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Taking the Measure of a Forest
A suburban forest preserve from the Eocene to the pandemic
Andrew L. Hipp
February 2021
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[Sugar-maple_floralBudsOpening-2020-04-14]Sugar maple floral buds,
April. [Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are by Andrew L.
Hipp, 2019-21]
Maple Grove Forest Preserve is located 20 miles west of Chicago, in
DuPage County, Illinois. It measures six-tenths of a mile from St.
Joseph Creek at its northern end to Maple Avenue at its south, and a
quarter mile between the backyards abutting its east and west
boundaries. The forest is small enough that you could learn the calls
of its common summer birds on a lunchtime walk. You could memorize
its dominant trees and showier wildflowers in an afternoon.
Fast-forward through the last 10,000 years, and we would see a
flickering mosaic of prairie, oaks, and maples, forests racing up
and down glacial moraines.
But run a transect perpendicular to the main trail, and you'll find
that this forest is vast. In late January, after a fresh snow, trails
of skunks, coyotes, and deer mice appear throughout the preserve,
twining around carcasses of red and white oaks. Fallen ashes two feet
in diameter, cracked open on impact, are perforated with ant
galleries. Tangles of black fungal rhizomorphs creep 20 feet or
higher under the skin of standing trees, exposed when the bark
ruptures. Lichen-covered branches drop 60 feet to the forest floor,
where they host orange mycena mushrooms and families of flat-backed
millipedes. Entodon mosses colonize a fallen maple and keep it moist.
They overtop mats of flat-brocade moss, then bump up against mounds
of baby tooth moss. After a few years, the mosses share the log with
bacteria-scavenging slime molds. Earthworms work the dead tree as it
softens. Brilliant orange chicken-of-the-woods sprouts as the bark
sloughs off, and the log is trampled back into the earth by human
foragers cutting off the fungal fruiting body at its base to take it
home and cook it in oil and wine. Within a few decades, the log will
have given back to the woods everything it assimilated over two
centuries of growth.
[Fog-2019-04-06]Fog, September.
[Chicken-of-the-woods_2020-09-18-CMS-1020x680]Chicken of the woods,
September.
Maple Grove has been shaped by thousands of years of human settlement
and of plant evolution, migration, and extirpation extending back
through the Eocene. If we could rewind the tape and then fast-forward
through 15 million years, we would see the landscape around Maple
Grove undulate with forest, ice, and fire, populated by species we
know well and those we may never know existed, ephemera that missed
the fossil record. If we focused on the most recent 10,000 years, the
same patch would appear as a flickering mosaic of prairie, oaks, and
maple groves, streams writhing across the terrain, forests racing up
and down moraines left by receding glaciers. Blink, and a Potawatomi
trail between the sites we now call Chicago and Naperville would
harden into a settlers' plank road. Blink again, and the banks of St.
Joseph Creek would steepen with erosion as the upstream stretch
plunged beneath the streets of Downers Grove, channelized in concrete
only to spill across the downstream floodplain in every storm. An
infestation of emerald ash borer beetles would arrive, and ash trees
would topple over. Then the movie would stop where we are now, with a
stream of people on the Maple Grove trails, caught mid-step, enjoying
a lazy afternoon in the midst of a pandemic.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
On March 21, 2020, Illinois instituted its statewide shelter-in-place
order. During that first month, I walked through Maple Grove every
day or two. I have been watching these woods closely for several
years and have been a naturalist in similar woodlands since I was in
my 20s. I have seen the forest-understory species emerge, flower,
fruit, and senesce; creep slowly into view some years and emerge like
gangbusters in others. But it quickly became clear that walking here
in COVID time would be different. I noticed details of the forest
year that had escaped my attention despite decades of looking.
Dutchman's breeches bent like bobby pins as the seedlings pulled
their yellow-green feathery leaves out of the ground, petioles thick
and turgid as mung-bean sprouts, translucent as frosted glass.
Toothwort seedlings were an alien purple. The brittle white rhizomes
of white trout lily arched above the soil's surface and plunged back
in again, tipped with next year's plants. My field notebook and
camera roll were densely packed, and everything seemed new.
[White-trout-lily_fruit_2020-04-30]White trout lily fruit, April.
