The foot trails: Lindenwood, Fox Island and Eagle Marsh

1974 - present

The other system: Not every Fort Wayne trail is paved, and the unpaved system is as old as the paved one's dream. Its three anchors are nature preserves, and two of them date to the same year, 1974, a year before Ernest Williams's greenway was first dreamed of in the record. Where the greenway's history is told in miles, the preserves' history is told in acres and in legal instruments, leases and dedications, because a foot trail through protected woods is a land story first.

Lindenwood: Lindenwood Nature Preserve, 110 wooded acres across Lindenwood Avenue from the cemetery of the same name, became a park when the city leased the land from Lindenwood Cemetery in June 1974. When the ten-year lease expired, the Fort Wayne Park Foundation, with the help of the English, Bonter, Mitchell Foundation, the same foundation whose grant bought Towpath land a generation later, purchased the land for the Board of Park Commissioners, and Lindenwood became an official city park in 1987. On 17 March 1994 the Board resolved to protect the park in perpetuity, applied to the Department of Natural Resources for Nature Preserve status, and received it. Its four hiking trails are short and named like poems: the Trillium Trail at half a mile, the Oak Paradise Trail at three quarters, the Trail of Reflection at a mile, and the Maple Spur at a quarter mile, 2.5 miles of walking in oak and hickory forest that shows what the cemetery grounds, and much of Allen County, looked like when the cemetery opened in 1859.

Fox Island: Fox Island Nature Preserve was dedicated by Articles of Dedication recorded on 2 August 1974, 270 acres of marsh, swamp and glacial dune inside what is now the 605-acre Fox Island County Park, owned by the Allen County parks board. The preserve's seven miles of marked trails cross a sluice dune left by the retreating glacier, standing 40 feet above the marsh at its highest, and six miles of the trails are groomed for cross-country skiing in winter, the one place in this section where the paved system's winter cousin, the ski and snowmobile world of SNOWMOBILE TRAILS, touches the hiking system directly. On the evening of 13 June 2022 a derecho took down more than 3,000 of the park's trees in about fifteen minutes; the park closed with no reopening date, and welcomed visitors back in June two years later, the front trails passable and much of the back of the park still closed for a cleanup that continues. Purdue Fort Wayne built a graduate course in disturbance ecology around the park's destruction and recovery.

Eagle Marsh: The third anchor closes the leg's whole circle. What followed was one of the largest wetland restorations ever undertaken in Indiana: drain tiles broken, pumps removed, shallow ground dug deeper, more than 500 acres seeded with native rushes, grasses and wildflowers and some 45,000 native trees and shrubs planted, the initial restoration completed in 2009. Forty acres of forested wetland were added between 2007 and 2010 and 75 more acres in 2019, bringing Eagle Marsh to 831 acres with more than 14 miles of trails and over 240 recorded bird species. In 2015 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built an earthen berm across the marsh, 80 feet wide and 8 to 10 feet high, to keep invasive Asian carp from crossing between the Wabash and Maumee waters in a great flood, and a trail runs along the berm. The marsh stands on the continental divide between the Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds, in the old portage country southwest of Kekionga: the newest foot trails in Fort Wayne cross the same carrying ground as the first article of this section.

Sources:

1. City of Fort Wayne, Lindenwood Nature Preserve page (the June 1974 lease, the 1987 purchase, the 17 March 1994 resolution, the 110 acres and the four named trails).
2. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Fox Island Nature Preserve record, and Indiana Natural Resources Commission hearing officer report, January 2025 (the dedication recorded 2 August 1974; the 270 acres).
3. Input Fort Wayne, Fox Island reopening report (the 605 acres, the seven trail miles, the 13 June 2022 derecho and its 3,000 trees, the June reopening two years later).
4. The Waynedale News, 14 September 2005 (the 15 August 2005 Eagle Marsh closing, the 675 acres, the partners).
5. Little River Wetlands Project, Eagle Marsh page, and Allen County Genealogical Society, Eagle Marsh page (the restoration, the additions of 2007 to 2010 and 2019, the 831 acres, the 14 trail miles, the 2015 Army Corps berm).