Kane County Forest Preserve District adds 33 acres to Bliss Woods preserve in Sugar Grove Township

The Bliss Woods Forest Preserve in Sugar Grove Township just grew in size after the Kane County Forest Preserve District recently closed on a roughly 33-acre addition.

The addition sits along Bliss Road, adjacent to the eastern section of the preserve, the Kane County Forest Preserve District said in a news release. It features intact forest-floor wildflowers and massive oaks, officials said.

First established in 1928, Bliss Woods is Kane County’s second-oldest forest preserve, according to the district.

Visitors to the preserve can see the last remnant of the Kaneville Esker, a winding ridge of gravel and rocks created by a river of water flowing underneath a melting glacier around 13,000 years ago, according to the forest preserve district. Most of the esker is gone after years of gravel mining.

The Virgil-Gilman Bike Trail also runs east and west through the preserve, connecting with the Hannaford Woods-Nickels Farm Forest Preserve, and with Waubonsee Community College to the northwest, per the forest preserve district.

The area also includes an 18-acre wetland basin on the north side of KeDeKa Road.

Portions of the forest preserve have Illinois State Nature Preserve status, and a group of volunteers works regularly to restore and maintain the health of the preserve, the district says.

The forest preserve district closed on the new property on Oct. 7, per the news release about the acquisition. It invested $545,985, or $16,500 per acre.

With the new addition, the preserve sits at about 268 acres.

“This purchase represents a step forward in our mission to protect local nature and provide more green spaces for everyone to enjoy,” Forest Preserve District President Bill Lenert said in the news release.

Included in the addition is the core of the woods that gave Sugar Grove its name, the forest preserve district said.

The village of Sugar Grove was named after a 500-acre woodland in 1834, according to the district. The area was known as Sin-Qua-Sip, which translates to “sugar grove,” in reference to the woods that served as a maple sugar camp for Indigenous people for generations. A little more than half of the historic grove still exists today, the district said.

Although large portions of the western woods have been protected for almost 100 years, and portions to the east protected since 1985, the southern core, long owned by the Aurora Sportsmen’s Club, remained unprotected, the forest preserve district said.

“These parcels hold some of the oldest forest still in existence in Kane County,” Benjamin Haberthur, the Kane County Forest Preserve District’s executive director, said in the news release. “The land has never been put to the plow, and the mature oak, maple and ash trees retain the forest structure found here hundreds of years ago.”

The new property had been privately owned since 2020, following decades of use by the gun club, according to the news release.

Two small areas require remediation because of lead contamination, according to the district, and those areas will be fenced off until funding is available for remediation, likely through grants. The remainder of the new addition will be available for the public to use.

According to Haberthur, the forest preserve is in a “unique position” to protect the woods and remediate this land, given that most other buyers would have needed an economic return to pay for remediation and would have removed the trees.

“These trees at Bliss Woods were under threat,” Haberthur said. “Without the public’s support for the Forest Preserve District, they would have been lost.”

mmorrow@chicagotribune.com