[Open-Street-Map-1-CMS-1-1020x641]Maple Grove Forest Preserve and
downtown Downers Grove. [via OpenStreetMap]
[Downers-Grove-Google-Earth-CMS]Downers Grove, Illinois, 2021. [via
Google Earth]
In the first months of the shutdown, public lands around Chicago
swarmed with people who, like me, had their health and the freedom to
work from home. In most years, an estimated four million people visit
the DuPage County Forest Preserves; in 2020 they received closer to
six million. ^1 There has been so much mountain biking in Maple Grove
that I have seen new trails appear in just a few weeks, swaths of
bare dirt 20 feet long and three feet wide, where previously wild
ginger, bloodroot, and white bear sedge grew. People working from
home across the U.S. and Europe have taken up biking or birdwatching.
^2 ^ But this freedom to be outside is apportioned unevenly. In
March, I corresponded with a colleague in Chicago who for a time
hardly got out to local parks, not wanting to sit
shoulder-to-shoulder on public transit to travel to her favorite
places. Other friends were barred from almost any movement: a
colleague in southern France, one of the best naturalists I know,
completely missed the spring. A friend from Spain could not explain
to his young son why their only outdoor forays were to the roof of
their apartment building.
So many people used Maple Grove last year that new trails
appeared where wild ginger, bloodroot, and white bear sedge grew.
I've been acutely conscious of our good fortune. In Chicago, the
enormous convention center just south of the Loop, McCormick Place,
was transformed into a hospital and began accepting COVID patients in
early April. But my neighbors and I witnessed this from a distance;
hospitals in our county never filled. ^3 I remained free to identify
a millipede or mushroom, to make notes as fruits developed on the
trilliums. Yet, on Memorial Day, as a fox trotted down our street
with a squirrel in its jaws and monarch butterflies returned to our
garden, George Floyd was killed by police on the streets of
Minneapolis, and a White dog-walker called 911 on a Black birdwatcher
in Central Park, for the offense of reminding her about the leash
laws. ^4 It has become more obvious than ever this past year that the
woods where I feel at ease are not equally accessible to everyone.
[Wild-ginger-2020-04-27]Wild ginger, April.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Around the first of May, sugar maple leaves hung limp in the
midstory. Within a week, they unfurled. Warblers filled the canopy,
stopping over on their way north. Toads sang and wooed from the pond
in the middle of the preserve. A month later, mosquitoes were drawing
blood. Solomon's seal flowers had almost opened. There were
unexpected jewelweed cotyledons in ephemeral creek beds. Baby
earthworms twitched beneath the leaves. I came across a few plants of
green dragon. Its distant cousin, Jack-in-the-pulpit, is common in
our region, and by this time its seedlings were ankle-high, but I had
never seen green dragon in Maple Grove. Green dragon and
Jack-in-the-pulpit are two of only three North American endemics
among an estimated 170 species in the genus Arisaema. The genus arose
in east Asia, and ancestors of the North American species migrated
through Beringia 20 or 30 million years ago. ^5 It's easy to imagine
them as emigres from an alpine temperate forest on the other side of
the world; they form exotic inflorescences, unlike anything else in
our woodlands, and they are gender-changers, able to flip back and
forth between seed- and pollen-production from year to year, as
resources permit. They are packed with poisonous calcium oxalate
crystals. But they wear their evolutionary heritage well, and we have
come to think of them as natives.
[Jack-in-the-pulpit-emerging_2020-04-27]Jack-in-the-pulpit emerging,
April.
[Green-dragon-berriesDeveloping_2020-06-14]Green dragon berries,
June.
The honeysuckles, which were by this time were in as magnificent a
state of flower as I had ever seen, are more recognizable as exotics.
There are several non-native species and hybrids in our area, most of
which arrived from Eurasia in the 1940s, though some were known here
as early as the 1870s. ^6 Unlike the Arisaema, honeysuckles are
invasive. They alter nutrient cycles and soil microbial communities;
they supplant native shrubs and reduce the growth and diversity of
native understory species. We're watching them alter our forests in
real time. When I see them flaunting their colors, I understand why
people plant them. All the same, I'll tear out a honeysuckle to make
way for a native bloodroot or bugbane.
Honeysuckles, green dragon, and Jack-in-the-pulpit, along with
everyone in this town and on this continent, are visitors who
stayed.
Honeysuckles, green dragon, and Jack-in-the-pulpit, along with
everyone in this town and on this continent, are visitors who stayed.
The plant species of Maple Grove have been tracking changing climates
and occupying new lands at others' expense for tens of millions of
years. Many of the species we favor today were upstarts at one time,
moving in on the heels of residents who were pushed out by cold or
drought or fire. We think of the honeysuckles as exotics because they
arrived in the Americas "unnaturally," by boat or airplane, and
because we happen to be here while they are taking over the forest
understory. Eventually, though, local insect herbivores and fungi
will most likely take a liking to them and keep them in check, as
parts of a novel forest community we can't quite imagine.
