Twenty-five years ago, Gill Moreland would regularly cross-country ski on stretches of what was then farmland near Main Street on Cary’s west side.
As she glided along one day, something caught her eye.
“I noticed these prairie plants peeking out above the snow,” Moreland said. “I went back in the spring, and my eyeballs nearly popped out.”
Moreland, who works for the Chicago-based Nature Conservancy and volunteers for a local prairie-preservation group, recognized the plants as rare remnants of Cary’s original terrain before farmers and developers came along.
The discovery started an initiative to turn the area–which is now Sands Main Street Prairie Park–into a nature education center, as envisioned by owner Carl Sands.
Sands donated much of the 80-acre parcel, with a house, a main barn, and several outbuildings, to the park district through the Nature Conservancy in 1989. Because of the tremendous amount of restoration work needed, with limited funds, the process was steady but slow and primarily completed by volunteers.
Earlier this year, it became apparent that, unless the park district moved more quickly with some of its renovations, there would be no nature-education center.
The main barn’s roof was at serious risk of collapsing, as were the district’s plans to house most of the educational displays for the nature center.
“We didn’t think it would make it through another winter,” said Jim Alwill, chairman of the park district’s barn-renovation committee. To fend off disaster, the district provided $11,000 to pay for the roof repairs, which were completed three weeks ago.
The committee is seeking grants to make additional renovations this spring, such as raising the foundation, bringing some utilities into the building and installing a sprinkler system. It also hopes to begin repairs to the nearby milk house, which may serve as an information kiosk for visitors.
The park’s farmhouse, which was in even worse shape than the barn, already had been renovated. Park District Executive Director Eric Burns did most of the work himself, virtually gutting the inside on his own time.
Park board members then asked Burns to live there, partly out of gratitude and partly to end the frequent vandalism of the house and barn.
“They wanted someone there who could take care of things as they came up and be their eyes and ears on the property,” Burns said, adding that the long-term goal is to have whoever runs the nature center live in the house.
Considerable work also has been done to restore and monitor the park’s prairie plants, which include rare and endangered species of buttercups and prairie thistle.
Each spring, to keep out non-indigenous growth, a portion of the park is burned. This kills off undesired growth but leaves the prairie grasses, with their extraordinarily deep roots. It also provides a home for a rare prairie sparrow that nests at the base of these grasses.
This past summer, Moreland helped lead an effort to transplant to the park a chunk of prairie from the Saddle Oaks housing development that was going to be destroyed. With the developer’s help, she and other volunteers moved the top two feet of an area covered with native flowers. By next spring, they hope, at least some of it will have taken root and begun growing.
“We want to be able to say to the schoolchildren and other people who visit, `This is what Cary looked like well before any of us got here,’ ” Moreland said.
