Hiking Trails and Nature Preserves Around Fort Wayne

Hike Trails · the foot trails and the preserves you walk

Fort Wayne's paved trail network — the Rivergreenway, the Pufferbelly, the towpath and the pathways — is a bicycle record as much as a walking one, and it is told in the Bike Trails chapter. This chapter is the other walking: the dirt and grass paths through the preserves, the nature trails of the parks, and the organizations that hold the ground under them. Three kinds of holder do the holding. A land trust founded in Fort Wayne in 1960, ACRES, keeps the county's string of nature preserves. A second, smaller trust, the Little River Wetlands Project, rebuilt a drained marsh into the largest nature preserve in Allen County. And the city and county park departments keep nature trails of their own, from an oak-hickory forest inside the city limits to a county park built around a glacial sand dune. Where a preserve stands outside the city — in a township, under the county — the entry says so in its first lines: these are county grounds, included because they are the walking record Fort Wayne actually uses, the same footing on which the Epidemics chapter carried the county's tuberculosis sanatorium. Acreages and trail miles are the holders' own figures, dated as the holders state them; where the figures move, the series stands rather than a single reconciled number.

Walking before there were trails · the field-trip culture

THE ORGANIZED WALK · 1899 TO THE PARK ERA

Fort Wayne was walking its woods in organized parties a generation before it had a nature preserve. The vehicle was a bird club. On April 12, 1899, at a 3:00 p.m. meeting in Room 8 of the City Hall — the building that now houses the History Center — local naturalists organized the Allen County Audubon Society, a year after the Indiana Audubon Society itself was founded. Fanny Wright Taylor, who had been elected a vice president of the state society at its formation meeting in Indianapolis on April 26, 1898, spearheaded the local chapter and served as its first secretary and treasurer; Alexander Johnson was its first president. The chapter is the oldest continuously active Audubon chapter in Indiana. Its work was field work: excursions, lectures, school programs on birds, and in time the Christmas Bird Count — the first Fort Wayne count was made in 1910, and Charles Stockbridge, the Fort Wayne ornithologist who served as the chapter's president, is believed to have been one of its two observers. After Stockbridge's death on March 4, 1934, the chapter took his name, and it carried the Stockbridge Audubon Society name until 2024, when it became Three Rivers Birding. Its field trips and its Christmas counts — the Southwest Allen County count among them — still walk the same preserves this chapter records.

The city's other walking was promenade walking, and it belongs to the Parks and Plans record: the boulevards and river drives of the Kessler plan were built for the carriage and the stroll, and the park chronology there carries that story. What matters here is the line of descent. The organized outdoor culture of the Audubon chapter and its sister societies — Ethyle Bloch, one of ACRES' twelve founders, was the first woman president of the Indiana Izaak Walton League — is the culture that, in 1960, founded a land trust. The preserves begin where the field trips end up: with people who already knew the ground on foot.

Sources:

1. Indiana Audubon, Terri Gorney Lehman, "Stockbridge Audubon Society's Beginnings" and "Charles Stockbridge and the Stockbridge Collection" (2025) — the April 12, 1899 organization in Room 8 of City Hall, the first officers, the 1934 renaming, the 2024 change to Three Rivers Birding, the 1910 first Fort Wayne Christmas Count.
2. Three Rivers Birding, "About Charles Stockbridge" — Stockbridge's presidency and talks, the 1910 count.
3. ACRES Land Trust / Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI) — Ethyle Bloch's Izaak Walton League presidency and ACRES founding role.

ACRES Land Trust · twelve people, five dollars each

THE REGION'S PRESERVE-HOLDER · FOUNDED MARCH 2, 1960

ACRES began in Fort Wayne because Fort Wayne was building. In the late 1950s, Tom and Jane Dustin watched development take the natural areas around the growing city and concluded that some of the ground had to be held permanently. On March 2, 1960, the Dustins and ten others formed the Allen County Reserves, each contributing five dollars as a founding member. The name lasted a year. The trust's first preserve, acquired in 1961, was the Edna W. Spurgeon Woodland Reserve — donated by its namesake, and in Noble County, not Allen. A trust named for one county was already holding land in another, and the founders kept the initials instead: ACRES, for Allen County REServes, a name the organization still spells out when asked why it is capitalized.

