Prairie Site Is A Work In Progress

Nearly a year after President Clinton authorized its creation, the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie appears to have arrived - at least symbolically - as a Midwest travel destination.

There are many interesting things to see at what conservationists equate to a Midwest version of Yellowstone National Park. But public access to the proposed 19,000-acre prairie park south of Joliet, Ill., remains strictly limited and always supervised.

More than 30 miles of chain-link security fence remain intact at the Army-owned prairie site, much of which served as an agricultural buffer for a huge munitions manufacturing complex that operated intermittently for nearly 50 years.

Recent signs indicate that public access to what U.S. Forest Service personnel describe as a work in progress will increase over the next year.

And inclusion of the prairie’s name in this year’s edition of the Rand McNally & Co. Road Atlas has put Midewin on the map literally and figuratively. The popular map book, surpassed in annual book sales only by the Bible, according to a Rand McNally spokesman, no longer refers to the site as the Joliet Army Ammunition Plant.

Though few in number so far, visitors have begun arriving, their trusty atlases in hand, in search of the largest tall-grass prairie east of the Mississippi, according to Midewin public affairs officer Pat Thrasher.

“‘Where is it?’ they ask. And our response has been, ‘It’s there, but it’s a work in progress’ and will be for 20 years or more,” said Thrasher.

“It is a prairie in the sense that we have a couple of areas that are native prairie. But in terms of a prairie ecosystem, we’re not there yet. It’s going to take time.”

For a few years, refuge employees will essentially be farming to produce plant material and seeds that will be used to begin prairie restoration.