This page was created by Jane Darcovich. The last update was by Dan Harper.
Preparations for the Future: Education and Reforestation
The district also embarked on more formal ways of educating the public about nature. From the 1930s, the district has played a key role in the management of Cook County’s Brookfield Zoo. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, it sponsored flower shows with the Chicago Horticultural Society, and beginning in 1972, it worked with that organization to manage the Chicago Botanic Garden in north-suburban Glencoe. Finally, its many nature programs - centered on the Crabtree Nature Center, the River Trail Nature Center, Little Red Schoolhouse Nature Center, Sand Ridge Nature Center, Camp Sagawau, and the Harold Tyrell Trailside Museum - enhanced its educational function.
In tandem with its commitment to education, the FPDCC expanded the scope of its mandate to conserve lands. Before 1961, the district could purchase only property that contained existing forests or that connected land that contained existing forests. But in 1961, the Illinois General Assembly granted the district the right to purchase “land capable of being reforested” and thereby reintroduce plant and animal life into the forests. Now the district had a much wider range of land purchasing options and could embark on large-scale plans for reforestation in the last decades of the twentieth century.