Like any location carefully examined, Maple Grove records a history
of unearned good fortune: one group's dominance becomes another's
exclusion. What's different this time around is that humans alive now
bear responsibility for a great proportion of the ongoing extinctions
and ecological transitions. We're driving the process along at a
phenomenal pace, and we understand very well what we are doing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
In one sense, Maple Grove is ancient. In the lower Eocene, about 56
million years ago, the tree genera here now -- oak, maple, ironwood,
elm, basswood -- were congregated in the arctic. ^7 An ocean cut
through North America from south to north. The southeastern corner of
the continent was dominated by tropical rainforest, while the
east-central section (what is now the northeastern U.S. and upper
Midwest) ranged from broad-leaved evergreen to deciduous forests of
ginkgo, birch, elm, and viburnum. There were palms in what would
become the Rocky Mountains, where we now find pines. ^8 Then global
temperatures began to cool, and eastern North America's tropical
species were pushed south. The Rocky Mountains rose, casting a rain
shadow across the continent, and the great ocean drained from the
Great Plains. Eastern deciduous forests sorted and assembled as
species migrated from the north, interdigitated with the prairies
that spread across the plains between eight and six million years
ago. North American forests came to resemble what we would see on a
walk today.
Black and white map of the midwest United StatesPrairie peninsula
map, from Edgar Nelson Transeau, "The Prairie Peninsula," Ecology
vol. 16 no. 3, July 1935.[Courtesy John Wiley and Sons]
Beginning two-and-a-half million years ago, temperatures dropped
abruptly, and northern portions of the continent were repeatedly
glaciated. The glaciers ground away the forests and prairies,
scrubbed the soil into a dusty loess, then receded from the Chicago
region approximately 17,000 years ago, making way for a succession of
plant communities. The first forests that formed along the glaciers'
south edge mixed spruce, aspen, and hardwoods such as elms and oaks,
assemblages of species without an exact contemporary analogue.
Surveys of pollen grains in lake-sediment cores show ash trees at
their highest level of dominance in our region around 14,000 years
ago, while maple pollen was barely discernible. At around 10,000
years ago, local spruces disappeared, and maples increased in number.
Prairies spread, reaching their maximum extent about 8,000 years ago,
filling the Great Plains and extending eastward to form a broad,
irregular delta whose terminus falls in what is now Indiana. This
"Prairie Peninsula" at the far end of the Rockies' rain shadow
tapered into oak savanna at its northern edge, near where Maple Grove
stands now. Where fires were frequent, prairie and fire-tolerant oak
trees thrived, particularly the thick-barked bur oak; fire-sensitive
trees such as basswood and sugar maple flourished only where they
were protected. Maple Grove, cradled by St. Joseph Creek and secluded
among glacial moraines, was one of these islands of forest. ^9
[St-Joseph-Creek_2020-06-13]St. Joseph Creek, June.
[St-joseph-creek_2019-11-17]St. Joseph Creek, November.
It's plausible that Maple Grove as we recognize it today has existed
for 10,000 years, though we can't say for sure. We do know that when
the Public Land Survey came through in the 1840s, surveyors walking
the section line that ran through the grove's east lobe encountered
trees still here today. ^10 A 1948 study of forest-stand structure in
southern Wisconsin and northeastern Illinois estimated that Maple
Grove was a closed forest -- with dense, mature canopy -- by the first
half of the 17th century. Quantitative work on forest structure in
the region, using tree cores to estimate ages and rates of growth,
found that, as of the early 21st century, the area's oldest living
tree was a white ash that arose in 1818, and that by the time this
ash was born, the grove was already densely shaded. ^11
It's plausible that Maple Grove as we recognize it today has
existed for 10,000 years. Yet this tiny forest is still changing,
sometimes rapidly.
Yet this tiny forest is still changing, sometimes rapidly. In the
1990s, the emerald ash borer beetle arrived in southern Michigan as a
colony of stowaways burrowed into shipping pallets. ^12 Like the
avian H1N1 virus that caused the global pandemic of 1918-1919, or the
mammalian SARS-CoV-2 virus causing the pandemic now, these insects
switched hosts -- from east Asian ash species to North American ashes
species in the case of the ash borers, and from bats or other mammals
to humans for SARS-CoV-2. These pathogens spread around the world
only because they hitched a ride with us. Emerald ash borers
proliferated undetected in the U.S. until the early 2000s, by which
time their populations were too widespread to contain. They arrived
in Maple Grove sometime around 2007, when they started feeding on the
crowns of American ashes. As the upper leaves wilted, the ash borers
ate their way downward, inscribing passageways under the bark of
200-year-old trees, devouring the phloem that carries the sugars of
photosynthesis down from the leaves and scratching the outer layers
of xylem that carries water up from the roots. The ashes wasted
slowly, though when the trees finally gave up, it seemed abrupt.
