Jeff Miller-UW Madison
A commemorative rock marks Curtis Prairie, the site of the Arb’s earliest experiments with ecological restoration.
Looking out over Curtis Prairie today, watching the tallgrass sway in the breeze, it’s hard to imagine it used to be farmland tilled with mules.
But when Aldo Leopold and G. William Longenecker, two of the founders of the UW Arboretum, gazed over that same field almost a century ago, they had no trouble seeing through our eyes.
It was John Nolen’s idea in the first place, at least in the abstract. In his 1911 paper, Madison: A Model City, Nolen argued that the university should have an arboretum. But that suggestion languished until the early 1920s, when lawyer Michael Olbrich and realtor Paul Stark came forward with a serious proposal.
At first, Stark pitched Olbrich on the idea of an arboretum on the south shore of Lake Wingra that would stretch across 800 acres. Stark says Olbrich immediately rejected the idea — much too small. He upped the ante to 2,000 acres, and the plan for the Arboretum was underway.
They had their eye on a particular parcel: The Nelson farm, a 245-acre chunk of land just southwest of Lake Wingra. It had been farmland for a century, but farmer Charles Nelson had fallen on hard times and the land was fallow.
Still, he was reluctant to part with his land, and it took Olbrich and Stark 10 years to get ahold of the property. By that time, they had amassed a few other parcels, which were deeded over to UW-Madison on April 26, 1932. By the time the Arboretum was dedicated in 1934, it had expanded to 500 acres. The Great Depression provided more opportunities for cheap land, and the Arboretum eventually surpassed 1,000 acres.
Wisconsin Historical Society
Charles Nelson, here in 1931, parted with his 245-acre farm the next year; it was the first land acquired for the Arboretum.
There was also the curious stumbling block of the Lost City.
In 1911, a group of developers introduced a splashy plan for Lake Forest, a suburb that would hug the southern shores of Lake Wingra. Marketing materials boasted of an idyllic planned community, a modern paradise built in a lush forest. “The Venice of the North,” with dredged canals connecting homes! A double boulevard straight to the Capitol! Lake frontage for all!
The only problem was that it kept sinking into the swamp. The developers dredged canals and built roads, all at tremendous expense. Though they offered 800 lots, only a handful of houses were ever completed.
Lake Forest Company declared bankruptcy in 1922. But developers weren’t willing to call it quits just yet, and refused to sell the land as a parcel. Eventually, the higher portions of the Lake Forest land were developed, making up the small neighborhood of Forest Park that still stands on Arboretum Drive today.
The university kept close watch on the remaining lots, acquiring them piece by piece beginning in the 1930s. The last lots were acquired in 1963.
With the land secured, the real work could begin. The only problem was that nobody knew what that work should be, since “restoration ecology” did not yet exist. Research director Leopold explained the term at the Arboretum’s dedication in June 1934. “Perhaps we should not call the place an arboretum at all,” he said. This was not to be a museum of trees. They were aiming to create “a reconstructed sample of old Wisconsin, to serve as a benchmark, a starting point, in the long and laborious job of building a permanent and mutually beneficial relationship between civilized men and a civilized landscape.”
Brad Herrick, staff ecologist at the Arboretum, says this focus led to a very experimental ethos in the early days.
“Researchers went out and set up experimental plots” across what we now know as Curtis Prairie, says Herrick. “[They] brought in seed and sod and hay from prairie remnants west of here, places like Mazomanie, Spring Green, the Wisconsin River area. They literally trucked them over, plunked them down, and monitored which planting method worked the best.” The first year or more of restoration work consisted mostly of this guess-and-check method, with researchers experimenting with planting and management techniques.
But Leopold had his sights set further afield. “Part of the idea of the Arboretum that Leopold discussed is that we would not only recreate Dane County, but the original communities of Wisconsin — trying to bring as many ecological communities as possible to the Arb for research and education.” As the Arboretum grew, other communities were added to the prairie — oak savannas, wetlands, dense woods.
The real breakthrough came when the Arboretum secured the help of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a jobs program to help unemployed workers during the Great Depression. In 1935, 200 trained men arrived for a long-term posting at what would soon be called Camp Madison, with barracks near the present-day visitor’s center. Their influence is everywhere in the Arboretum: They built the council ring and the stone entrances, dredged the ponds we still see today, finished building the road through the Arboretum, transplanted sod, and performed the first-ever prescribed burns on the prairie and planted trees. In every respect, the CCC built the Arboretum.
Still, it was decades before it was clear this experiment would work.
“There’s a paper, by John Curtis and Henry Greene, published in 1960,” Herrick explains. “They go through all the different methods they used to plant the prairie, and what worked. At the end, they say: ‘In summary, we feel this can be done.’” Twenty-five years in, they could finally prove they’d had a good idea. “What they had made was recognizable as a tallgrass prairie,” Herrick says, even though the work was clearly not finished. They had proven that the damage mankind inflicted on nature could be reversed.
Plenty of things have since changed at the Arboretum, says Susan Carpenter, another Arboretum ecologist who oversees the native plant garden. But that hands-on idea isn’t one of them. “One of the ideas here has been that you could actively do something and be able to teach people what was underlying the practices and how to understand them,” Carpenter says. “The restoration isn’t a thing that you then look at. The process of it, and the ecological understanding of what’s underneath, is also part of the message.”
Herrick agrees. “We refer to Curtis Prairie as the oldest restored prairie in the world, but really it’s the oldest restoration in the world. It’s always ongoing, there’s always new challenges. The Curtis Prairie you saw 30 years ago will change, has changed. That’s the nature of ecosystems.”
Carpenter says that mission of the Arboretum comes from the personalities of its founders. “They saw restoration itself as being a research technique. And there’s never been a sense that you’re done.”
This story is part of our Arboretum Issue. Read the rest of our Arb coverage. And test your knowledge of the Arb with our interactive pop quiz.
