The City That Bought a Forest

Eagle Creek Park is one of the largest municipal parks in the United States, covering nearly thirty-nine hundred acres of forest and fourteen hundred acres of reservoir. The land has an unusual backstory. From the nineteen thirties through the fifties, pharmaceutical heir Josiah K.

Lilly Junior assembled it as a private country estate and reforested it himself. He donated it to Purdue University in nineteen fifty-eight, and the city of Indianapolis bought it from Purdue in nineteen sixty-six after serious flooding of Eagle Creek made a reservoir necessary. The Eagle Creek Dam was finished in nineteen sixty-eight.

The park officially opened on June tenth, nineteen seventy-two. Today it draws more than a million visitors a year and remains one of Indianapolis's most defining green spaces, a rare stretch of old-growth woodland tucked inside a major American city.