The farmstead land on the Tryon Grove Parcel will be restored to natural prairie with the help of the Environmental Stewardship Initiative Grant from Nicor.
Two key workdays have really advanced this project. In October 2023 Harvard High School students took a school field trip to the Hackmatack NWR Turner site outside Genoa City, Wisconsin and collected prairie seed there for our restoration activities. (pictured below)
The second event took place in November of 2023, when a USFWS training session was held for volunteer chain-sawyers at the Tryon Grove site. They cut down all the larger trees on the site as part of their training exercise, leaving only an oak and two apple trees.
Brush piles that were created on one of the initial stewardship workdays, preparing the area for the chain sawyers to come in and finish cutting the larger trees.
Friends of Hackmatack chainsawyers completed federal S212 chainsaw training which will enable them to use chainsaws on the Hackmatack refuge.
A major bonus is that the training took place on the Tryon Grove refuge site, where many large trees had to come down as part of the restoration planned for the site. We got almost all the trees cut, including all the big ones!
Nine volunteer sawyers worked for 6 hours one day and the next day, 6 volunteer sawyers worked another 4 hours. That’s 78 hours of chain saw work!
January, 2025: Project Completion Report Summary
45.5 acre site, located on the north side of Tryon Grove Rd., approx. 2 miles west of Route 31, Richmond, IL
Project Goal: to restore the 2.58 acre homestead to prairie, and thereby add it to the larger, already restored prairie on the site.
The project was completed with 137 individuals, putting in 428 hours of volunteer labor.
Invasive species were removed, controlled burns were utilized, and pollinator species were planted. 2.58 acres of old farmstead were seeded with native prairie seed.
This land is part of Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge, and accessible to the public.
Thank you to Nicor Gas, to the volunteer workers, and to the high school students who helped to collect seed for this project!