The trust's method is ownership. ACRES protects land primarily — its executive director Jason Kissel put the figure at 99 percent — by owning it outright rather than by easement, and it promises never to sell, trade or transfer the land it protects. Its people were also builders of the state's machinery: ACRES founders, the Fort Wayne attorney James Barrett III among them, were instrumental in the creation of the Indiana Nature Preserve Act of 1967, the statute under which the state dedicates and protects nature preserves — several of them in this chapter. The trust's office sits inside one of its own preserves, the Dustin Nature Preserve at 1802 Chapman Road in Huntertown, in the Cedar Creek corridor north of the city.

The growth, as ACRES itself states it at each date, is a series and is printed as one. In the fall of 2008 the trust's Quarterly reported 68 nature preserves totaling over 4,450 acres. In 2022 ACRES put its protected land at 7,300 acres. In 2023, Input Fort Wayne's profile reported over 150 properties and more than 7,500 acres in permanent protection, with over 30 of the properties carrying public trails. In March 2026, marking its sixty-sixth anniversary, ACRES put the figure at over 8,700 acres of woods, prairies, wetlands and family farms across northeast Indiana, southern Michigan and northwest Ohio. ACRES is Indiana's oldest and largest locally based land trust. Its service area runs to more than twenty-five counties in the three states, but its heart — and the whole of this chapter's concern — is the string of preserves in and around the city where it was founded.

Sources:

1. Input Fort Wayne, "ACRES Land Trust, the nonprofit preserving land indefinitely throughout the region" (2023) — the Dustins and the founding, the 1961 Spurgeon reserve and the naming, the 7,500-acre and 150-property figures, the founders' role in the 1967 Nature Preserve Act.
2. ACGSI, "ACRES Land Trust on Allen INGenWeb" — the March 2, 1960 founding date, the Huntertown office, the founders' five dollars.
3. NUVO, interview with executive director Jason Kissel (2021) — oldest and largest locally based land trust in Indiana, protection by ownership at 99 percent.
4. ACRES Quarterly, Fall 2008 — 68 preserves, over 4,450 acres. ACRES Land Trust (2022; March 2026) — 7,300 acres; over 8,700 acres at the sixty-sixth anniversary.

ACRES in Allen County · the Cedar Creek corridor and the county string

COUNTY SCOPE · THE TRUST'S PRESERVES IN AND AROUND THE CITY

Nine ACRES preserve groups stand in Allen County on the trust's own published list, and between them they cover the county's walking map. The oldest is Fox Fire Woods near Leo, protected in 1974. Fogwell Forest, protected in 1976, stands near Fort Wayne International Airport on the city's southwest side. The largest of the trust's Allen County preserves, on Visit Fort Wayne's account of the ACRES list, is the McNabb-Walter Nature Preserve, acquired in 1982 at 195 acres. In the city itself, the Mengerson Nature Reserve (1989) holds ground on Stellhorn Road in northeast Fort Wayne, and Vandolah Nature Preserve (1989) stands near Leo. Blue Cast Springs, near Woodburn, followed in 2012, and Spring Lake Woods and Bog, on Lake Everett Drive in the county's northwest, in 2014. Most of these are quiet preserves with a parking area and a marked trail; they are working ground for the county's remaining forest and wetland, not developed parks, and ACRES keeps many of its holdings closed to the public entirely — of its hundred-plus properties, only a portion carry public trails.

The showcase is the Cedar Creek corridor. Cedar Creek, which crosses the county's north from DeKalb County to the St. Joseph River, is one of Indiana's designated natural, scenic and recreational rivers, and ACRES calls its corridor the largest forested corridor remaining in Allen County. The trust states that it protects over 1,200 acres in the corridor; with its partners' holdings, the corridor's permanently protected habitat approached 2,000 acres in the trust's Fall 2024 accounting. The walking heart of it is the linked group at the trust's Huntertown headquarters: the Tom and Jane Dustin Nature Preserve (1990, 71.8 acres on the parks listings), joined by the Robert C. and Rosella C. Johnson (2004) and Whitehurst (2005, 2006) preserves, with a trail of about a mile and a half running through all three along the creek.

