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Council plans to vote on putting the 66 acres into a conservation easement.
By Tim Thornton
RADFORD -- Wildwood
Park is not a wilderness
experience. There's a paved trail for bikers and steps built into the hiking
trails and benches planted where a person might need to rest or watch Connellys
Run run downhill to the New River.
But it is a special place to the community. Maybe as much as 66 acres of
trees and nature right where East Radford used to meet West
Radford.
"That's, in my opinion, one of the jewels of the city," said Mayor
Tom Starnes.
It's in the middle of everything, yet it's away, too.
That's why Starnes and the rest of the Radford City Council want to put a
conservation easement on the property. Conservation easements put permanent
restrictions on land development. In exchange, private land owners get state
and federal tax credits and deductions. Owners keep title to the property, but
the protective easements apply to all future owners. Radford won't get tax
breaks, but the city will get to protect an area that holds endangered species,
history and a regenerative effect for park visitors.
"I don't know that it would ever happen, but all it would take is three
affirmative votes and the city could sell that property," Starnes said.
In fact, he said, the city bought part of the land that would be covered by
the conservation easement from a would-be developer.
"It's such a beautiful little respite in the middle of the city,"
Radford resident Sarah Dunleavy said Tuesday.
Dunleavy had been at the park that morning with her 15-month-old daughter,
Sophia, and her 9-month-old puppy, Shep.
Shep was sleeping off the run while Dunleavy was being interviewed.
They're at the park nearly every day, Dunleavy said, sometimes more than
once. She likes the exercise. It's helped socialize Shep and it lets him burn
off excess energy. And Dunleavy and her daughter are learning about the birds
and the plants that live just a five-minute walk from their house along the
Virginia Birding and Wildlife Trail that runs through the park.
Those plants include juniper sedge, a plant that grows in only three states.
The park is one of only three sites in Virginia
where it grows. The park holds three other rare plants and one ecosystem Virginia's Natural
Heritage Program considers "significant."
Ruth Babylon, an easement specialist with the Virginia Outdoors Foundation,
said she's worked on a hundred of the documents, but no property she's worked
on has packed as much into 60 or so acres as Wildwood Park.
"It's packed with what we call 'public conservation values,' " Babylon said. "Of
course, I'm a little partial. I just love that place."
Besides being home to endangered plants and a tributary of an American
Heritage River, Wildwood Park is in the middle of a city, which means
recreation and education opportunities galore. That's a quality-of-life issue
that the city's leaders appreciate and are trying to protect. Dunleavy said the
park is one of the reasons her family moved across the city a few months ago.
And then there's all that history.
American Indians used Adams
Cave as a burial site
before contact with Europeans. During the War of 1812, it was a mine for
potassium nitrate, a component of gunpowder.
Arnheim, home of John Radford -- the man Radford is named for -- stands at
the edge of the park. Now on the National Register of Historic Places, it was a
target for Union artillerymen during the Battle of Central. They shelled the
land around the house, including the park.
More recently, rock was quarried from what's now the park's entrance to fill
in the gap that separated East Radford from West Radford
and to build Main Street.
The property brought the two towns together in another fashion when it
became a park and Radford's first swimming pool was built there in 1929. The
next year the park got its name, and a Radford State Teacher's College student
won $25 for coming up with "Wildwood
Park."
During World War II, Boy Scouts tore down a metal bridge across Connellys
Run so the metal could be used in the war effort. The Scouts built a wooden
bridge in its place.
The pool, which was filled with Connellys Run's icy water, was closed twice
in the 1950s for fear of a polio outbreak. It closed for good in 1965. The
official reason was the pool's poor physical condition, but the announcement
was made months after a black family integrated the pool. In previous summers,
black residents were allowed to use the pool only in the last three weeks of
the season. But it became apparent in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1965
that segregation couldn't survive in Radford's pool. Eventually the old pool
was filled with dirt, but part of its wall and railing are still visible.
Though the park was closed, people continued to use it, hiking there and
restoring trails and bridges. A decade ago, there was talk of putting a road
through the park, but residents put an end to that and saved the park.
Now the city is on the verge of saving Wildwood Park
forever. City council gave preliminary approval to a permanent easement Monday.
Next month, the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, a state agency charged with
seeing that the terms of the easement are honored, will vote on the plan.
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