Spring 2005

Memories of 104th Avenue

A restoration volunteer explores her own past
and a hopeful future on the prairie.

By Dorothy Turay Petraitis

I can still pick my way through the dense prairie and find my former home site. When I was nine, my entire neighborhood, a farming community of sixteen families in Bremen Township, now Orland Park, Illinois, was forced to move by decree of eminent domain. It was 1966, and the Forest Preserve District had bought the land — 960 acres, all told — as part of an overall plan to save open space in southwestern Cook County. I thought it was the worst possible fate in the world, to be wrenched from the sweet security of lifelong friends and neighbors and watch familiar homes and barns torn down.

My parents had moved there more than a decade earlier, to five acres on 104th Avenue that my grandfather bought in the 1930s. My father, a salesman, craved the quiet country life away from the crush and noise of the city, and my mother reluctantly agreed. I recall the openness of the land: acres of corn and hay, some soybeans, but mostly the clean swaths of land. Garter snakes and pheasants, brown thrashers, and lots of spiders roamed about. Gangs of crows pecked the cornfields. Over the open plains, barns, cows, and horses crafted a country skyline. A spring bubbled to the surface at the back of our property. As kids, we’d head down to the creek by 175th Street to play with salamanders, snakes, and snails. Red foxes, cottontail rabbits, and woodchucks cavorted, keeping company with crickets, butterflies, and dragonflies.

Idyllic summers were the best of all. I’d awaken as soon as the sun’s rays lit up the eastern sky. Walking out in pajamas, I’d view the rosy horizon and see the fields hushed and slippery with the morning dew. Cocks crowed and birds started to chirp and flutter in their cozy nests. I padded silently through the waist-high “weeds,” breathing the damp, fragrant air. Some of what we called weeds were really prairie plants hanging on at the fields’ edges: asters, brown-eyed Susans, and milkweed. I didn’t know what I was really looking at then; I only knew how much I loved the nature around me.

The long days stretched the daylight, making time for strawberry picking, four-leaf clover hunts, tree climbing, and eating green apples. Summer evenings, while the air throbbed with insect mating calls, the neighborhood kids gathered for games of Hide-and-Seek and Simon Says. When darkness descended, moms hollered for us to come in, but we begged to stay out late to feel the cool night dew slip over us, soothing our sweaty bodies. If we were lucky, one of our brothers would tell us the ghost story of the crazy old coot who lived in the old stagecoach house. (“One day,” they would whisper conspiratorily, “he was found hanging from a rafter in the barn, and all the animals had mysteriously disappeared. His soul is thought to wander the farm, looking for his livestock and misbehaving children.”)

Today, volunteers are restoring the property to grassland, encouraging prairie birds and butterflies to return. The land’s broad, rolling hills offer great views and places to explore. Photo by John Weinstein.

Autumn turned the fields into a beautiful sea of muted grays and browns. The longer nights encouraged stargazing, each of us hoping to be the first to spot a falling star. The still, quiet beauty of the night-blackened sky, pierced with starlight, awakened a sense of awe and mystery in us.

In the winter, we would wish for snow to build igloos and snow tunnels. Sleds, some mere slabs of cardboard, came out of storage for slippery winter fun. Groups of kids walked through the frozen fields with shovels and ice skates in hand to clear a snow-covered pond for a rowdy game of “Snap the Whip.”

Spring meant playing in puddles, making mud pies, and watching with wonder as the earth revealed tender new shoots of bright green grass, luscious new buds on trees, and colorful carpets of flowers. In late April and early May, our mothers sent us out with paper bags to hunt the ditches for wild asparagus.

Our notification from the Forest Preserve District to move probably came sometime in 1965. I, however, would burn all the letters bearing a government seal by getting to the mailbox first. We had an old wood-burning stove in the garage, and I made good use of it. Thus, I delayed the inevitable for a while until an official showed up at our door one evening. Thank goodness for my understanding mother!

After the Forest Preserve acquisition, my family relocated to nearby Orland Township. I grew up and moved to Denver, but would always visit the “old place” to see my original home when I came back for a visit. In 1990, I moved back to Chicago and got married. In 1996, my husband and I bought my parents’ place in Orland Township. One day, I read an article in a local paper about the Orland Grassland Volunteers, members of the surrounding community who were doing ecological restoration on the land where my family had once lived.

Now called the Orland Grassland, the parcel is still owned by the Forest Preserve District. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Corlands, Audubon-Chicago Region, and the Village of Orland Park have all played a role in the huge amount of work done so far to return the water to the wetlands, clear giant swaths of invasive brush, and reseed the land. Before I knew it, I was pitching in at workdays, pulling invasive weeds and cutting invasive brush — all with the goal of restoring 750 rolling acres to the prairie ecosystem that existed long before the farmers arrived. The rest of the 960-acre preserve will be natural wetlands, ponds, shrubland, and oak woods.

The Orland volunteers are a vibrant, dedicated bunch, wholly committed to this job. I am happy to be a small part of that hard-working team. The work and dedication make the transition from farm to prairie a hopeful vision for the future.

Dorothy in her halcyon days, with dad. The land was originally open prairie and savanna, and it remained open under agriculture. Invasive trees later crept in. Photo courtesy of the Turay family.

I knew a lot about how to find happiness when I was nine. Many years later, I’m finding the basics haven’t changed much. I feel gratified to see the land open, flower, and attract native animals, in addition to acting as a public venue for education. My mother used to refer to open spots in the city as prairies, but even on all that open land, I never understood the true meaning of that word until the Grasslanders opened my eyes. A true prairie, given space and time, is a wondrous miracle to behold.

Now, in view of the rampant development in the southwest suburbs, I am happy and grateful to see the former neighborhood preserved. Farmers in our area are all but gone, displaced by the rapid rise of real estate values in southwestern Cook County. Their fertile land disappears under subdivisions, as pavement and streetlights replace fields and choke out the stars.

The whole experience of losing my home and seeing it come back to its natural state is a Zen life-lesson of hope and renewal. In the end, it was by letting go that I managed to hang onto the quality of life I so desperately wanted to keep.

Visitors can enter the Orland Grassland just west of LaGrange Road (Rt. 45) and south of 167th Street. To check out the workday schedule or learn more about the plants and animals, visit the Orland Grassland Web site.

Related Articles:

Orland Tract Grassland Restoration (CW, News of the Wild, Winter 2003)
Wes Serafin Monitors Birds at Orland (CW, Winter 2004)