Uphill from the creek stands Bicentennial Woods. The preserve, at 340 East Shoaff Road in Perry Township, covers 80 acres of glacial hill country — ground carved by meltwater more than ten thousand years ago — under oaks, hickories and sycamores, some of them more than two hundred years old, the oldest vegetation among the county's ACRES preserves. The sources divide on its year by one: ACRES' own county list dates the preserve 1993, and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources' preserve file says the woods were acquired to honor Fort Wayne's bicentennial in 1994. Both stand; the preserve was plainly a bicentennial act either way. It is a dedicated state nature preserve, and its trail system — the state file describes a well-marked two-mile system, rated difficult in the trust's own trail listings — climbs the hills that the rest of flat Allen County does not have.

Sources:

1. ACGSI, "ACRES Land Trust Allen County Preserves" (the trust's list) — the nine county preserve groups and their years: Fox Fire Woods 1974, Fogwell Forest 1976, McNabb-Walter 1982, Mengerson 1989, Vandolah 1989, Dustin/Johnson/Whitehurst 1990–2006, Bicentennial Woods 1993, Blue Cast Springs 2012, Spring Lake Woods and Bog 2014.
2. Visit Fort Wayne, "ACRES Land Trust: Enjoy Nature in Pure Form" and "Best Places to Hike in Fort Wayne" — McNabb-Walter as the largest county ACRES preserve at 195 acres; Bicentennial Woods at 80 acres, purchased 1994, trees over 200 years old; the three-preserve Cedar Creek trail at 1.5 miles.
3. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Nature Preserves, Bicentennial Woods Nature Preserve file — 80 acres, acquired to honor Fort Wayne's bicentennial in 1994, the two-mile trail system, Willow Creek.
4. ACRES Land Trust, Cedar Creek corridor materials and ACRES Quarterly, Fall 2024 — over 1,200 acres protected by ACRES in the corridor; nearly 2,000 acres with partners. Fort Wayne Parks listings — Dustin Nature Preserve, 71.8 acres.

Fox Island County Park · the dune, the forest, and the storm

COUNTY SCOPE · ABOITE TOWNSHIP, SOUTHWEST ALLEN COUNTY · PRESERVE DEDICATED 1974

Fox Island is a county park, held by the Allen County Park and Recreation Board in Aboite Township at 7324 Yohne Road, southwest of the city — and it is the county's great walking ground. The park covers 605 acres, and 270 of them are dedicated as a state nature preserve: the Articles of Dedication were recorded on August 2, 1974, and the county park developed around the preserve from the middle 1970s, on ground that included the 200-acre Yahne family farm for which Yohne Road is named. Within the park stands what the county parks department calls the largest contiguous forest in Allen County, and through it runs the feature that gives the place its name in the geological record: a glacial sand dune — a sluice dune piled by wind off the retreating Wisconsinan glacier — standing some forty feet above the marsh at its highest, with swamps, seasonal ponds, wetland forest, old fields and restored prairie around it. The ground's human depth is far older than the park: Fox Island's archaeological sequence, told in the Before Fort Wayne chapter, reaches back some eight thousand years.

The walking is seven miles of marked trails through the preserve, and in winter, with four or more inches of snow on the ground, over six of those miles are open to cross-country skiing. The Nature Center — classrooms, exhibits including the "Tree House," and the department's education offices — anchors the park's teaching program, and the Vera Dulin Wildlife Observation Building watches the marsh edge. The birding record is the state's: the Indiana Division of Nature Preserves' file counts over 190 species of birds found on the preserve. A support organization, the Fox Island Alliance, backs the park's programs, and the park's Sol Fest has marked the coming of summer each May since the park's twenty-fifth anniversary year in 2000.

The preserve's modern history has a wound in it. In June 2022 a derecho cut straight through the park and destroyed over three thousand old-growth trees; Fox Island closed, and more than four thousand man-hours went into clearing roads and trails under the nature preserve rules, which ordinarily bar removing downed trees at all. Allen County reopened the park in June 2024, two years on, with three of the seven trail miles open and the rest in repair — the walking record of the county's best forest, interrupted and resumed.

