An old farm that grew its wetlands back

Out on Rich Road north of Alma, a 90-acre patch of land has spent the last thirty years turning back into what it used to be. In 1992 the Gratiot County conservation district bought an abandoned farm from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The next year it handed the keys to the Gratiot-Isabella school district’s education agency, which turned the fields and ditches into an outdoor classroom and, with help from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, set about rebuilding the wetlands the farming had drained away.

What grew back is the point. School buses roll in from across mid-Michigan — there’s a parking lot sized for them — and kids fan out across the trails to learn what a marsh does and who lives in it. A covered observation platform looks out over the restored wetland, the kind of spot where you can stand still long enough to watch herons stalk the shallows and red-winged blackbirds argue over the cattails.

You don’t have to be in fourth grade to use it. The trails are open to the public, and they cost nothing. The paths wander through old farm ground that has shaded back into woods, edges of meadow, and the marsh itself, so a short walk takes you through three or four kinds of habitat without much effort.

It is a quiet, unflashy place — no visitor center gift shop, no entrance booth, just a former farm being allowed to remember what it was. In a county where roughly four-fifths of the land is still in crops, a piece of it deliberately let go wild again is worth the drive down a gravel road.