The Parklands is excited to continue its partnership with the Louisville Science Center in 2012. Investigate your natural surroundings in these workshops designed to connect families with little ones to the wonders of the world outside. Each workshop covers a different topic and takes place in one of Louisville’s greatest natural resources, The Parklands.

Cost: $2.00 per day members, $3.00 per day non-members (children and adults)

Winter Wonders: Take a walk outdoors discover colors, trees, plants and see what happens to bubbles outside during the winter season. Explore with ice and making frost.

Diary of a Worm: Get your hands on some creatures that slither, buzz, jump and wiggle through life. See how they act, what they eat, and where they live. Make your very own worm house!

Interesting Insects: Get your hands on some creatures that slither, buzz, jump and wiggle through life. See how they act, what they eat, and where they live. Get ideas about how to keep your wiggle worm busy.

Pond Life: A dive into the unusual world of pond life. Learn about tadpoles and turtles

Discovering winter: Parents come learn ways to teach your young children about the wonders of winter.

Mom’s Little Green Thumb: Explore the world of plants and gardening from roots and shoots to flowers and fruits!

Winter Night Sky: What does night time mean to you? Where does the sun go? Come observe what the sky looks like in the winter months.

To sign up, visit louisvillescience.org

Nearly all the money needed has been raised and all the land procured for the massive Parklands of Floyds Fork project, one of the nation’s largest urban parks development.

The sponsors, headed by the nonprofit 21st Century Parks, have assembled about 3,700 acres for the project.

And primarily through the leadership of Humana Inc. co-founder David Jones, $110 million of the $113 million budgeted for land purchases and improvements has been raised.

An additional $13 million has been banked to maintain the linear park, envisioned as a
suburban counterpart to Louisville’s urban park and parkway system designed by  Frederick Law Olmsted a century ago.

Christen Boone, spokeswoman for 21st Century Parks, said the organization is confident of raising the full $113 million by the end of the summer. If need be, some
of the endowment funds could be transferred to the budget, but that isn’t anticipated, she said.

Contracts covering $18 million in work have been let for the project’s first phase, which
is along Floyds Fork near Interstate 64 in far eastern Jefferson County.

The project, a recreation corridor along 27 miles of the creek between Shelbyville and
Bardstown roads, is within budget and on schedule for completion by the target date
of 2015, said Dan Jones, the Humana founder’s son and 21st Century Parks’ chief executive officer.

The senior Jones recalled getting an emotional lift from what he saw when he joined members of the 21st Century Parks board of directors last fall in touring some of the early construction along the creek.

“We walked on the first few feet of road to encircle the Egg Lawn, saw the early beams
on the bridges spanning Floyds Fork, and visited the site of the future buildings. It was inspiring to see the beginning of what will become a treasured park for generations of Louisvillians to follow,” he said.

“This is truly the most important civic projects of my lifetime. We are looking forward to opening these new amenities … for so many to enjoy.”All of the land needed for the Parklands is now under the control of either 21st Century Parks or two kindred organizations — Louisville Metro Parks and the nonprofit Future Fund land bank. Dan Jones said no additional parcels are being sought at this point, but more land may be purchased, if it is suitable and becomes available.

Some work — including building a wet playground, developing eight fishing
ponds, breaking up a logjam on the creek and planting 50,000 trees — has already
been completed, or soon will be. Most of that work has been along Beckley Station
Road near I-64 in the northernmost section of the Parklands, called Beckley Creek
Park. South of there, three more large parks will be developed — Pope Lick, Turkey Run
and Broad Run.

Work now under way, or expected to start soon, and scheduled for completion by
mid-2013 includes:
The William F. Miles Trailhead at the former Miles Park; it will include parking, a
garden, restrooms, a fountain and historical markers.

Developing 2.1 miles of the Louisville Loop south of Shelbyville Road. The loop is
envisioned as a 105-mile recreational path around metro Louisville.

The 19-acre Egg Lawn just south of I-64 along the west side of Floyds Fork. The
large oval, similar to the layout of the sports fields at Seneca Park off Cannons
Lane, will be ringed by a walking path, with parking and a dog park nearby.

The Creekside Center, just south of the Egg Lawn, will be where facilities are
concentrated. “It will be the busiest place in the whole thing,” Dan Jones said. “People
will be doing all kinds of things there.”