Sources:

1. Allen County Parks, Fox Island County Park page — 605 acres, 270 acres dedicated as State Nature Preserve, seven miles of marked trails, six-plus miles of winter ski trails, the largest contiguous forest in the county, the Nature Center and Vera Dulin Wildlife Observation Building, Bowman Lake.
2. Indiana Natural Resources Commission, Fox Island Nature Preserve master plan amendment record (2024–25) — the Articles of Dedication recorded August 2, 1974; the 2022 derecho damage.
3. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Nature Preserves, Fox Island Nature Preserve file — 270 acres; marshes and swamps bordering a dune developed after the recession of the Wisconsinan glacier; over 190 species of birds.
4. ACGSI, "Fox Island County Park & Nature Preserve" — the Yahne farm and Yohne Road, the preserve's beginnings around 1975, Sol Fest since 2000, the June 2022 closure, over 3,000 trees destroyed and 4,000 man-hours of restoration, the June 2024 reopening with three of seven trail miles open.

The Little River Wetlands Project · a trust for one valley

THE SECOND LAND TRUST · FORMED 1990

The Little River Wetlands Project is Fort Wayne's second land trust, and unlike ACRES it has a single subject: one valley. The Little River — the Little Wabash — is a headwater tributary of the Wabash River rising in Allen County and running southwest into Huntington County. Its valley, some 25,000 acres in the project's accounting, was once known as the Great Marsh: the wet portage ground between the Maumee and Wabash systems. The marsh was drained for farmland in the late 1800s, part of a statewide loss that a 1991 Indiana Department of Natural Resources report put at over 85 percent of Indiana's original wetlands. In 1990 a group of concerned Allen County residents formed the Little River Wetlands Project to restore and protect what could be saved of the valley's wetlands; twelve individuals formed the organization, and the founders the project has named publicly include Paul McAfee, Dick Poor, Sam Schwartz and Ron Zartman.

The project works the way ACRES does — by holding ground — but on a restorer's model: it buys drained farmland and puts the water back. By its own current accounting it protects more than 1,300 acres of restored and natural habitat; its federal filings put the protected total at 1,323 acres at the end of 2020, including a conservation easement of about 140 acres on private land. Its Allen County preserves are four: Eagle Marsh, Arrowhead Marsh, Arrowhead Prairie and Buttonbush Bottoms, with a fifth holding, Little River Landing, co-owned with ACRES Land Trust. Three of the preserves are open to the public. Eagle Marsh, the largest of them, is the next entry but one; the Arrowheads follow it.

Sources:

1. Little River Wetlands Project, lrwp.org, "Visit — Our Preserves" and mission statements — formed to restore the Little River watershed; more than 1,300 acres protected; the four Allen County preserves and the co-owned Little River Landing.
2. Little River Wetlands Project, IRS Forms 990 (2020, 2023) — year of formation 1990; 1,323 acres protected at December 31, 2020, including the easement acreage.
3. The Waynedale News, "LRWP to Honor Founders" (October 2013) — the twelve founders and the named founders honored.
4. ACGSI, "Little River Wetlands Project" — the 25,000-acre Great Marsh project area and the 1991 DNR wetland-loss estimate.

Eagle Marsh · the marsh that drainage made and restoration remade

ABOITE TOWNSHIP, THE CITY'S SOUTHWEST EDGE · ACQUIRED 2005

Eagle Marsh stands on Engle Road at the southwest border of Fort Wayne, in the Little River valley on the old portage ground — the carry between the Wabash and Maumee watersheds whose deep history is told in the Before Fort Wayne and Land chapters. A sign in the marsh marks the St. Lawrence continental divide: rain falling on one side of the marsh runs to the Great Lakes, and on the other to the Mississippi. The marsh itself is a made thing twice over. In the 1800s, ditches drained the Great Marsh to make farmland. What the Little River Wetlands Project bought in 2005 — 676 acres, with the support of the federal Wetlands Reserve Program, the Indiana Heritage Trust, The Nature Conservancy of Indiana and foundation funders — was farmland that flooded regularly despite its drainage tiles.

