1,100 acres of woods that started on Halloween, 1960

On Halloween of 1960, a group of neighbors pooled their money to buy a patch of woods north of Kalamazoo. That one buy has since grown into about 1,100 acres of forest, meadow, and ravine along North Westnedge Avenue. The Kalamazoo Nature Center is what they were after — a place to teach people about the land they live on. More than sixty years later, it is still doing exactly that.

Inside the boundary you get a glass-walled visitor center and an indoor tropical butterfly room that is a lifesaver in February. Miles of marked trail run through old hardwoods, with overlooks down into the Kalamazoo River valley. The trails range from stroller-easy boardwalks to steeper climbs up the wooded ridges. The river-valley views are the payoff most people remember.

The land carries an older story too. The DeLano family farmed this ground back in the 1800s. Their homestead — a tidy Greek Revival farmhouse and its outbuildings — is still standing, looked after by the center. It runs today as DeLano Farms, which grows food with sustainable methods and sells a community-supported agriculture share. Members pay up front in spring for a summer’s worth of vegetables, picked the same week they eat them.

It is the kind of place you can fold into an ordinary weekend without much planning. Let the kids meet the live animals and chase butterflies under glass while you take the long way around the ridge trails. Or come home from a farm-share pickup with your arms full of greens, grown on a homestead that has been worked for more than a century and a half. The woods, the farm, and the museum-quiet trails all sit on land a handful of people decided, one autumn day, was worth saving.