Work has begun on the $2.5 million Gheens Foundation Lodge and community
center; it should open in early 2013 with 11,000 square feet of space. The lodge
will be available for rent for weddings and corporate and group functions.

Also under construction at the Creekside Center is the $1.2 million PNC Achievement
Center for Education and Interpretation. It, too, is due to be completed in early 2013.
The center will have 4,000 square feet of space, including classrooms for school field
trips and camps. The Creekside Center will also have a large picnic pavilion and a butterfly garden.

Two additional phases of work will follow, eventually extending the Parklands to
Bardstown Road. They are budgeted to cost $13 million and $31 million, Dan Jones said.

The second phase, south of the Creekside Center, will incorporate the old Floyds Fork
Park and feature the new Pope Lick Park. Amenities will include a half-mile-long,
100-foot-wide Grand Allee, designed for fairs and festivals. The phase also includes
completion of six more miles of the Louisville Loop. Most of the work should be
under way this summer and completed by late 2013, Dan Jones said.

The last phase, the southernmost section of the Parklands, should be under
construction in 2013 and take about two years to complete. It will feature mostly
passive development along about 11 miles of Floyds Fork and include Turkey Run and
Broad Run parks. Plans call for trails, picnic areas, observation decks, sports fields,
camping sites, canoe launches and a playground.

The $110 million raised so far includes $38 million in federal money secured by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., along with $10 million from the state and $1.5 million from the city. In addition, more than $60 million in private funds has been raised by David Jones and friends, including $14 million from the Jones family, $8.2 million from the
James Graham Brown Foundation and $8 million from the late Sara Shallenberger  Brown.

Read article here. 

We begin The Parklands search at William F. Miles Lakes. Tucked into the woods where the new Louisville Loop trail passes the canoe launch, is a colossal white oak. The tree surpasses three feet in diameter. The texture of the bark and the shape of the canopy branches suggest the tree is over 200 years old. Tree-ring information confirms that the tree is in the neighborhood of 225 years. White oak can be found in dry upland sites, and, as is here, rich, moist bottomland sites.

Near the high point of the road in William F. Miles Lakes are two sites. On the west side, the side with Floyds Fork, a handful of chinkapin oaks grow along the near-vertical slope. Though not large—perhaps 16 inches in diameter, the trees are twisted and contorted showing they have lived through many a broken limb. They also survived land-clearing by settlers due to their inaccessibility and poor form.

On the east side of the road one can find a number of oaks and hickories that, in some ways, did not survive the ax. These trees, with two or more trunks, are called coppiced trees. (You can read about coppicing in an earlier Field Notes story here.) These trees resprouted after being cut in 1913. Therefore, the original trees that were cut date back to the early 1800s or earlier. This shows us that the presettlement forest here was comprised largely of oak and hickory.

Moving south we find a handful of sizeable old trees in southern Beckley Creek Park. Several chinkapin oaks near the Legacy Commons are over 200 years and one probably approaches 300 years. A twisted blue ash might near 200 years. A grove of sycamores along the Fork in this area contain the largest trees in The Parklands, some over 5 feet in diameter. Their age is uncertain, but the trees are clearly discernable, and still quite large, in an aerial photograph from 1937. Undoubtedly, the trees predate the photo by at least 100 years. (You can read more about sycamore ecology here.)

Pope Lick Park contains a number of relics. Along Floyds Fork is a mature riparian forest that, because it is so flood-prone, has never been cleared. Nevertheless, the large silver maples, American elms, hackberries, and sycamores are probably younger than 200 years. But the composition of species is probably indicative of the presettlement landscape. John Floyd Fields, where today there are soccer fields, was formerly a vast wetland system evidenced by several drainage ditches along the peripheries. Though we have no indication of what species were there, the fact that the area was drained at least tells us it was too wet for farming, suggesting a swamp or marsh ecosystem.

In the uplands, away from the floodwaters of Floyds Fork, we find 40 acres of outstanding hardwood forest highlighted by ancient American beech trees. The trees have broken tops and crooked limbs and range from two to four feet in diameter. Trees here approach 300 years old with most dating over 200 years. The stand is not an old-growth forest, as other species have been logged out—oak stumps show logging occurred around 1950, but for a variety of reasons the beech trees were spared. Similar to Miles Park, these uplands also contain a few twisted chinkapin oaks growing on steep-sided bluffs above the Fork. These trees also probably date back to the 1700s.

