GREENFIELD — Nestled near a neighborhood on the northeast side of Greenfield, Henry B. Wilson Park draws only a handful of residents. Some watch birds, while others simply explore the wooded area.
The city’s parks and recreation leaders hope that will soon change. The department is establishing about a mile-long trail that weaves through the wooded park, giving runners, hikers and mountain bikers a chance to travel along one of the only non-paved park trails in Greenfield.
The park is a triangular parcel adjacent to Interstate 70, east of the city’s hotel cluster at the State Road 9 interchange.
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Jeremiah Schroeder, recreation director for the Greenfield Parks and Recreation Department, and Mitch Doran, owner of the Family Bike Chain store in downtown Greenfield, have spent countless hours forming the Wilson Park trail since last fall. Much of it they’ve made by hand, Schroeder said, using shovels, mattocks and axes to clear away the overgrown brush and branches throughout the property.
But despite that work and the progress made, the rainy weather has held off the parks department from officially opening the trail, Schroeder said. Some of the branches have quickly grown back, hanging over the once-cleared trail, and parts of the wooded area are flooded with water from Brandywine Creek inside Wilson Park, which is adjacent to the Brandywine Village Neighborhood.
Schroeder said he’s hoping to put the finishing touches on the trail and open it within the next month.
Most trails in Greenfield, such as pathways through parks or the Pennsy Trail, are paved, which doesn’t provide a challenge to some runners or bicyclists, Schroeder said. Through parks department surveys, he said he found out that many people in the city wanted unpaved trails as a different recreational activity.
Doran, who’s operated his bike shop downtown since 2017, said a few of his customers who like to ride mountain bikes have to travel to Brown County, to trails in Indianapolis or go out of state. Schroeder, a mountain biker himself, said the new course can introduce cyclists to the sport.
The trail has options for bicyclists and runners based on their skill level, Schroeder said. Parts of the course lie in flat areas through grassy fields, and other tighter offshoots of the trail on higher ground.
“We know we’re not Brown County; we know we’re not the Smokey Mountains, (places) that have big-time elevation changes,” Schroeder said.
Since the Brandywine Creek flows through Wilson Park, a few sections of the trail commonly floods. Colton Kiser, a Greenfield Boy Scout from Troop 242, has agreed to build a few 5-by-16-foot wooden walkways over areas prone to flooding along the trail for his Eagle Scout project.
Colton, 16, plans to build and install the walkways by the end of June. He hopes the new trail might draw in more people to Wilson Park.
“I guess I can describe it like an older house,” he said about the park. “Once it gets cleaned up real nice, it really shines.”
Schroeder said as they near completion of the trail in the coming weeks, anyone interested in volunteering to clean up the park can contact the parks department at 317-477-4340.
