70 Acres Dedicated to Crossroads at Big Creek

Photo by Coggin Heeringa.

The Nature Conservancy donated almost 70 acres forested with large red oaks, tall pines, white cedar, hemlock, sugar maple and beech trees to Crossroads at Big Creek on Dec. 13.

“Crossroads was just a derelict orchard,” Crossroads director Coggin Heeringa said. “It completes the habitat picture – now we have the creek, now we have an old growth forest. It’s a part of the Door County habitat we didn’t have previously, and it is just beautiful.”

The land is known as the Ida Bay Forest, and it will boost Crossroad’s size from 125 acres to almost 200. It was donated to The Nature Conservancy in 1995 from the Ida Bay Estate, has been managed as a natural area and is supported by an endowment held by the Door County Community Foundation.

“[The Nature Conservancy] goes for large tracts of land so they can actually develop habitat and do large scale projects, and this is an almost an urban small parcel and it really didn’t fit in with their management program,” Heeringa said.

The forest is about a quarter mile south of the Crossroads’s Utah Street entrance, and is open for nature study and quiet recreation.

Bay donated $25,000 to Crossroads at Big Creek when she died in 1993. Heeringa had met her through her work with the Door County Historical Society.

“We believe that if we had been farther along I our development she would have maybe given it to crossroads in the first place,” Heeringa said.