The grieving woman who turned a swamp into a garden

Wilhelmina Stock built a garden out of grief. In a single year she lost three of her children — one to a terrible accident at the family mill, two to tuberculosis — and behind her Hillsdale home sat a useless patch of swamp with a pit of quicksand in it. She decided to make something out of it.

She hauled in soil by the wagonload and did a lot of the digging herself, filling the swamp and the quicksand, shaping ponds, and laying out roads. Plants and trees came over from England. Over about twelve years of hard work she turned it into what she called Willow Park — though everyone in town just called it Mrs. Stock’s Park. A 1909 account in the Hillsdale newspaper described handsome trees, rock-rimmed ponds, fine roads, and little pavilions, with swans gliding across the water. A hired gardener named Margaret Decker Waldner helped her keep it.

Wilhelmina was married into the Stock family that ran the big flour mill on the river, so she had the means to dream big and the loss that made her want to.

After her time the park faded, the way private gardens do. Then in 2003 the city council voted to bring it back, and the Hillsdale Garden Club took over its care a decade later. The pond, the fountains, and a stone bridge are restored, the beds are planted again, and on a July evening the place fills with a summer concert crowd. A century after one woman dug a swamp into a garden to outlast her sorrow, the town is still tending it.