Prairie Farmer Recreational Trail is 25 years old

CRESCO - It may be hard to believe, but the original Prairie Farmer Recreational Trail––from Cresco to the Howard County Nature Center––was built 25 years ago!

It was the year 2000, following several years of planning and purchasing property by a small committee of area individuals, that the newly formed organization could move ahead and make the trail a reality.

Gary Gooder, who was part of that original Prairie Farmer Recreational Trail Committee, gave a nice 15 minute speech following a Ribbon Cutting held at the Cresco Nature Center.  

Gooder praised numerous individuals involved with making the 3.5 mile trail come to life, creating a paved 10-foot wide path from the Balk Park in Cresco to the Nature Center near Vernon Springs.  

He noted that it “wasn’t easy” raising the money, getting the land, and “doing what we did,” but in the end it was such a wonderful project.  

“The cost to make this happen was $1 to 2 million dollars, where now it costs several million to just do one mile of trail,” said Gooder.  “We had some generous individuals help us with this project and no engineers were involved––just the expertise of a few farmers that knew how to how to put in a colvert properly.”

He stated there were 27 culverts put in to make this trail happen.”

Gooder also commented that most trails are only 8-foot wide, but this one is 10-foot, due to the group wanting to make it better, more safe and to make it a “little different” from other trails in the area.

For the fundraising efforts, Gooder stated they contacted “a lot of people and knocked on a lot of doors,” and even put on a phone-thon (with many of his own employees at Alum-line doing the calling) to get the funding needed. 

“We didn’t get any money through grants, but had to raise it through a lot of work and that is what’s unusual about this trail.”

Gooder stated that after the original trail was completed, they moved forward to build the new trailhead, again doing more fundraising. 

Once finished, the group moved on to “Phase 2” to build a new 20 mile stretch from Cresco to Calmar. 

“We took a bus load of people and went to Des Moines for that meeting just to support this project,” added Gooder. “We got the grant in April and by that fall we had over 20 miles asphalt. Nothing moves that fast . . . it was crazy what we got done.”