The restoration, which began in late 2006 and which the project's historians call one of the largest wetland restorations ever undertaken in Indiana, reversed the drainage: tiles were broken, pumps removed, shallow ground dug deeper, so the water stayed. Over 500 acres were seeded with native rushes, grasses and wildflowers, and more than 45,000 native trees and shrubs were planted. Between 2007 and 2010 a forty-acre mature swamp woodland was added, bringing the preserve to 716 acres. It has kept growing by small additions since: the project's filings give 834 acres in 2020, and its current preserve guide gives 831 acres — the difference stands unexplained in the sources and both figures are printed here as the project states them. At any of those figures, Eagle Marsh is, on its own published description, the largest nature preserve in Allen County. The federal Wetlands Reserve Program easement on the ground is held by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and the preserve is co-owned by the project and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.

The walking grew with the water. The preserve's trail system measured over eleven miles in 2014, when the preserve hosted its first biodiversity survey — a two-day bioblitz on May 31 and June 1, 2014, with thirteen taxonomic teams working its ponds, marsh, sedge meadow, prairie, shrubland and swamp woodland. The current figure, as the project states it, is fourteen miles of trails. The returning wildlife is the Animals chapter's record; here it is enough that the restoration accounts count over 240 bird species at the marsh, the project's current materials over 250, and that the marsh is named for the bald eagles that nest there.

Eagle Marsh also holds a piece of continental engineering, and its top is a trail. In 2010 the marsh was identified as a place where floodwater could carry invasive Asian carp from the Wabash system into the Maumee and so to Lake Erie — assessed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2012 as the second-highest-risk such pathway in the country, behind only the Chicago waterways. Indiana's first answer was a 1,250-foot chain-link fence, set in 2010 as a net against swimming fish. The permanent answer, designed by the Natural Resources Conservation Service and built with the Corps, is a berm over 9,000 feet — 1.7 miles — long, averaging seven and a half feet high, of some 177,000 cubic yards of compacted fill, built in 2015 at a cost of about $4.4 million and completed, with its closures, into 2016. It is built to hold back a hundred-year flood. The Little River Wetlands Project turned the barrier into a walk: the Continental Divide Trail runs along the berm's crest, with interpretive signs on the watersheds and the barrier itself, and connects toward the Towpath Trail — the canal-era towpath path, part of the paved Fort Wayne Trails network told in the Bike Trails chapter, that runs along the marsh's edge.

Sources:

1. Ruch et al., "Results of the 2014 Eagle Marsh Biodiversity Survey, Allen County, Indiana," Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science — the 676-acre 2005 acquisition and its funders, the tile-breaking restoration, 500-plus acres seeded and 45,000 trees and shrubs planted, the 40-acre swamp woodland and the 716-acre total, eleven-plus miles of trails, the 2014 bioblitz and its thirteen teams, the history by Judy Nelsen and Tony Fleming.
2. Little River Wetlands Project, lrwp.org — 831 acres as the current figure, the largest nature preserve in Allen County, fourteen miles of trails; IRS Form 990 (2020) — 834 acres in 2020; the joint ownership with the Indiana DNR and the NRCS Wetlands Reserve Program easement (also ICRCC completion release).
3. Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, "Completed Eagle Marsh berm blocks Asian carp pathway to Great Lakes" — the berm at 1.7 miles long, averaging 7.5 feet high, 177,000 cubic yards of fill, about $4.4 million, the pathway identified in 2010.
4. Northeast Indiana Water Trails, "Asian Carp Warning," and Indiana Birding Trail, Eagle Marsh — the 2010 interim fence of 1,250 feet, the 2012 second-highest-risk assessment, the Continental Divide Trail on the berm and its connection with the Towpath Trail.
5. ACGSI, "Eagle Marsh Nature Preserve" — the preserve established 2005, the continental divide sign, the berm's dimensions as locally reported.

