permanent protection from selected land uses but keep the land in private ownership and on the tax rolls. It is an honor for us to work with these landowners who have saved important land for the benefit of future generations.
On April 4, 2018 Groundswell helped assure the continued protection of nearly 3,000 feet of shoreline on Lake Wisconsin near Okee in Columbia County. In collaboration with Gathering Waters, Wisconsin’s Alliance for Land Trusts, we assumed responsibility for the stewardship of a 92-acre permanent conservation easement that protects a large area of wetlands and forest and includes a single house.
The conservation easement was originally established between the landowners and Gathering Waters in 1999. According to Mike Carlson, Executive Director of Gathering Waters, “Gathering Waters took on the easement to help protect this valuable land at a time when there wasn’t a land trust active in the area. I am glad that we can hand off permanent protection of this property to Groundswell.”
Groundswell will inspect the property every year and work with the current and future landowners to ensure that Lake Wisconsin scenery and wildlife habitat remains undisturbed.
Good news that on Tuesday, February 13, 2018, through the generosity of Orfordville residents, Norman and Carol Aulabaugh, 75 acres of rolling landscape will be transformed into a public natural resource.
Norm and Carol donated the land, to be named Sunny Peace Prairie, to Green-Rock Audubon Society, who will be responsible for managing the restoration efforts. Groundswell Conservancy was granted a permanent conservation easement on the land to ensure that the Aulabaugh’s wishes for it to remain open for the public’s enjoyment be upheld, forever.
The Aulabaugh’s vision for Sunny Peace Prairie is for it to be a nature education resource and place for quiet contemplation. Transforming the land back into a prairie and oak woodland with walking paths will begin this year thanks to a generous endowment that Norm and Carol have established at the Community Foundation of Southern Wisconsin.
When asked to say something about what motivated them to donate their land, Norm offered these words from the book O Pioneers! by Willa Cather:
“The land belongs to the future, Carl; that’s the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother’s children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it–for a little while.”
Our thanks go to Norm and Carol for their wonderful gift to the future and to Groundswell Conservancy supporters that make our work on these projects possible.
2020 Updates: Click here to see a short video documentary about the prairie planting at Sunny Peace Prairie. And here’s a late summer video update on the prairie.
Thanks to the generous donation of land made by Full Circle Farm, LLC, on December 29, 2017 we permanently protected 31 acres of wetland north of Stoughton. This property is adjacent to an 82-acre wetland area owned by the DNR with 2,500 feet of shoreline on the east side of the Yahara River.
Wetlands are increasingly endangered in Wisconsin. According to Katie Beilfuss, Outreach Programs Director at Wisconsin Wetlands Association, “wetlands provide critical natural benefits for our communities, including protection from flooding, improving water quality, and providing critical habitat for wildlife. With 50% of Wisconsin’s wetlands already gone, and efforts underway to roll back state and federal wetland protections, it’s more important than ever to protect wetlands through local and private actions like this one.”
Our thanks to Full Circle Farm, LLC for their generosity and to the continued backing of Groundswell Conservancy supporters – together we make these land conservation successes possible.
Mike and Lynn McLain’s 13-acre conservation easement has protected wetland, savanna, and agricultural land adjacent to Lower Mud Lake on the Yahara River for the past 30 years.
Check out the video below from Channel 3 reporting on the creation of the easement 30 years ago on October 28, 1987. It features our founding board president, Norman Anderson, and Bill O’Connor, our long-time attorney who was pivotal in building the Land Trust movement in WI.
Our thanks go to the McLains for their 30 years of stewardship of their land and Groundswell supporters, who make conservation where you live possible.
Many of you may remember the excitement and sense of accomplishment when a group of people came together in the early 1980s to protect a few acres of woodland on Lake Mendota. The creation of Wally Bauman Woods started a conservation movement that has saved many wonderful local landscapes of farmland, wetlands, woods and prairies, and has provided public places to hike, hunt, fish, and play in and around Dane County.
Our movement is now 34 years old, and our accomplishments have really added up. Since we got started as Dane County Natural Heritage Foundation and later became Natural Heritage Land Trust, we have permanently protected more than 11,000 acres of our beautiful landscape.
Protecting more land and serving more people is more important than ever. As our community grows and becomes more diverse, we continue to need land for good health and vibrant communities. But the competition for land gets stiffer every year. So what do we do?
Our core purpose is unwavering—to protect special places forever—but we are re-dedicating our work to the broader community so that we can protect even more places that are important in all our lives.
Our new name—Groundswell Conservancy—represents everything Natural Heritage Land Trust is and does. The name creates a powerful identity that will help us enlarge our wonderful base of friends, supporters, and partners. With it, we can connect with young families, college students, urban youth, and environmentally conscious consumers with limited outdoor recreation experience—the conservation heroes that we will surely need tomorrow and in the years to come.
We may have a new name, but we have the same purpose as when we started in the 1980’s – to protect special places, forever.
Groundswell Conservancy also helps tell how your impact goes beyond “acres saved” to “lives changed.” We are using our own experience in land protection to give disconnected youth important work experience on our preserves, helping students at Lake View Elementary School learn outside in an enlarged outdoor classroom, and securing land for local food production by immigrant farmers.
Conservation of cherished places—Cherokee Marsh, Black Earth Creek, Westport Drumlin, Patrick Marsh, Town of Dunn farmland— doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because our community comes together to make it happen. We look forward to all we will accomplish together in the coming years.
Video Credits: Videography and music by Michael Bryant; photography by Mario Quintana, Angie Banks and Roberta Herschleb; Patrick Marsh drone video by Jason Sromosvsky.