Today, hulking boles two feet in diameter lie shattered on the forest
floor or stand with broken crowns. Ash seedlings continue to sprout --
but for now, in Maple Grove as in almost every eastern North American
forest, mature ashes are a memory.
[White-ash-with-EAB-traces]White ash log showing traces of the
emerald ash borer, December.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
On the land that now includes Maple Grove, we can track human uses
dating back to the recession of the glaciers. Archaic flint points
13,000 to 9,500 years old have been recovered from the DuPage River a
few miles west of Maple Grove; this would have been around the time
that sugar maple migrated to fill most of its contemporary range. The
people living here then passed part of their year in villages, where
they cultivated native plants. ^13 They foraged for tree nuts, and by
4,000 years ago they were trading for copper. ^14 By 1,000 years ago,
in the Woodland Indian period, there were established seasonal
sugaring camps farther north in the Midwest, and the high caloric
value of the syrup would have encouraged the establishment of camps
in our immediate area as well. ^15
Archaic flint points 13,000 to 9,500 years old have been
recovered from the DuPage River a few miles west of Maple Grove.
At around 700 years ago, a people referred to by archeologists as the
Oneota appear to have displaced the Woodland Indians, developing an
increasingly local culture and living in smaller villages. They were
succeeded in turn by the Illinois, a diverse nation composed of at
least twelve tribes or subtribes. The historic territory of the
Illinois was massive. Their population numbered 13,000 or more. ^16
But in the mid 1600s, European fur traders decimated beaver
populations in what is now upstate New York, home of the Iroquois.
The Iroquois consequently fought with tribes to the west to take over
their portion of the fur trade, employing guns they had obtained
through trade with the Dutch. They pushed the Illinois west to the
Mississippi, and by 1750, seven of the Illinois tribes had been
destroyed or absorbed into the remaining five, with their total
population reduced to about 2,000. By 1818, there were two Illinois
tribes left, and a single village of approximately 80 people remained
east of the Mississippi. ^17
[Waubonsie-and-Shabbona-2-CMS-1020x730]Potawatomi Chief Waubonsee in
a lithograph by I.T. Bowen after Charles Bird King, ca. 1838 [the
Smithsonian Institution], and Potawatomi Chief Shabbona, 1859. [via
Wikimedia, in the public domain]
As the Illinois were driven out ahead of settler-colonialists moving
westward, the Potawatomi moved in from the north. In March 1831, one
of the first White families to settle in the county, the Hobsons,
observed hundreds of Potawatomi making sugar near what is now
Naperville; their chief, Aptakisic, is said to have used Maple Grove
as his sugar bush. ^18 The next year, Pierce Downer made a three-day,
20-mile journey from the sparse settlement of Chicago, along the
"High Prairie Trail," the Potawatomi track heading west out of what
is now Chicago, to what would become Downers Grove. Downer stopped at
a roughly section-sized woodland in a sea of tallgrass prairie. He
claimed a quarter section, 160 acres, and purchased it at $1.25 per
acre from the U.S. Government under the Land Act of 1820. He was
followed closely by other settlers, and his purchase consequently
marked the end of an estimated 10,000 years of land use here by
native people.
Part of the mythology of Downers Grove is that Pierce Downer had a
close friendship with the Potawatomi, despite the fact that the land
he settled is said to have been a seasonal residence for Chief
Waubonsee. ^19 School kids in our town are taught that Downer learned
from the Potawatomi to tap sugar maples. They learn that Chiefs
Aptakisic, Waubonsee, and Shabbona were regular visitors to the home
of the Blodgetts, one of the village's founding families. They are
told that Aptakisic saved the inhabitants of Naper Settlement by
warning them when Chief Blackhawk of the Sauk was planning a raid. I
don't doubt that this is true. But it's also true that, as local
lands were claimed by settlers, Aptakisic's people were forced west
to the DuPage River. Henry Blodgett reported that, though their
exclusion was a source of "grievance," Aptakisic "submitted to the
inevitable and remained the friend of the settlers." ^20 There was,
of course, nothing inevitable about it: Blodgett, Downer, and
ultimately my own family were able to form a community around what
would become Maple Grove only by expelling the people already living
here.
