The Origins Of The Preserves

Long before there was a Cook County, this region where tallgrass prairie meets eastern forest was home to a breathtaking mosaic of landscapes. The forest preserves in Cook County are located on the ancestral homelands of the Council of Three Fires, a long-standing Anishinaabe alliance of the Ojibwe (or Chippewa), Ottawa (or Odawa), and Potawatomi North American Native tribes. These lands have also been home and a place of trade for many other tribes, including the Fox, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Meskwaki, Miami, and Sauk people.

For centuries, these Native Americans cared for and protected these lands, until ownership was largely stolen from them by U.S. colonizers. By the turn of the 20th century, with a great city growing here, civic leaders like Dwight Perkins and Jens Jensen recognized that it was essential to preserve these native landscapes for people to enjoy for centuries to come. They worked for years to establish the nation’s first – and now largest (70,000 acres) – forest preserve district.

In more recent history, the forest preserves have encountered a great deal of abuse and neglect. Invasive brush turned thousands of acres into impassible thorn thickets, preserve land was sold, and trash littered the landscape. A new group of civic leaders, people just like you, formed Friends of the Forest Preserves in 1998 to rescue these treasured lands, knowing that to maintain their vast rewards and ensure they’re here for all of us to enjoy, we’d have to work just as hard as the visionary citizens who protected them more than a century ago.