In Turkey Run Park there are just a handful of ancient trees but one in particular provides an important piece of information. On a chinkapin oak that approaches 300 years old, the branching structure shows us that the tree initially occurred in a closed forest. The tree was later released and grew for a century or more in the open, and then was engulfed in forest once again. This tells us, at least at this site, the landscape was covered in closed-canopy forest, not an open savanna-type landscape as has been suggested for portions of the Bluegrass Region.

Also telling in Turkey Run Park is the role different directional aspects play on vegetation. The north-facing slopes contain a number of ancient American beech trees (the Pope Lick Park beech trees are also north-facing) while the warmer south-facing slopes contain a few chinkapin and red oaks that range from 100 years to over 250 years. This observation is inline with the respective species’ regional site preferences for warmer or cooler sites.

In the far south of The Parklands, at Broad Run Park, we find not a huge ancient tree, but a diminutive little flower that lives for only one year—Kentucky gladecress. The flower has rather strict growing requirements: it needs full sun, periodic disturbance from animals or fire, and rocky ground of dolomite that stays wet in the spring. Largely for this reason, the plant is rare and endangered. But occurrences of the plant in The Parklands are, according to Deb White, with Kentucky State Nature Preserves Commission, relic glades that would have occurred prior to European-American settlement. Thus, here the forest was broken by a very dry, open, and rocky plant community.

When we assemble these fragments of the ecological past into a more complete story, we find a landscape mosaic of different ecological communities. We probably would have seen a forested landscape dominated by oaks and hickories on warmer and drier sites, and beech and maple (among other species) on cooler and moister sites punctuated by open glades on the steep, (fire-prone) south-facing slopes where dolomite occurs near the surface. The broad bottomlands would have held rich diverse forests in the drier areas and extensive wetlands in lower sites, both forested swamps and some open marshes. We have little way of knowing exactly what species would have grown in these wetlands because all regional analogies have been converted to agriculture.

Undoubtedly, there are more relicts of the Boones’ days than are shared here. Many of the coppiced trees, we will probably find, date to the early 1800s—during the original land clearing. But at least with these relics of the ecological past, we can see firsthand some of the living reminders of a time period that seems so far away.

-Michael Gaige

*It is worth noting that there are other, equally valuable, sources of information for uncovering the presettlement landscape. The writings and narratives of early travelers and explorers provide an outstanding resource. Much information for the Bluegrass Region has been compiled by Julian Campbell, a botanist from the Lexington area. His work can be found here.

It all makes a good story beginning with the distillery’s construction in 1933 – a complex of holding tanks, warehouses and an ugly, angular four-story distillery building that loomed above the rural landscape. Add to that its convoluted whiskey history that so matches Kentucky bourbon history; the comic aspects of the Great Whiskey Heist of 1963.

Then there was the 1968 conflagration that destroyed part of the distillery, a fire so fierce the Courier-Journal breathlessly reported “Light from the flames were so bright that a book could be read by it a half-mile away.”

Like somebody is going to break out a good book when it seems the whole neighborhood could go up in smoke.

You can almost hear the Kentucky bluegrass music backing up this whiskey tale   – hard-strummin’, foot-stomping backwoods music from a group called “Distillery Bend,” which just happens to be the name given the old site on your Beckley Creek Park map.

Most important – and much too forgotten – are the distillery owners, Charles and Theresa Grosscurth, who balance out the story, who did so much for Louisville, including leaving the University of Louisville’s Speed School $12.5 million for its “Bucks for Brains” program and $3 million to the Community Foundation of Louisville.

According to the book “Bourbon in Kentucky” by Chet Zoeller, the Grosscurth Distillery was built along Echo Trail in 1933 by a John Dowling just months after prohibition was repealed.

It was built as the Waterfill and Frazier Distillery. The Grosscurths – who had met and married in Chicago in the 1930s – purchased it in 1948.  The distillery’s brand was “Kentucky Supreme,” although in the literal mish and mash of ownerships over the years many other brand names would be subscribed to the distillery, including “Old Boone” and “Old Prentice.”

Over time the Grosscurth name would also appear on distilleries in other parts of Jefferson County, Anderson County and near Bardstown, making the lineage – and Kentucky has had almost 1,000 different bourbon brands in its history – very difficult to trace.

The bluegrass music kicked in a little louder in June of 1963 with this Courier-Journal headline and story:

Two Thugs Get $11,750 in Bourbon

    “Two armed holdup men got the drop on a distillery watchman here early today, chained him to a steel girder, and made off with $11,750 worth of bourbon.”

