Hidden Gem - Cary/Fox River Grove: Picnic Grove Park has many faces
By BRETT ROWLAND – browland@nwherald.com
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| Picnic Grove Park in Fox River Grove offers residents year-round fun, including one of the area's largest sledding hills in the winter. (Travis Haughton – thaughton@nwherald.com) |
FOX RIVER GROVE – Picnic Grove Park long has been a hub for this village, its residents and scores of out-of-town visitors.
The 40-acre park that stretches along the south side of the Fox River near the Norge Ski Hill has changed dramatically over the years.
“Picnic Grove Park is a focal point and gathering place for not just Fox River Grove, but all of Chicagoland,” Village Treasurer Penny Toppel said.
Its confines have hosted everything from eponymous picnics to dance halls, barrooms, and even a ski hill. In the first few decades of the 20th century – the park’s heyday – it had the carnival atmosphere of a party thrown by Jay Gatsby.
Although it since has mellowed, the park still is a popular destination for picnics, sledding, fishing and boating. It also is the site for Fox River Grove’s annual summer fireworks show, firefighter water fights and other community events.
“Fox River Grove has far more river frontage than many other communities, and we have two great parks on the river – Picnic Grove Park and Lions Park,” said Dan Shea, who has lived in Fox River Grove for more than 50 years, been a longtime community leader, and served on the McHenry County Board. “It is fabulous the village was able to preserve Picnic Grove Park.”
Shea, who visits the park once or twice a week, has watched it evolve over the course of countless visits. He even worked as a police officer in the park during the 1960s.
Picnic Grove Park originally was designed and used as a spot to hold picnics, as its name implies. Companies including Proctor and Gamble and Deering Harvester Company would bring thousands of employees to the riverside park for corporate events, Shea said. The park was open to the public, but visitors had to pay admission. Shea said admission rates varied. The area featured an amusement park, pony rides and speedboat rides.
Before the park became a recreation destination at the beginning of the 20th century, it was the winter home for Chippewa Indians in the 1850s and 1860s. In the 1870s, the Fox River became a vacation spot, and by 1901, what is now the village of Fox River Grove was a prime destination along the river, according to village land-use documents.
Early village pioneer Eman Opatrny bought what is now Picnic Grove Park in 1900 from his father with the idea that it would be a perfect location for then-fashionable country picnics. A rail line was built to the park and a promoter was hired. Opatrny planted 2,200 trees on the land at that time, according to documents from the Cary-Grove Historical Society.
Opatrny built the Castle Pavilion and Resort Hotel on the property in 1902. A week’s stay cost $5, according to land use plans. Thereafter, amusements of all kinds popped up. Bars, restaurants, a horse track, shooting gallery, and bowling alley dotted the landscape. The vacation destination’s popularity was a factor in the decision to incorporate the village of Fox River Grove in 1919, land use documents show.
Years later, in 1942, Louis Cernocky Jr. bought the Picnic Grove. He further improved the park, adding a bath house, dance hall, outdoor fireplaces and sand beaches.
“Louie was a promoter,” Shea said.
Cernocky dubbed Picnic Grove Park “40 acres of paradise,” and it attracted such visitors as Robert F. Kennedy, said Pam Losey, president of the Cary-Grove Historical Society. Cernocky also added the ski hill and tow rope, Shea said. Cernocky’s operations ended in 1965 and the park changed hands several times in the following years. A restaurant and marina built there were destroyed by fire. Plans for other hotels, including a Holiday Inn, never got off the ground, and the property fell into disuse.
In a deal that allowed Terrestris Development to build a 98-home subdivision in 1994, the village acquired the land with the help of a state grant, said Jon Huizinga, Fox River Grove’s superintendent of streets and parks.
“I’m glad the village could negotiate that,” Shea said. “People don’t understand how different it used to be.”
Now all the buildings erected by Opatrny and Cernocky are gone from the public park, in part as a result of conservation efforts. The park’s natural beauty has been maintained and restored, and the area features a playground, shelter, gazebo, boat docks and launch, grills, a sledding hill and, of course, picnic tables, Huizinga said.