The Arrowhead preserves and the rest of the Little River holdings

ABOITE TOWNSHIP · RESTORED 2000–2009

West of Eagle Marsh, across Aboite Road from each other near Roanoke, stand the project's paired preserves. Arrowhead Marsh covers 97 acres, and Arrowhead Prairie 158 — together 255 acres of wetland, prairie and woods. The project acquired and restored them between 2000 and 2006; its filings describe the original 188 acres restored between 2002 and 2006, with a thirteen-acre mature woodland at the marsh left standing as it was. Sixty-seven acres added to the prairie in 2009 have been restored in their turn, and a demonstration native-plant garden stands by the prairie's parking area. Both preserves are kept by stewardship — prescribed burns among the tools, in a watershed where fire set by lightning and by Native Americans was part of the ground's life cycle before the drainage. Arrowhead Marsh carries almost two miles of nature trails through marsh, tallgrass prairie and mature woods; the prairie's walking is the garden and the open ground.

The project's remaining holdings are smaller and mostly unwalked. Buttonbush Bottoms is a 25-acre preserve in the valley. Little River Landing, 53 acres, is co-owned with ACRES Land Trust — the county's two trusts holding ground together. Together with Eagle Marsh and the Arrowheads, and the easement acreage on private land, these are the 1,300-plus protected acres of the Little River record: a drained marsh valley being bought back piece by piece, at walking scale.

Sources:

1. Little River Wetlands Project, "Arrowhead Preserves" — 97 and 158 acres, acquisition and restoration 2000–2006, the 67 acres added in 2009, the marsh's almost two miles of trails, prescribed burning.
2. Little River Wetlands Project, IRS Form 990 (2020) — the 188 acres restored 2002–2006 and the woodland left intact; Buttonbush Bottoms at 25 acres; Little River Landing at 53 acres, co-owned with ACRES Land Trust.

Lindenwood Nature Preserve · the city's own woods

IN THE CITY · 600 LINDENWOOD AVENUE · LEASED 1974, CITY PARK 1987, PRESERVE 1994

Lindenwood is the nature preserve inside the city: 110 wooded acres at 600 Lindenwood Avenue, across the road from Lindenwood Cemetery, holding the mature oak-hickory forest — white and red oaks, shagbark hickories, a spring wildflower display the state's preserve file calls rich and diverse — that shows what the cemetery grounds, and much of Allen County, looked like when the cemetery opened in 1859. The ground came to the parks by a lease and a rescue. In June 1974 the city leased the land from Lindenwood Cemetery and Lindenwood Park began. When the ten-year lease expired, the Fort Wayne Park Foundation, with the help of the English, Bonter, Mitchell Foundation, purchased the land for the Board of Park Commissioners, and Lindenwood became an official city park in 1987. On March 17, 1994, the park board resolved to protect the park in perpetuity and applied for state nature preserve status; the designation was awarded, and Lindenwood Park became Lindenwood Nature Preserve. The two acreages in the record measure different things and both stand: the city's park is 110 acres; the Indiana Division of Nature Preserves' file gives the dedicated preserve at 86 acres.

The walking is four trails from a single trailhead at the campfire ring: the Trillium Trail, half a mile and the showiest in spring; the Oak Paradise Trail, three-quarters of a mile; the Trail of Reflection, a mile, with a level boardwalk that makes it the preserve's wheelchair- and stroller-accessible path; and the Maple Spur Trail, a quarter mile — two and a half miles of trail in all, around a small pond and under the old canopy. The preserve keeps an interpretive program and a volunteer corps, the Stewards of the Woods, who serve as trail guides. It is the one place in this chapter where the full preserve machinery — state dedication, protected-in-perpetuity status, foot trails only — operates inside the city limits, ten minutes from downtown.

Sources:

1. City of Fort Wayne / Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation, Lindenwood Nature Preserve page and brochure — the 110 acres, the June 1974 lease from Lindenwood Cemetery, the Park Foundation purchase with the English, Bonter, Mitchell Foundation, city park status in 1987, the March 17, 1994 resolution and the state designation, the four trails and their lengths, the Stewards of the Woods.
2. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Nature Preserves, Lindenwood Nature Preserve file — 86 acres; the mature oak-hickory forest and its wildflowers; 600 Lindenwood Avenue.
3. ACGSI, "Plants in Allen County, Indiana" — the preserve as a view of the county as it looked when the cemetery opened in 1859.