[Treaty-of-Chicago-1833_cover_CMS-2-1]Cover page of the Treaty of
Chicago 1833. [via National Archives at Chicago]
However close it may have been, Pierce Downer's friendship with local
Potawatomi was probably not enduring. Under the 1833 Treaty of
Chicago, the Potawatomi lost their remaining land in the region to
the U.S. Government, as did the Chippewa and Ottawa to the north, in
exchange for a tract beyond the Mississippi. The treaty was ratified
in 1835, and by 1837, the last Indians had been banished from the
area, removed to the Great Plains -- a very different landscape from
the mosaic of forest, savanna, and tallgrass prairie they had known.
Chief Aptakisic came to see the Blodgetts before his people were
removed to Kansas. Henry Blodgett wrote years later that he could
"well remember the sad face of the old chief as he came to bid our
family goodbye ... We all shed tears of genuine sorrow ... his generous
kindness to my parents has given me a higher idea of the red man's
genuine worth." ^21 But by fifteen years later, as settlers planked
over the heavily-used Potawatomi trail from Chicago, children playing
in Maple Grove would not have been thinking of Chief Aptakisic's
"genuine worth." ^22 It must have seemed to them, as it always seems
to children, as though they were the first to discover the forest.
Black-and-white photograph of elderly man breaking ground with
shovel; large group of women looking on.John Manning ("Daddy") Wells,
breaking ground for the Girl Scout Cabin in Maple Grove Forest
Preserve, c. 1926. [Courtesy The Downers Grove Museum]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Downers Grove grew rapidly. In 1850 the first township meeting was
held. The first passenger train came through in 1864, connecting to
Chicago. In 1872, a group of investors led by insurance executive
Arthur Charles Ducat purchased 800 acres of largely wooded land from
earlier homesteaders, intending to subdivide and develop it; their
purchase included what would become Maple Grove. ^23 The next year,
Downers Grove incorporated as a village of 350 inhabitants. Ducat
laid out roads in the tract he had purchased, but in the end did not
develop homes. Instead, in 1892 he sold 700 acres to the
department-store magnate Marshall Field at $300 per acre. ^24 This
was the same year that Field engaged Daniel Burnham to design his
flagship store in downtown Chicago, in anticipation of the 1893
World's Columbian Exposition. Field endowed the city's Field Museum
of Natural History and contributed substantially to establishing the
University of Chicago. He built a golf course at the edge of Downers
Grove, but left much of the land he had purchased in DuPage County
undeveloped. When he died in 1906, the estate passed to his
grandsons, Henry Field and Marshall Field III.
Chicago magnate Marshall Field bought the land in 1892 -- the same
year that Daniel Burnham designed Field's flagship store
downtown.
As Chicago grew, Downers Grove sold itself as a haven from the city.
Ordinances enforced quiet on Sundays. The village described itself as
a place where citizens could "sit under the wide-spreading branches
of ... stately forest trees and refresh themselves with pure air, free
from the odors of Bridgeport, the Chicago River, and the cold and
chilly fogs of the lakefront." ^25 In 1915, DuPage County formed its
Forest Preserve District, and a front-page story in the local paper
pleaded with residents to vote for preservation of the village's
remaining undeveloped forest, arguing that, "For years we have
gloried in the possession of a beautiful woodland surpassing in
natural attractions all the glories of the artificial parks of the
great cities. At any moment our freedom to wander through the sylvan
shades, to pluck the fragrant flowers and to delight in the wonders
of nature can be taken from us." ^26 Eighty years had passed since
ratification of the Treaty of Chicago, just one human lifetime. But
the appeal expressed only urgency, no irony.
[entrance-to-marshall-fields-marshall-field-and-costore-chicago-ill]
Hans Behm, entrance to Marshall Field and Co. department store on
State Street in Chicago, ca. 1907. [Library of Congress]
[Marshall-Field-father-and-son-composite-CMS-1020x759]Marshall Field,
ca. 1915 [Library of Congress] and Marshall Field III, ca. 1940s.
[via Wikidata, unrestricted]
The country was at war, and efforts to preserve a section of forest
were delayed. Henry Field had died, leaving his brother Marshall
Field III, who was soon to be serving overseas, heir to an estimated
200-million-dollar fortune, including most of the land that would
become Maple Grove. ^27 Establishment of the preserve may also have
been hindered by the 1918-1919 pandemic, which killed 373 out of
every 100,000 Chicago residents, about two-and-half times the 2020
per capita mortality from COVID-19 in the city. ^28
Maple Grove is a palimpsest of forest species, glacial
recessions, colonial expansions, department-store fortunes, and
kids in a pandemic, building forts.
