Wilderness Park is a mostly-public conservancy located in southwest Lincoln, Nebraska. The park is the largest in Lincoln and is separated into several branches. S 14th St, a north-south street dissects much of the south end of the park.
Description
Wilderness Park is heavily wooded, but also includes some prairieland. Because of the nature of the unrestricted flow of the Salt Creek in this area, the lay of the park changes over time. Flooding and erosion as well as seasonal fluctuation in the flow of the streams in the area mean that land that is perfectly dry in midsummer or midwinter becomes completely inundated and impassible in Spring or Fall.
Boundaries are S 1st St on the west, S 27th St on the east, Van Dorn St on the north and Saltillo Rd on the south - however, not nearly all of the land between these boundaries resides in the park. The park is much wider in the southern segments. Among smaller streams, Beal Slough, a primary tributary to Salt Creek, passes through Wilderness Park.
Wildlife in the area includes foxes, deer, raccoons, opossums, frogs, hawks, owls, songbirds, and squirrels, as well as small fish and aquatic invertebrates. It is possible that the area may support larger carnivores such as coyotes, but evidence of this remains to be seen.
Wilderness Park features a vast network of dirt walking trails, single-track biking trails, and horse trails. Each trail type is denoted by signs along the trails. The hiking trail was designated part of the National Recreation Trails Program in 1977.
The crushed limestone 6.5-mile Jamaica North Trail is mostly located within the park. South of Saltillo Rd, Jamaica North connects to the Homestead Trail corridor, which as of July 2012 reaches to Beatrice, Nebraska, and will ultimately extend to Marysville, Kansas.
History
Lincoln Park
In 1866, the southern portion of the land that would become Wilderness Park supported a corn mill situated on the Salt Creek. Shortly thereafter, a settler named Phillip Cooper dammed the Salt Creek to create a pond for the purpose of making ice in the winter. In 1873, Cooper dug a cave in the area to store the ice during the summer. Cooper sold the land to Lincoln attorney and mayor A.J. Sawyer in 1887. Sawyer rebuilt the dam in concrete in 1900 and opened the area as Lincoln Park.
Some time after this, the land was purchased by the Burlington Railroad to operate Lincoln Park and more importantly to use Salt Creek as a water source for their steam engines. The railroad pumped roughly one million gallons of water from the Salt Creek through a twelve inch pipe to their roundhouse located southwest of Lincoln.
The first Boy Scouts of America troop formed in Nebraska in 1910, quickly becoming immensely popular, and began meeting in Lincoln Park in 1912. In 1916, the park was purchased by Lincoln Traction Co. who used the power generated by the damming of Salt Creek to light the park with arc and incandescent lighting, earning it the nickname Electric Park.
The park was closed in 1935 and leased to the Boy Scouts Cornhusker Council. The Cornhusker Council continued using the park as a campsite, eventually buying the land and renaming it Camp Minis-Kuya. Camp Minis-Kuya later closed.
Epworth Park
Concurrently in the late 1890s, a Methodist organization called the Epworth Association sought to bring the "camp meeting" style of retreat popularized at Chautauqua, New York, to Nebraska. The Epworth Association held its first retreat in Lincoln Park but subsequently purchased its own 40-acre lot of land directly south of Lincoln Park to develop.
In 1903, the Epworth Association opened Epworth Park selling 1,500 tickets a day in its first week and audiences grew to 5,000. In its first season, Epworth Park made $10,000 of which it donated "$800 - to worn out preachers and $1,000 to Nebraska Wesleyan [a Methodist college near Lincoln]."
By 1915, Epworth Park featured an open-air pavilion which could seat 5,000, a boy scout cabin, and two foot bridges which connected to the man-made island called "Oxford Isle" in the center of the man-made Epworth Lake. Fed by water from the Salt Creek, Epworth Lake allowed park-goers to swim and canoe. Epworth Lake was also the site of the park's "Venetian Nights" in which families could rent ornately-decorated rafts and rowboats to leisurely ride around the lake.