Once an industrialist’s hunting reserve, Thorn Creek Woods Nature Preserve in Park Forest remains open to everyone 55 years after a group of neighbors formed the Walnut Hill Gang to fight a p…
An 1865 church building that was moved from Richton Park became the nature center for Thorn Creek Woods preserve in the 1970s, after it was refurbished by volunteers. The hiking paths at Thorn Creek Woods Nature Preserve are rife with vestiges of the people who care about the place.
Arthur Mall, a native of Hammond, Indiana, who established a successful tool company in Milwaukee in the 1920s before moving Mall Tool to a South Side plant along South Chicago Avenue at 77th Street, had aspirations for a more serene operation. But the best, most scenic parts of the acreage were turned into a private retreat. There was a “picnic grove,” where hundreds of his employees could gather for events, and “more than 40,000 evergreen trees have been planted in a carefully planned landscaping scheme,” the 1952 story stated. Some of those were planted to outline the name “MALL” on a hillside a bit west of the factory.
Despite Remington’s firearms heritage, the company didn’t share Mall’s hunting lodge vision for the land south of Park Forest, and the acreage was sold off. Among the largest buyers was Nathan Manilow, who’d played a crucial part in developing Park Forest as a model postwar community. A group of neighbors met in 1969 in a backyard along Stunkel Road to figure out what to do. They dubbed themselves the Walnut Hill Gang and vowed to fight the development. It proved to be a popular idea.
The effort grew into the Thorn Creek Preservation Association, and members recruited some allies powerful in their own right, including then Lt. Gov. Paul Simon and attorney Victor Yannacone, a founder of the Environmental Defense Fund who was instrumental in getting the pesticide DDT banned. Simon visited at the behest of the Thorn Creek backers — “They feted him and had dinner at someone’s house” — and was among a bevy of officials who were led down “deer trails and introduced to the woods.”
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