The war ended and the pandemic subsided, the latter to all but
disappear for decades from the history books. ^29 In November 1919,
ten days after the first anniversary of the Armistice, the village of
Downers Grove treated the County Board of Supervisors to a dinner at
the Masonic Hall. Afterwards, presumably in high spirits, the group
proceeded at Field's invitation to inspect his estate, seeking to
identify anywhere from seven to 160 acres as a site for future public
rambles through "the sylvan shades." Field had offered the land to
DuPage County at $200 per acre, a third less than his grandfather had
paid nearly 50 years earlier, and the board of supervisors purchased
80 acres. The population of Downers Grove thus preserved for
themselves an island of forest whose roots stretched back to the
recession of the glaciers. The Downers Grove Reporter described it at
the time as "a playground for present and future needs." ^30 In many
ways, that is how it is viewed still.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
As an administrative entity, Maple Grove Forest Preserve is sharply
bounded. But the forest itself radiates through nearby neighborhoods,
as bur oaks shed acorns onto car roofs and colonies of bloodroot and
green dragon grow in ditches along the roads. Great horned owls hunt
in the fields and yards that back up to the preserve. Coyotes chase
white-footed mice across the boundary between the woods and the
adjacent schoolyard. Detritus from the neighborhoods flows in via St.
Joseph creek, which begins as a trickle in the formerly prairie-clad
moraines to the east, runs through ditches between commercial
buildings and the train line, then vanishes beneath downtown Downers
Grove before it reappears just east of the preserve. ^31 On its way
through the forest, the creek exchanges trash from the streets and
seeds from upstream for insect frass, fungal spores, silt and clay
sliding downhill between the oaks and maples. It all flows west, past
the sewage treatment plant and under high-tension lines at the ComEd
substation, under the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks,
through the Village of Lisle to the East Branch of the DuPage, thence
to the Des Plaines River, the Illinois River, the Mississippi, and
finally the Gulf of Mexico.
[Wild-leek-last-seeds_2020-12-26]Moss capsules, December.
[Ice-crystals-CMS-1020x676]Ice crystals, January.
[Toothwort-seedling_2020-03-07]Toothwort seedling, March.
Maple Grove is a palimpsest, written and overwritten with diverse
histories: the origin and extinction of forest tree species,
department-store fortunes, civic pride and self-interest, glacial
recessions, colonial expansion, international shipping routes,
viruses, and kids in a pandemic summer, dirt-biking and building
forts from the bark of downed ash trees. Maple Grove is an evolving
response to the questions, What species will control the canopy one
hundred years from now? How do human choices form Maple Grove? I turn
my hand lens on this neighborhood-sized forest in order to move
beyond thinking of it as a portrait of the past, a place to walk, or
a naturalist's playground. Maple Grove, like any landscape, replays
the same indeterminate processes year after year, but every year is
remarkable, a novel variation on old themes. Each individual plant or
square foot of land in this forest is a point of entry into paths
braided through the Anthropocene.
Places Journal
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Author's Note
This essay benefited from conversations, insights, and access to
documents and data provided by Marlin Bowles, emeritus ecologist of
the Morton Arboretum; Christy Rollinson, Forest Ecologist at the
Morton Arboretum; Tricia Bethke, Plant Health Care Outreach
Specialist at the Morton Arboretum; Wayne Lampa, emeritus ecologist
of DuPage County Forest Preserves; Scott Kobal, ecologist of DuPage
County Forest Preserves; Jennifer Meyer, Land Preservation
Specialist, Forest Preserve District of DuPage County; Lynette
Kleiser, Maple Grove Forest Preserve steward; Daniel Hebreard,
President of the DuPage County Forest Preserve District; Felicia
Camacho, Recreation Supervisor of Historical Programming at the
Downers Grove Museum; Frances Richard, Senior Editor at Places; and
Rachel Davis, artist, collaborator, and partner in this good life we
share.
Notes
1. Daniel Hebreard, DuPage County Forest Preserve District
President. Email to the author (October 23, 2020).