Salomon Farm Park · walking a working farm

IN THE CITY · 817 WEST DUPONT ROAD · GIFT 1995–1996

The north side's walking ground is a farm. The Salomon family settled its Allen County farm in 1871, immigrants from Prussia, and five generations worked it. In 1995, on the parks department's own telling, Chris Salomon and his daughter Lynn presented the department with the family farm; the department gained ownership in 1996, and the 170 acres on West Dupont Road became Salomon Farm Park. The gift came with a condition the family set and the city keeps: the farm remains a working farm, maintained to the farming world of the 1920s to 1940s — the department chose the 1930s — with demonstration plots, period equipment, heirloom gardens and a menagerie of farm animals. The Wolf Family Learning Center, completed in 2001, is its teaching hub.

The trail is the farm's perimeter made walkable: a fully paved loop of 1.8 miles around the fields, wetlands and livestock pens, the most-walked path of any in this chapter precisely because it is the easiest — flat, paved, open from six in the morning until eleven at night, and shared with bicycles, for which the paved network's account is in the Bike Trails chapter; the loop ties into the Pufferbelly Trail corridor at the farm. It is a different kind of hike trail from the preserves': not protected wild ground but protected working ground, a farm kept in production inside a subdividing city so that the walking includes the sight of the work.

Sources:

1. City of Fort Wayne / Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation, Salomon Farm Park page — the 1995 gift by Chris Salomon and his daughter Lynn, the 170 acres, the working-farm condition and the 1930s theme.
2. My Indiana Home, "Salomon Farm Park is a Farm for the Future" (2019) — the family settled in 1871; the offer of 170 acres and the department's ownership in 1996; the Wolf Family Learning Center.
3. Fort Wayne Parks listings and park accounts — the 1.8-mile paved trail loop; the Learning Center completed in 2001.

The city parks' dirt trails · Franke, Shoaff, Foster

IN THE CITY · THE PARK SYSTEM'S WALKING, IN BRIEF

Below the preserves, the ordinary city parks carry walking of their own, and three carry it at trail scale. Franke Park — at about 339 acres the largest of the city's parks, its history in the Parks and Plans chapter — holds the city's one true dirt-trail system: the park's trail map lays out roughly ten miles of multi-use dirt trails in three rated loops, green at 5.3 miles, yellow at 3.7 and red at 1.4, run through the woods around Shoaff Lake and the Children's Zoo and shared between walkers and mountain bicycles. The signature walk is the Shoaff Lake, Terry's Turn and Soap Box Derby Hill loop at 3.5 miles. Franke's woods have a preserve thread of their own: in 1952 Fred B. Shoaff gave 54.36 acres within the park as a bird and wildlife sanctuary. Shoaff's second gift, in 1955, was Shoaff Park itself — 169 acres then, 184.5 acres in the current city listings — along the St. Joseph River on the northeast side, where an almost-two-mile perimeter loop carries the walking, and from which the paved St. Joseph Pathway runs three miles downriver to Johnny Appleseed Park (the pathway is the Bike Trails chapter's; the walking on it is the same ground).

Foster Park, 254.9 acres along the St. Marys River on the south side, carries hiking trails and a fitness trail among its gardens and diamonds, on the Rivergreenway's line. The pattern across the three is the park system's general one: the developed parks walk their edges — riverbanks, lake shores, woodlot loops — while the preserves walk their interiors. Both records belong to the city's walking; the preserves are simply where the walking is the point.

Sources:

1. Visit Fort Wayne, "Franke Park Hike" and Fort Wayne Outdoor Pass — the park's roughly ten miles of mapped trails and the three rated loops (5.3, 3.7 and 1.4 miles), the 3.5-mile Shoaff Lake loop, Shoaff Park's almost-two-mile perimeter loop and the three-mile St. Joseph Pathway to Johnny Appleseed Park.
2. Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation park listings (via Fort Wayne magazine's parks guide) — Shoaff Park at 184.5 acres; Foster Park at 254.9 acres with hiking trails and a fitness trail.
3. Parks and Plans chapter of this record — Franke Park at about 339 acres; Fred B. Shoaff's 1952 gift of 54.36 acres for a bird and wildlife sanctuary in Franke Park and his 1955 gift of 169 acres for Shoaff Park.

