Content created in partnership with Milwaukee County Parks Wehr Nature Center.

This weekend, the Wehr Nature Center, 9701 W. College Ave. in Franklin, toasts its 50th anniversary as “a place for all seasons, a place for everyone.”

The celebration, called “Rooted and Growing,” looks at the center’s past, present and future, says Director Carly Hintz.

“This is quite possibly the biggest milestone for the nature center,” Hintz says. “It's really been a treat to be able to soak in the history and think about not only our past, but also where we are headed next. We really have tried to keep that lens on for our planning for this event.”

The celebration, which runs from 1 to 4 p.m. and is free and open to all, starts with remarks from Hintz, Milwaukee County Parks Director Guy Smith and Todd Wehr Foundation chair Allan Iding.

Also addressing the crowd will be County Executive David Crowley, whose annual Healthy County Challenge series works to get county residents into parks, trails, nature areas, beaches, and other outdoor spaces in the name and spirit of physical and mental wellness.

Then, at 1:30, there will be a group hike to the oak savanna for the planting of a commemorative tree.

At 2 p.m., attendees are encouraged to hit the more than five miles of trails to enjoy nature, see what the Wehr offers and take part in a self-guided scavenger hunt.

At 3:30 p.m., head back to the amphitheater for cake, light refreshments and a puppet show.

There will also be historical displays, a youth photo contest, representatives from community partners and clubs, and more.

Afterward, more than 75 former Wehr staffers and volunteers will gather for an alumni reunion.

Hintz will have the “future” part covered herself, she says.

“I'll also be inviting people to look at our five-year site improvement plan,” she says. “So really looking at what's next, whether it's new buildings, new infrastructure, new changes to our trails and other opportunities that we're working on.”

As for the “past” part, no one knows that better than Wehr’s Park Naturalist Bev Bryant, as I learned recently when she led Hintz and I on a stroll along the trails that was part nature walk and part history tour.

“If you'd have come and dropped in here in 1925,” Bryant begins as we stand alongside the man-made Mallard Lake, on a spot that was originally used as a beach, “Mallard Lake wouldn't have been here at all. “Part of our landscape is very old and unchanged. A lot of our landscape that people think is really old is 80 years old. Depression era.”

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While the Wehr Nature Center is officially 50, it’s story really goes back further than that and, like many of our parks, it owes a great debt to Charles Whitnall, one of Milwaukee’s famed socialists who served as a Milwaukee County Park Commissioner from that body’s founding in 1907 until 1941 and was a member of the City of Milwaukee’s Board of Public Land Commissioners during roughly the same period.

Whitnall got his start in his father’s gardening and floral business, which he inherited and which led him to create the now-ubiquitous “FTD” system of ordering and delivering of flowers.

“He was involved in a group of civic leaders that were interested in building out Milwaukee's parks,” Bryant explains. “Everyone who describes him always uses the word visionary. At the time people thought he was kind of crazy or eccentric.”

When he began working toward creating the park that now bears his name – originally called Hales Corners Park – some couldn’t understand Whitnall’s vision.

“‘What are you even talking about? Why in the world would people leave the city of Milwaukee to come way out here to Hales Corners and Franklin to go to a park',” says Bryant, echoing the doubters. “‘Why do we need to do that?’ ‘Why do we want to connect our riverways?’ He had this big idea that people cannot be their best selves in a city.

“He thought cities themselves were not going to exist in the future. The future was going to be more utopian where people all live in this sort of environment.”

Still, Whitnall pushed and in 1920 land – including numerous farmsteads – was purchased to create the 660-acre park and the adjacent 3,266-acre Root River Parkway.

“(It was) a pretty grand plan to include a formal gardens, to include a nature education center, to include golf courses and more traditional recreational things,” Bryant says. “And he had a landscape architect named Alfred Boerner, who helped to develop those ideas.

“So here they are, they got this big idea, they have some plans and then the Depression hits. (President Franklin Delano) Roosevelt comes up with the New Deal and the idea of putting people back to work, and so the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) needs shovel-ready projects.”

Voila, Whitnall and Boerner have a workforce to make their vision a reality.