2. Jacey Fortin, "The Birds Are Not on Lockdown, and More People Are
Watching Them," The New York Times (May 29, 2020); Isabella Tree,
"Lockdown awakened our interest in nature, but it mustn't be at
the expense of wildlife," The Guardian (December 28, 2020). For a
thoughtful perspective on living through 2020 as a Black
ornithologist, see J. Drew Lanham, "Elegy in Three Plagues,"
Places Journal (December 2020), https://doi.org/10.22269/201215.
3. "Illinois Covid Map and Case Count," The New York Times (October
28, 2020); Hal Dardick and Gregory Pratt, "McCormick Place gets
its first COVID-19 patients," Chicago Tribune (April 17, 2020) .
4. Sarah Maslin Nir, "White Woman Is Fired After Calling Police on
Black Man in Central Park," The New York Times (May 26, 2020).
5. On Ariesaema see Sue A. Thompson, "Arisaema Martius: Araceae," in
Flora of North America North of Mexico, ed. Flora of North
America Editorial Committee, vol. 22 (New York and Oxford, 2000),
128; and P. Bierzychudek, "Determinants of gender in
Jack-in-the-pulpit: the influence of plant size and reproductive
history," Oecologia 65 (1984): 14-18, https://doi.org/10.1007/
BF00384456.
6. Gerould Wilhelm, and Laura Rericha, Flora of the Chicago Region:
A Floristic and Ecological Synthesis (Indianapolis: Indiana
Academy of Science, 2017).
7. On forest development, see G.J. Harrington, J. Eberle, B.A.
Le-Page, M. Dawson, and J.H. Hutchison, "Arctic plant diversity
in the Early Eocene greenhouse," Proceedings of the Royal
Society, Series B: Biological Sciences 279 (2012): 1515-152.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2011.1704; and Alan Graham, Late
Cretaceous and Cenozoic History of North American Vegetation,
North of Mexico (Oxford University Press, 1999).
8. The Field Museum in Chicago has a great fossil illustrating this,
from the Green River formation in Wyoming.
9. Except as otherwise referenced, this discussion of postglacial
vegetation history is from E.C. Pielou, After the Ice Age: The
Return of Life to Glaciated North America (University of Chicago
Press, 1991). See also P.A. Delourt and H.R. Delcourt, Long-Term
Forest Dynamics of the Temperate Zone: A Case Study of
Late-Quaternary Forests in Eastern North America (New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1987); E.N. Transeau, "The Prairie Peninsula,"
Ecology 16 (1935): 423-437, https://doi.org/10.2307/1930078; V.M.
Kline, "Orchards of oak and a sea of grass," in Stephen Packard
and Cornelia Fleischer Mutel, eds. The Tallgrass Restoration
Handbook: For Prairies, Savannas, and Woodlands (Washington,
D.C.: Island Press, 1997), 3-21; and John T. Curtis, The
Vegetation of Wisconsin: An Ordination of Plant Communities
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959).
10. Our oldest quantitative records for vegetation from the region
come from the Public Land Survey initiated with the Land
Ordinance of 1785. Teams were sent across the western territories
to survey land that could be given to soldiers from the
Revolutionary army or sold to help pay the new nation's debts.
11. P.B. Whitford, Species distribution and age of hardwood stands in
the prairie forest region of Wisconsin. PhD Dissertation,
University of Wisconsin-Madison (1948); see also Marlin L. Bowles
and Michael D. Jones, "Chronological Change in Old-Growth
Forests of the Chicago Region," (Lisle, IL: The Morton Arboretum,
2008), 13.
12. The insect was likely in the country for at least a decade before
it was observed in observed in 2002. See Jill Jonnes, Urban
Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American
Cityscape (New York: Viking, 2015).
13. R.J. Schmidt, The Potawatomi Indians of DuPage County (Wheaton,
IL: DuPage County Historical Society, 1974), 3; B.W. Styles, R.E.
Warren, et al., "The Illinois: Hunting and Fishing," MuseumLink
Illinois (2020).
14. Copper pots would not have been needed, however, as maple sap
could be boiled with care in bark pots. See B.G. Armstrong, Early
Life Among the Indians: Reminiscences from the Life of Benjamin
G. Armstrong (1892), 111. Cited in M. B. Holman, "The
identification of late woodland maple sugaring sites in the upper
Great Lakes," Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 9 (1984):
63-89.
15. Maple sugar production is difficult to detect in the
archaeological record, but scholars argue that (1) prehistoric
Indians had sufficient technology to produce maple sugar and
might, like historic Indians, have depended on it as an important
nutritional source; and (2) late Woodland Indian sites in
northern Michigan, dating to ca. 750-1,000 years ago, show strong
evidence of having been seasonal maple sugaring camps. Margaret
Holman, "The identification of late woodland maple sugaring sites
in the upper Great Lakes," Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology
9 (1984): 63-89.