The story said the watchman, Andrew Russell, 54, of Fisherville, was making his rounds about 1 a.m. when two men jumped out of the bushes, one carrying a rifle and the other a .45 automatic. The faces of both men were covered with women’s stockings.

The two men walked Russell behind one of the warehouses, sat him on the ground, tied his feet together and used an “auto tire chain” to fasten him to padlock him to a steel girder.

The men loaded a distillery truck with 235 cases of eight-year-old Kentucky Supreme and left. Some four and one-half hours later Russell’s shouts attracted a neighbor, who freed Russell with a pair of bolt cutters.

In August 1963, two Crestwood, Kentucky, residents were arrested and charged with knowingly receiving stolen property after 175 full cases of bourbon whiskey were found in their trailer home and a nearby house – whiskey identified as taken in the Grosscurth heist. The two men, Walter Brock and Francis Newton, were given two years in jail.

On April 25, 1968, a raging fire destroyed two warehouses at the Grosscurth complex, burning up almost 5,000 barrels of whiskey.  A resident of the area reported hearing an explosion just before the blaze. As the burning liquid poured out onto Floyds Fork, witnesses said it seemed the river was on fire, the air filled with the saucy odor of burning bourbon.

Flames shot 200 feet into the air, sparks from the blaze set nearby fields and woods on fire, and even nearby utility poles were destroyed Nine fire departments would be called to the scene to quell the blaze and water down the other buildings, saving them. A company executive said the whiskey was only being stored for aging in the warehouses; the company had not produced any on the site for two years. The cause of the blaze was never determined.

The distillery’s destruction was also a loss for area farmers. One former resident, Jim Oesterritter, said it had also been a source of food for dairy and beef cattle.

Oesterritter said as a boy he would accompany his father as he drove a big tank truck to the distillery to pick up 20 to 25 barrels of corn mash for cattle feed. Many area farmers did the same thing, backing their tank trunks beneath a huge distillery spigot. The cost of the mash was about 10 to 15 cents a barrel.

“It was hot,” Oesterritter said. “Right out of the cooker…I tried some once. It tasted pretty terrible. It was really foul stuff, but the cows loved it.”

Oesterritter also had strong memories of the rickety old iron bridge that spanned Floyds Fork on Echo Trail near the distillery.

“It used to pop and bounce,” he said. “I always thought I’d meet my maker on the other side.”

The Grosscurths had worked very hard to build their demanding and very competitive distillery business; he as president and she – with only a high school education – as secretary-treasurer. After the fire they sold the distillery to the Chicago-based Makler Brothers who moved production to Bardstown.

The couple had been very active in Louisville society; the box seats at the Kentucky Derby, Life Master bridge tournaments, golf at Audubon Country Club – where a stray lightning bolt almost killed them – a 50-year membership at the First Unitarian Church.

Petite, vivacious and fashionable, Mrs. Grosscurth loved to cook and entertain at their Valley Vista home, eventually taking piano lessons which gave way to a parlor organ where she would hold singing songs.

Mr. and Mrs. Grosscurth never had children of their own, but became foster parents and eventually adopted three children – who gave them nine grandchildren. They were married 60 years and died – just a few months apart – in 1999. Their mutual generosities were lauded at their memorial services, particularly their gifts to Boys Haven and a number of other charitable and social justice organizations.

University of Louisville officials said they had not been surprised by a gift from the Grosscurths – the couple had hinted a donation was coming – but were very surprised by the amount, the $12.5 million was then the largest in U of L history.

Their gift was met with $11.5 million from the State of Kentucky – bringing the total to $24 million – a supreme and enduring Kentucky legacy of another sort.

-Bob Hill

Click here to read article.

Consider the following scenarios: a beaver gnaws a young ash tree along a stream; a fire burns through a dry oak and hickory forest; a person cuts down a sugar maple for furniture. For many tree species this would spell the end—just the stump left to rot. However, the species listed in these examples, and many more, have the ability to resprout after such disturbance.

We call this adaptation “coppicing.” Anyone who has walked in a deciduous broadleaf woods has undoubtedly seen such trees. The photos here show coppiced trees, identifiable by their multiple trunks. Usually, two, but sometimes three or four or more, the new stems emerge from the edge of the stump. For all trees in our region, the living tissue of the tree occurs only in the outer half-inch or so, just below the bark. For a large tree, say 15 inches in diameter, numerous sprouts will shoot up around the edge of the stump. But only a few of these stems will survive.

