Watkinsville Woods is an amazing preserve of history and foliage

There are a lot of jewels buried in the acreage that is known as Watkinsville Woods.

Council members Mike Huff and Brian Brodrick did their dad gum best to transform this jewel Saturday morning with help from Cub Scouts, Boy Scout, pack leaders and many more people from the professional world like Walt Cook of Cook's Trail or Gary Grider of Athens have all put in considerable hours long before this second volunteer clearing of the park.

The history of the area remains subject of much speculation as a both a religious area and a place of washing clothes with earthen dams to bolster the outdoor laundry facilities.

There are still bed frames and heater boxes and other debris in the back yards of some residences connected to the park, but lots of barbed wire were yanked out of the ground this time.

The tools employed for this adventure in man and woman power were amazing unto themselves, and borrowed from the bike trail making group SORBA, which has some irony since this park is meant to be anything but a bike path. It was very empowering to create something from nothing in an area to be enjoyed by everyone soon enough.

This area is hidden for sure, and the City is considering what kind of fence to provide for the neighbors both on the driveway adjacent to Jackson Terrace and any other areas on the peripheries of Watkinsville Woods. I am sure we will get some signage eventually to enlighten those who do not know this area exists, even here in Watkinsville.

This work was done on a loop designed to eventually be accessible to those in wheelchairs and walkers, and thus earned the sobriquet ADA Loop for the group of trailblazers using fire fighting tools to remove roots, scrub, plants of all kinds, were chopped, dug, yanked, and otherwise carted away and raked with the ominous tools light years beyond my pedestrian lopers.

Among the more fascinating details I learned that day is that there is a purple leafed orchid that appears in all 159 counties of Georgia that seemed to really dig this place and it was otherwise hidden from my untrained eye.

We removed non-purple leafed plants from between the blue flags marking the paths and had waves of people almost sifting the soil to remove as much of the invasive debris as possible. Marking the trails with some kind of boarding and mulch would seem to be the next steps (although I am not at all certain what is the process).

I am NOT talking about jewels in the sense of rubies and diamonds but instead golden memories and history and a flash of how life was run in days gone past. The Fox family, the flora and fauna, trees, the creeks, the gullies, the place where people used to get preached to, the place where people used to do the laundry, the tulip poplars, all these and more. Sure there is lots left to do but the pass that were cut yesterday with tools I had never used before was an amazing first step in the process, and really its a second or third or fourth step at the very least.

The park will have an exit behind the Chapelle Gallery and giving Jackson Street residents a way to get to downtown without having to tread on Main Street.

Happy 51st anniversary to Kathy and Jerry Chappelle by the way.