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May Theilgaard Watts and the Creation of the Illinois Prairie Path

One day while the naturalist May Theilgaard Watts was driving around the back roads in the flat countryside near her home in Naperville, Illinois, west of Chicago, she noticed a strip of weedy and seemingly abandoned land. This was the right-of-way of the defunct Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railway, which had fallen victim, like many other commuter trains, to the rise of the automobile. May Watts had an idea: This strip of land could become a public path.

In September 1963, May Theilgaard Watts wrote the following letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune, proposing that the right-of-way of the CA&E be converted to a walking trail. The ideas proposed in her letter led to the creation of the Illinois Prairie Path and inspired the Rails-to-Trails movement:

We are human beings. We are able to walk upright on two feet. We need a footpath. Right now there is a chance for Chicago and its suburbs to have a footpath, a long one.

The right-of-way of the Aurora electric road lies waiting. If we have courage and foresight, such as made possible the Long Trail in Vermont and the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia, and the network of public footpaths in Britain, then we can create from this strip a proud resource.

Look ahead some years into the future. Imagine yourself going for a walk on an autumn day. Choose some part of the famed Illinois footpath. Where the highway crosses it, you enter over a stile. The path lies ahead, curving around a hawthorn tree, then proceeding under the shade of a forest of sugar maple trees, dipping into a hollow with ferns, then skirting a thicket of wild plum, to straighten out for a long stretch of prairie, tall grass prairie, with big blue stem and blazing star and silphium and goldenrod.

You must go over a stile again, to cross a highway to another stile. This section is different. The grass is cut and garden flowers bloom in great beds. This part, you may learn, is maintained by the Chicago Horticultural Society. Beyond the garden you enter a forest again, maintained by the Morton Arboretum. At its edge begins a long stretch of water with mud banks, maintained for water birds and waders, by the Chicago Ornithological Society. You notice an abundance of red-fruited shrubs. The birds have the Audubon Societies to thank for those. You rest on one of the stout benches provided by the Prairie Club, beside a thicket of wild crab apple trees planted by the Garden Club of Illinois.

Then you walk through prairie again. Four Boy Scouts pass. They are hiking the entire length of the trail. This fulfills a requirement for some merit badge. A troop of Scouts is planting acorns in a grove of cottonwood trees. Most of the time you find yourself in prairie or woodland of native Illinois plants. These stretches of trail need little or no upkeep. You come to one stretch, a long stretch, where nothing at all has been done. But university students are identifying and listing plants. The University of Chicago ecology department is in charge of this strip. They are watching to see what time and nature will do.

You catch occasional glimpses of bicycles flying past, along one side. The bicycles entered through a special stile admitting them to the bicycle strip. They cannot enter the path where you walk, but they can ride far and fast without being endangered by cars, and without endangering those who walk.

That is all in the future, the possible future. Right now the right-of-way lies waiting, and many hands are itching for it. Many bulldozers are drooling.

-MAY THEILGAARD WATTS, letter to the editor, Chicago Tribune, September 25, 1963.

May Watts' letter inspired a dedicated group of volunteers who worked with her to make the trail a reality, and is generally credited with starting the rails-to-trails movement in the United States. (Watts' fantasy of a separate lane for bicycles did not come to pass. The IPP is shared today by bicyclists, joggers, users of motorized wheelchairs, and walkers afoot.)

May Watts had been inspired by the public foot paths of Britain (as she described in her book Reading the Landscape of Europe), and by the Appalachian Trail. Her proposal reflects her understanding that nature is interesting even in ordinary, long-inhabited places like northern Illinois, and that human beings need places to walk, where we can make intimate contact with the landscapes we inhabit.

In another letter, written during the campaign to preserve the right-of-way for a public path, Watts described what had been lost as the automobile came to dominate the landscape:

I remember lanes and byways where one could walk between fencerows full of hawthorn, wild plum, elderberry. I remember when the lanes were widened and hardened, and one needed to be alert, but there was still a footpath alongside, and a ditch with frogs, and fence-posts with meadowlarks. I remember when the road widened again, and the fencerows were blighted with weed-killer, but one could still walk on the edge, in gasoline fumes. And now the walker is often fenced out. He is illegal.

Is not the walker entitled to damages for his deprivations? Where slum clearance has displaced people, they are often given help in finding new homes. Then why is an erect, air-breathing, unmechanized human not entitled to recompense for his losses? We are willing to accept this 54-mile strip of footpath, for a start.