Competition among the stems causes most to die. The final number of stems is determined by the diameter of the stump (the original trunk). Larger-diameter stumps will allow more sprouts than smaller diameter stumps. If a very small diameter tree, say 4 inches, is cut (or burned), the emerging stems will compete until just one stem is left and as it grows it will be impossible to tell the was a resprout.

The (new) coppiced stems of a tree will grow slower than the original tree. So while a single tree trunk 12 inches in diameter may be only 50 years old, a coppiced pair of trunks (such as those in the photo) may be 90 years or more. A coppiced tree with three trunks will grow more slowly than a two-trunk coppice tree. It is important to remember that the age of the stump (and therefore the whole tree) of a coppiced tree is often much older that the new sprouts, even if those sprouts are rather old. There are coppiced trees in The Parklands that can be confidently dated to over three hundred years—100 years for the new stems, and about 200 more years for the original tree.

Once you’ve found a coppiced tree you can look for more clues to determine the reason the original stump resprouted. Look for signs of fire in the form of basal scars and charcoal in the surrounding area. For logging, look for stumps, other coppiced trees of the same age, or slash piles (branches). Trees cut by beaver will occur very close to water. Flooding can also break trees, leaving a stump that might resprout.

In addition to the oaks, maples, and ash trees listed here, other deciduous hardwoods such as elm, hickory, cherry, and walnut also coppice. Cone-bearing trees, such as pines and cedar in our area, do not coppice.

With an understating and a search-image for coppiced trees, you will be able to read more deeply into the history of any tree as well as the forest and the processes that shape them. You will also be able to read deeper into the cultural landscape of the Parklands at Floyds Fork and beyond.

Cane has an interesting history. It is one of two species of bamboo, a type of grass, native to North America. Preferring full sun and disturbance, river cane was formerly most common on floodplains where it occurred beneath open forest canopies. Cane also occurred under canopy openings in upland forests, and in scattered-tree savannas. Such sites and soils have been coveted by humans for various purposes for centuries.

Native Americans were first to use sites suitable to cane as well as the plant itself. They farmed bottomlands and, after the soils were exhausted, the abandoned sites often grew back as cane. As a grass, cane responds well to burning—the bulk of the plant’s biomass lies in its root system, so a fire merely burns off the culms allowing the root stalk to quickly regenerate.

The use of cane permeated nearly every aspect of Native life. They used it for structures, furniture, weapons, baskets, medicines and more. The plant was inexhaustible with respect to their land-use practices and population levels.

Despite cane’s importance to Native Americans, the plant was less common on the landscape then than it was when European explorers and settlers entered the region in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Prior to that, as Europeans settled areas farther east, they spread disease such as small pox into the Native American population. With no immunity, Native American populations were decimated by some 95%, effectively eradicating them and their land-use practices. This allowed for a rapid and extensive expansion of cane into old fields and areas previously maintained open by Native Americans with burning.

The rise of cane was well noted by early settlers. They often wrote of “canebreaks” extending ten or twenty miles or more “where no firewood could be found.” The plant can grow tall—up to 25 feet, but more commonly 10 to 12 feet. It must have been a maze to travel through. Kentucky, for a time, was called “the land of cane and clover.”

The land-use practices of the newcomers did not allow expansive areas of cane. Bottomlands were put into agricultural production and the uplands opened to grazing. Cattle had a particular fondness of and ravenous appetite for cane, eating it to the root and preventing it from reproducing or spreading. Even the resilient cane could not tolerate constant grazing by cattle. The sole vestigial patch of the plant in the Fork today speaks to that history. Cane’s downfall was swift and decisive.

Around Floyds Fork, cane’s next chapter will be one of expansion. The rise of cane around the Fork has already begun with the gathering of rootstocks from local patches that will be propagated and planted in coming years. The plant grows slowly at first, but soon begins spreading. Cane will be a focal species for bottomland and riparian rehabilitation throughout The Parklands; it is an important story of restoration of a key Kentucky and American icon.

With the return of cane, perhaps the vestigial patch near Broad Run will feel welcome. It can stand proud in a recovering landscape as an important ecological and cultural icon. The new rise of river cane is beginning.

-Michael Gaige