This page was created by Jane Darcovich. The last update was by Dan Harper.
The First Forest Preserve Opens
In February 1916, the district appointed a “Plan Committee” to “devise ways and means for the most expeditious, economical and practical method of acquiring land.” Peter Reinberg, president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, commended the private-citizen members, among them Dwight Perkins and Charles Wacker, for their public spirit, saying that “[e]ach member cheerfully set aside his own private business affairs and, at much inconvenience and sacrifice of personal interests, labored with the Board without remuneration or expectation of reward other than the success of the project of forest preservation.”
In short order, the Plan Committee identified tracts of land for sixteen separate preserves. The first tracts were near Palatine and farther northwest of Chicago. By January 1917, the district had issued three million dollars worth of bonds and spent more than $130,000 to purchase this land. On June 16, 1917, the county dedicated its first preserve: a tract of nearly 1,000 acres near the town of Palatine, an area formerly known as Deer Grove Park. In the years that followed, the district purchased more land. By 1921, it boasted holdings of more 18,000 acres in the county, with visitors numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Forest Preserve District’s holdings grew as the district purchased even more land, mostly along the Des Plaines and Skokie Rivers.