“The economic disaster that was the Depression was a good thing for the park,” says Bryant. “Who knows what would've happened if we hadn't been able to find that other source of revenue to build it all.”

In 1933, the CCC arrived on site and built barracks called Camp Whitnall – located on what is now the Boerner Botanical Gardens parking lot and trial gardens area – and about 300 men started to build a park – scooping out about 150,000 cubic yards of earth to create Mallard Lake (soil that created the rise upon which the Wehr Nature Center building now sits), building roads and bridges, planting trees, creating the waterfall and more.

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“They had mostly young men from the Chicago area that came and stayed here,” notes Bryant. “A lot of our Milwaukee boys went further north. They were here in the park from ‘33 to I think ‘38 or ‘39. And since the infrastructure was all here, when the war started in ‘41, they actually used Camp Whitnall(‘s barracks) for the Billy Mitchell air base.”

Due to the war, progress at the park came to halt and didn’t get going again until the late ‘40s or early ‘50s, says Bryant, and in 1952, a real tangible seed of the Wehr Nature Center sprouted in the form of the first nature trail.

Whitnall Park's superintendent at the time, John Voigt, tapped student Phil Whitford to create the hiking trail, which remains part of the Wehr trail system today.

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The route was a hit.

“People were using it,” says Bryant, “and then in the early ‘60s, they started to move on and said, ‘Let's start planning for a nature center.’ Things that were happening on a national level to say we need to take better care of the earth started coming up here. We found a letter from a whole bunch of garden associations and Audubon clubs saying, ‘We are doing these good little things off all on our own, but we need a hub. We need a central place. We need someplace that's going to promote and shepherd these ideas forward.’

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“So they were starting to do political advocacy work saying we need a county nature center, and they drew the original plans by 1964.”

Around the same time that County Parks Landscape Planner Robert Mikula was developing plans for the building, Whitford – no longer a student, now a professor – worked with botanist Arthur Ode to create the prairie on a former farm field located east of the parking lot, using seeds they collected from Madison’s Curtis Prairie.

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In 1970 County Executive John Doyne – who had worked on the park as a young man in the 1930s – connected with the Todd Wehr Foundation. Two years later, a $200,000 grant from the foundation was matched with funds from state and federal grants and the dream of a nature center building became a reality.

The new building was completed in 1974 and that June 14, the center was dedicated and opened.

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The following year, the trail was completed with the help of high school students. Though the planks have all pretty much been replaced by now, the original Wetland Trail boardwalk was built using seating planks that had been pulled out of County Stadium.

In 1981, the Friends of Wehr got started, helping the nature center in myriad ways (which you can read about here), not least of which has been in providing a steady supply of dedicated and hard working volunteers.

A decade later, stressed for space, the Wehr building was expanded with the addition of the Gardner Room and a remodeling and renovation of the rest of the facility.

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The Warbler Bridge was added in 2008 and the Early Childhood Playspace followed two years later. In 2015 the amphitheater was renovated and three years later another renovation added an accessible restroom to the building.

In 2020, the accessible pier was built, and in recent years the boardwalk has been expanded, too.

Of course, programming for children and adults has always been part of the Wehr, beginning in the days before the building even went up and that education component has been a through line in the center’s history.

“That idea that people need nature and nature needs people, especially children, was also a part of Whitnall’s vision,” says Bryant. “So having a nature education program here was always part of the plan. There were nature education activities happening here before the center was born.”

A century after Whitnall sparked the idea for the park that now carries his name, County Executive Crowley shares that vision and adds equity to the equation.

“Wehr Nature Center has been a beloved space for our community to learn, explore, and relax in nature for the past 50 years,” he says.

“I remain committed to celebrating our parks and ensuring equitable access to these important green spaces so every one of our residents can maintain a healthy lifestyle.”

The staff and volunteers at Wehr Nature Center work hard to keep it all moving forward.

“There's been a lot of good things, I think, leading up to this point,” says Wehr Director Hintz, “and we're excited to be able to share it and hopefully get other people excited, too, about what's next and about sustaining this place for the next 50 years.”

(NOTE: Historical photos courtesy of Wehr Nature Center.)