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area into a “park,” plowing up the wildflowers and sodding it with blue 
grass. They seem favorable, however, to the idea of selling it for a preserve. 
The McCook prairie, 160 acres between Plainfield Road and 55th Street, 
west of East Avenue, near the village of McCook, is notable for its size. 
As you stand in its midst and feel the wind blowing and hear the plaintive 
cries of the two pairs of upland plover and killdeer, you can easily imagine 
that you are inded on the “lone prairie.” Besides the more usual prairie 
flowers one finds here Seneca snakeroot, a small white-flowered plant, and 
prairie parsley, Polytaenia nuttallu, as well as lovely yellow painted cups. 
The excellent prairie which borders Dolton Avenue a quarter mile west 
of Torrence Avenue, a little to the north of Shabbona Woods Forest Pre- 
serve, is remarkable for its spectacular display of blazing star, and also 
for the presence of the rare prairie mimosa, Desmanthes illinoiensis. It is 
to be hoped that this fine piece of land can be added to the adjoining Cook 
County Forest Preserves. 
Of the larger tracts, the area of the low dunes and prairie north of 
Winthrop Harbor in Wisconsin is excellent. It is gravely threatened by a 
huge real estate project. 
A large area of dunes and prairie is to be found along both sides of 
Clark Road, north of Highway 12 and west of Gary. This is the famous 
Clarke described by the earlier botanists of the region, with white, yellow 
and showy ladies’ slippers. Mr. Swink writes: “This area in June is the 
most beautiful spot anywhere around Chicago, with its thousands of Indian 
paint brush, golden ragwort, prairie phlox, wood betony, hoary puccoon, 
hairy puccoon, blue-eyed grass, yellow star grass and lesser amounts of 
orange-red lily, lead plant, purple prairie clover, stiff sandwort and sand 
cress.” 
The Tolleston tract is a huge area, containg some residences, between 
Kennedy Avenue in Hammond and Chase Avenue in Gary, and between 
1ith and 25th Avenues. One of the best spots is the marsh just west of 
Whitcomb Street, together with a natural sandy prairie and woods _ be- 
tween the future 15th and 16th Streets. It contains thousands of fringed 
gentians, sundew, rose pogonia, rose-pink Sabatia, now very rare; priarie 
talinum or flame-flower, also very rare; large ladies’ tresses, and the ex- 
quisite calopogon. 
Besides these areas easily accessible to Chicago, there is a very fine 
one more convenient to down-staters. This 2,000-acre tract in Will and 
Kankakee Counties extends four miles due south of the Kankakee River, 
beginning at State Highway 113-S at a point eight miles south of Wilming- 
ton and two miles southeast of the village of Custer Park. This is the only 
area remaining in the state large enough and typical enough to serve Illi- 
nois as a Prairie State Park. Mr. Roberts Mann of the Forest Preserve 
District of Cook County wrote in his “‘Nature Bulletin No. 104,” February 
22, 1947, of the uplands and wet prairies, wooded knolls, sloughs, and sand 
dunes as follows: “There are various types of soil and all the various types 
of prairie plants. We have walked over this tract with eminent botanists 
at different times of the year. Its beauty defies description. A list of the 
species of native prairie plants, some of them very rare today, most of 