16. On Oneota and Illinois populations, see Styles and Warren, et
al., "Late Prehistoric Indians: Identity," MuseumLink Illinois
(2002).James Mooney and Cyrus Thomas, "Peoria," in Handbook of
American Indians North of Mexico, ed. Frederick Webb Hodge,
Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 30
(1907), reprinted by Scholarly Press, Grosse Pointe, MI (1968);
R.E. Hauser, "The Illinois Indian Tribe: From Autonomy and
Self-Sufficiency to Dependency and Depopulation," Journal of the
Illinois State Historical Society, 69 (1976): 127-138.
17. Styles and Warren, et al., "Illinois Indians: Society: Enemies,"
MuseumLink Illinois (2000); Hauser, 134.
18. Schmidt, 10; Virginia A. Stehney, "Downers Grove" (1985) in
Richard A. Thompson, DuPage Roots (DuPage County Historical
Society).
19. Montrew Dunham and Pauline Wandschneider, Downers Grove: 1832 to
1982 (Heritage Festival Task Force of Downers Grove, 1982), 12.
20. Henry Blodgett, Autobiography of Henry W. Blodgett (Waukegan IL,
1906), 37.
21. Quoted in D. Dretske, "Aptakisic - Half Day," Lake County,
Illinois History: Illuminating the past through photos, objects,
and stories of people, events and the land (2011).
22. The plank road became what we know today as Ogden Avenue.
23. Village of Downers Grove Architectural Design Review Board,
Downers Grove Architectural and Historical Survey (2013), 37.
Title examination on file at Forest Preserve District of DuPage
County (April 8, 1921) demonstrates that acquisition history for
the land that is now Maple Grove Forest Preserve was complicated,
encompassing nearly 20 plots and multiple landowners since the
PLS survey of 1842 through the time of purchase by the Forest
Preserve District. The title examiner lists 23 objections,
ranging from orthographic discrepancies to lack of proof that
owners had inherited land they sold, to lack of documentation of
past sales.
24. Dunham and Wandschneider, 63.
25. Federal Writers Project, ed. Marion Knoblauch, DuPage County: A
Descriptive and Historical Guide (1948), 31. Dunham and
Wandschneider, 63.
26. Elizabeth Riotto, "Maple Grove: 'I am the Tree the Ages Grew,'"
in The Volunteer Voice: The Newsletter for the Forest Preserve of
DuPage County Natural Resources Management Volunteers
27. "Henry Field Dies in Hospital Here," The New York Times (July 9,
1917).
28. John Dill Robertson, Report and Handbook of the Department of
Health of the City of Chicago for the Years 1911 to 1918
Inclusive (Chicago: 1919), 70; cited in Influenza Encyclopedia:
the American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919: A Digital
Encyclopedia, ed. J. Alexander Navarro and Howard Markel (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine,
2016).
29. Scott Hershberger, "The Pandemic we forgot," Scientific American
(November 2020), 66-69; Sean M. O'Connor, "Suburban Profile:
Downers Grove, Illinois," In The Garden City blog (February 25,
2018).
30. "Supervisors to inspect forest property today," Downers Grove
Reporter (November 21, 1919). In 1923, the county purchased a
final tract of three acres at the east edge of the preserve for
$313 per acre from a different landowner, completing Maple Grove
as we know it now. Title examination on file at Forest Preserve
District of DuPage County (April 8, 1921).
31. St. Joseph Creek emblematizes the 20th-century domestication of
watercourses. USGS maps from the 1800s show it as a network of
rivulets arising in the prairies and coalescing via natural paths
to the DuPage River. As late as the 1950s, you could have
followed the creek all the way through Downers Grove, where it
regularly flooded Main Street. Pierce Downer and his wife were
not buried in the downtown cemetery because St. Joseph Creek was
flooded at the time of their funerals, making a crossing
impractical.
Cite
Andrew L. Hipp, "Taking the Measure of a Forest," Places Journal,
February 2021. Accessed 21 May 2021.
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About the Author
Andrew L. Hipp
Andrew L. Hipp
Andrew L. Hipp is the Senior Scientist in Plant Systematics and
Herbarium Director at The Morton Arboretum and a Lecturer at the
University of Chicago.
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Andrew L. Hipp, "Taking the Measure of a Forest," Places Journal,
February 2021. Accessed 21 May 2021.
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