Friends of Fort Wooster Park

2024 Greenspace Report

Fort Wooster Park is an incredibly unique Greenspace where historical and archaeological significance meet ecologically rich forest and beautiful trails for community members. The high hilltop area that is now this city park was first used by Quinnipiac people as sacred burial grounds. American colonists later established a signal beacon on the hill (now known as Beacon Hill) during the Revolution. The park consists of an approximate area of 29 acres. It was previously an old field pine forest and is currently dominated by invasive Norway maples with native mixed oaks species, sassafras, sumacs, and American yew. It also is covered with invasives such as tree of heaven, mugwort, Japanese knotweed and American pokeweed. We worked both Beacon Hill and along Townsend Avenue, which we usually named as upper and lower parts of the park respectively. The core members of the group this summer were Sam Sigg, Ann, Kelvin and Liz. The group was supported by eight paid youth work crews (5 from ACES and 5 from Common Ground), as well as 5 volunteers from YSE’s Society of Ecological Restoration. Together we have accomplished cleaning and weeding the garden near the memorial stone of Beacon Hill. We retained young Sassafras (Sassasfras albidum) to maintain a multi-storied forest structure based on the recommendation of the Greenspace Manager during one of his site visits. In addition to stewarding the garden, we planted two trees in Beacon Hill, i.e. 1 Shumard Oak (Quercus shumardii) and 1 Dogwood (Cornus kousa) to fill empty spaces of the park boundary. We also planted 3 eastern white pine in the urban oasis site. We accomplished cleaning the forest by removing invasives, vines, and debris. We piled these removals into a location to provide habitat for the wildlife. Sam would use his spare time to remove wisteria and English ivy along the trails. Based on my personal observation, the number of visitors in the park is increasing daily and at some point, Sam met with some ornithologists who informed him of having high diversity of birds. The park hosts habitat for wildlife such as migrating birds, turtles, salamanders, deer, fox, raccoon, turkey, coyote, etc.

2024 Accomplishments

• 5 trees planted (1 Shumard Oak,1 dogwood, Kousa and 3 eastern white pine)
• 25 events
• 18 volunteers
• 273 volunteer hours