Two Rivers Park remembers its roots

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/CELIA STOREY
New signs on the Two Rivers Park Learning Circle in Pulaski County's section of Two Rivers Park highlight water birds and animals as well as fishing regulations, but they also acknowledge the park's history as a penal farm.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/CELIA STOREY New signs on the Two Rivers Park Learning Circle in Pulaski County's section of Two Rivers Park highlight water birds and animals as well as fishing regulations, but they also acknowledge the park's history as a penal farm.

Central Arkansas has its share of mysterious protuberances left upon the landscape 1,000 years ago by ancient mound-building people. But the big bump in Two Rivers Park is not one of them.

Pulaski County erected the mound that rises incongruously from otherwise level land around the lollipop loop that is Two Rivers Park Road.

Much, but not all, the dirt piled up below a layer of dormant sod was scraped up within the 1,000-acre park. But as County Judge Buddy Villines recently explained, some of it came from channels dug elsewhere in the county, where Central Arkansas Water laid new wastewater pipes.

“It basically was brought in to create that as part of the trail system,” Villines said, while looking up at the mound after a public dedication of the spot as the Two Rivers Learning Circle on Dec. 19.

An artificial mound is in keeping with the county project to create a nature park on the land, Villines said.

“The whole idea was to create this experience that will draw people, get them out of their cars and off their couches and come out,” he said. “I think that at some point we’ll have people coming up with acoustic guitars and giving little mini concerts here, with the berm as the [stage].”

Besides the mound, or berm (which is topped by an inaccurate sundial), the circle’s landscaping includes a small garden of saplings wrapped to protect them from the park’s estimated 150 to 200 deer.

Looking over the trees are seven interpretive signs created by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s Watchable Wildlife experts.

Other new interpretive signs mark accesses to the Little Maumelle River, 8.5 miles of which have been designated as an official Arkansas Water Trail; the county’s new overlook on the river; a trail head near public restrooms; and a field next to the park’s struggling Garden of Trees that will be left fallow to see what happens.

Two Rivers Park has older interpretive signs about wildlife on the section of the peninsula that belongs to the city of Little Rock, but this new set is remarkable because one panel acknowledges the history of the land as the Pulaski County penal farm.

The research was done by students at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Villines said, and landscape architect Tanner Weeks found old photographs to illustrate it.

Older residents remember that, until 1974 when it was closed by order of a federal judge, the county’s 600 acres of land was farmed by inmates.

Speaking at the dedication, Villines said, “Lo these many years ago, when I first took office [in 1984], people were wanting me to sell this property for development, for whatever, a golf course. A justice of the peace wanted to turn it back into a prison farm. And I got out here and I drove around in a pickup from one end to the other, and I thought ‘Here’s 1,000 acres in the middle of an urbanizing area. We just can’t let that go.’”

The land is not “a natural area,” he said. “It was a prison. And it was all cleared for that purpose.

“What we said we’d do is a nature park. And a nature park, in my definition, is where people are attracted and they get out, walk, and they see nature. They get to experience that here in an urbanizing area where you have thousands of people now. Two Rivers Park bridge since April of ’12, has had 900,000 people on it, and they’re coming over here and they’re coming down through this park.”

ActiveStyle, Pages 25 on 12/30/2013

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