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The plan years were also gift years. Lakeside Park, east of the St. Joseph, came first: its original ground was acquired from the Fort Wayne Land and Improvement Company in 1908 — for $5,000 by Griswold's account; the department's chronology describes the 1908 land as donated — with further areas given by the Forest Park Company in 1908 and 1912, the city buying more in 1912 to a total ground cost of $7,800, and $17,500 of improvements made in 1912, financed, the department specifies, by a special tax on the area around the park — the 1911 benefit levy at work. In 1908 the city had also bought fifteen acres of forest for $10,500 to establish Weisser Park (Griswold dates the Weisser purchase to 1909, from Magdalena Weisser). Then 1912 brought the flood of gifts: Camp Allen Park, on the "peninsula" of the Nebraska neighborhood, purchased; John H. Vesey Park, Pontiac Place Park and Hirons Park all donated; and the largest single gift in the system's history to that date — Foster Park, from the brothers Samuel M. and David N. Foster, wooded land bordering the St. Marys south of the Broadway bridge, formally dedicated with speeches and music in July 1912. Griswold gives the gift as sixty-four acres; the department's chronology gives 110 acres donated in 1912, with 120 more acres purchased as an addition in 1924 and a further 30 donated by the Fosters in 1926, Foster Park standing today at about 255 acres — the sources divide on the original figure and agree on everything since.
The system acquired its forester in the same spring: on the establishment of the municipal department of forestry in April 1912, Carl J. Getz, a Purdue graduate, was engaged as city forester, Griswold records; the department's chronology lists Getz as the city's first forester under 1914, and Adolph Jaenicke — whose name the Swinney Japanese gardens would later bear — became the first superintendent of parks and city forester in 1917. The giving continued past the plan's adoption: in January 1917 Nicholas Klug gave three acres for Klug Park, and in that year the people of Fort Wayne subscribed $26,000 to dam the St. Joseph just south of the State Street bridge — to deepen the water for boating, fishing and bathing and to create a park some four miles in extent along the banks, the riparian owners contributing the land, the whole placed under the park commissioners, with park board member William Breuer leading the movement.
Sources: Griswold (1917), Ch. XLVIII ("Growth of the Park System"; "City Forestry Department") and Ch. XLIX ("St. Joe River Dam and Park"; Klug Park in the 1917 activities); Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation Department, published chronology (entries for 1908, 1912, 1914, 1917, 1924, 1926); Wikipedia, "List of parks in Fort Wayne, Indiana" (Foster Park acreage today).