Metea County Park · walking Cedar Creek

COUNTY SCOPE · CEDAR CREEK TOWNSHIP, NEAR LEO-CEDARVILLE

The county's second walking park stands at the other end of the county from Fox Island: Metea County Park, 250 acres at 8401 Union Chapel Road near Leo-Cedarville, in the Cedar Creek corridor that the ACRES preserves also line. Cedar Creek itself — the state-designated scenic river — cuts the park in two, north and south, and 120 of its acres are dedicated as the Meno-aki State Nature Preserve. The park is named for the Potawatomi leader Metea, whose village, Muskwawsepeotan — in the county parks department's translation, "town on the old red wood creek" — stood on the creek's north bank near its mouth, close to the present park's boundary; the village was, on the department's account, the southeasternmost Potawatomi village in Indiana, settled sometime after 1795. The tribal history behind the name is the Tribes chapter's; here the name is the park's own.

The walking is five miles of marked trails through woodland, wetland and prairie, in the county's deliberate style: as the county's master plan notes of its parks generally, most trails are in their natural state — marked, but rugged, with the north portion of Metea undeveloped and its trails the roughest in the county system. The Gloria Goeglein Nature Center, with its exhibits and bird-watching room, is the park's teaching anchor, alongside a swimming lake, sled hill and winter ski rentals. Metea and Fox Island together are the county park department's two nature parks; the department's whole system, on its 2023–2027 master plan, runs to four parks and 1,013.75 acres.

Sources:

1. Allen County Parks, Metea County Park page — 250 acres, the 120-acre Meno-aki State Nature Preserve, Cedar Creek as a state-designated scenic river dividing the park, five miles of trails, the Gloria Goeglein Nature Center, the naming for Chief Metea and the village of Muskwawsepeotan.
2. Allen County Parks and Recreation Master Plan, 2023–2027 — the county system at four parks and 1,013.75 acres; the county trails' natural-state character.

The preserve system today · the holders' totals, and the hands

THE WALKING RECORD AS IT STANDS

Sum the holders as each states its own total, and Fort Wayne's foot-trail ground comes to this. ACRES Land Trust: over 8,700 acres protected across its three-state region as of 2026, of which the Allen County preserves in this chapter are the founding core, over 30 of its properties carrying public trails across the system. The Little River Wetlands Project: more than 1,300 acres protected in one valley, with fourteen miles of trails at Eagle Marsh alone. Allen County Parks: 1,013.75 acres in four parks, with seven trail miles at Fox Island and five at Metea. The City of Fort Wayne: a park system of 89 parks and some 2,840 acres on the parks department's published figures, its one state-designated preserve at Lindenwood and its dirt-trail system at Franke. The totals overlap at the edges — preserves sit inside park figures, and the trusts' acres are the region's, not the county's alone — and they are printed as the holders state them, not forced into a single sum. The modern figures and the current trail-building program are the Current chapter's; the paved network that threads many of these grounds together is the Bike Trails chapter's.

The system runs on volunteers as much as on deeds. ACRES' own accounting of its work names the members who renew, the donors who give, and the volunteers who maintain trails and eradicate invasive species. The Little River Wetlands Project offers dozens of free guided hikes and programs a year at its preserves, and its calendar carries Earth Day Fort Wayne and the Monarch Festival. The Fox Island Alliance supports the county's park; Lindenwood's Stewards of the Woods guide its trails. The civic-organization record of these bodies belongs to the Charities chapter. What belongs here is the plain fact the walking record ends on: the ground Fort Wayne walks for nature was almost all of it saved on purpose, by named organizations, within living memory — and the trails are where the saving becomes visible.

Sources:

1. ACRES Land Trust (March 2026) — over 8,700 acres protected; the volunteers who maintain trails and eradicate invasive species. Input Fort Wayne (2023) — over 30 ACRES properties with public trails.
2. Little River Wetlands Project — more than 1,300 acres; fourteen miles of trails at Eagle Marsh; the free hike and program calendar, Earth Day Fort Wayne and the Monarch Festival (project program listings).
3. Allen County Parks and Recreation Master Plan, 2023–2027 — 1,013.75 acres in four parks. Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation published figures, as carried in the Parks and Plans chapter — 89 parks, about 2,840 acres.