Donald Park provides a link to Dane County’s natural and cultural history
It’s been more than 60 years since Mathew Marty’s father showed him the remnants of the pioneer cabin five miles south of Mount Horeb where his grandparents lived shortly after they emigrated from Switzerland in 1884.
Marty, 77 and a retired Sun Prairie middle school social studies teacher, has been back to that site many times in the decades since then. Now part of the nearly 900-acre Donald County Park, he has participated in archaeological digs there, walked hundreds of miles in the preserve and helped cut and maintain trails for hikers, equestrians, birdwatchers and anglers.
He credits two women, Pat Hitchcock and Delma Donald Woodbury, for pushing Dane County to create the park, which they wanted protected for nature lovers, as well as for its cultural history.
Hitchcock donated 100 acres for the park in the 1990s and Woodbury sold her farm to the county. Those two properties now make up the majority of the park, which was formally dedicated in 1999, Marty said.
“It’s an impressive chunk of land, with deep woods, prairies, savannas, trout streams and wetlands,” he said. “It has just about every natural feature you can think of for this part of the state.”
Both women volunteered countless hours of their time at the park and Marty said Woodbury was especially persuasive in getting others to help.
“Delma was an amazing ‘can-do’ person,” he said of Woodbury, whose Presbyterian minister grandfather, the Reverend James Donald, began farming in the valley in 1855.
“You couldn’t turn her down. It was like saying no to your mother, if you ever even thought of turning her down.”
Woodbury died in 2001 at age 102.
A friend and I met Marty on a recent steamy July morning at the Pop’s Knoll parking lot, across from the 50-foot-tall Donald Rock outcropping — a hard St. Peter sandstone that was left standing after the softer rock around it eroded thousands of years ago. As we walked to the cabin site along a small creek called Fryes Feeder on the edge of an oak savanna filled with bergamot and other native flowers, he told us the park’s history.
The preserve is on the eastern edge of the Driftless Area, Marty said, so the hills and dales in the valley were created by wind and water erosion rather than ice shields that flattened much of the state.
Donald Rock was important to the Ho-Chunk, who lived in the valley before Europeans arrived and dubbed it Preacher’s Cap. The Donald family gave it to the state Department of Transportation, and two surrounding acres, in 1952 as a scenic wayside. It was then renamed Donald Rock in recognition of the family’s gift.
Marty said his parents courted on the rock, which is on the north side of Highway 92, and that he scaled the rock hundreds of times as a youth. His paternal grandfather died in a farmhouse, now gone, next to the outcrop.
“I was like a squirrel back then,” he said with a chuckle. “I knew at least six or seven ways to get up to the top. Every time we’d come to Mount Vernon, which is just down the road, to visit my grandmother, I’d scramble up there.”
A second prominent rock, Devil’s Chimney, is two miles away. It’s about 45 feet tall, 20 feet around and also made of hard sandstone. Similar rocks, sometimes known as monadnocks, can be found near Wausau and at Castle Rock near Camp Douglas.
Marty said the cabin where his grandparents lived was built by the Foye family, who chose the site because it was close to Little Spring, one of three springs in the park. Big Spring, a gathering spot for pioneer celebrations, was only 100 yards away.
Marty’s forebears lived in the cabin and farmed there for nearly a decade. Then, as family lore has it, the hired man accidentally started a fire in 1893 by tapping his pipe onto straw outside the cabin. Everyone in the house, including four children, survived.
When Marty helped with digs at the site from 2008 to 2012, he said he and others found artifacts that may have belonged to his grandparents. But the most remarkable discoveries, he noted, were arrow and knife points that could be 8,000 years old.
He said the abundance of chert, which can be easily knapped, or chipped into sharp points, was one reason why native people settled there.
When Marty first saw the crumbling foundation while squirrel hunting with his father 60-plus years ago, it was overgrown with brush and trees. Several large threshold stones were about the only things showing.
The volunteer group got a grant and began an effort to restore the cabin, pulling out the sandstone pieces and cleaning them off. All the mortar, he said, had disintegrated.
“We thought we could put a cabin on the site, but plans changed when we thought about maintenance and possible vandalism problems,” he said.
“Ultimately, we decided to make a spot here that honors Native Americans and pioneers and is low maintenance and won’t cost an arm and a leg.”
So instead of a cabin, they rebuilt the foundation and capped the low wall with sandstone as a place where visitors can sit and ponder the beauty of the surrounding countryside and spring, as well as the people who once lived there.
“It’s a pretty nice setting for that, don’t you think?” he said.
More information: See the Friends of Donald Park website at donald park.org.
Getting there: Donald Park is off Highway 92, five miles south of Mount Horeb and 15 miles southwest of Madison. It is 100 miles from Milwaukee via I-94 and Highways 151 and 92.