Around the turn of the century, the nationwide "City Beautiful" movement found local expression through the efforts of Charles Mulford Robinson and nationallly known landscape architect George Kessler. Seeking to reclaim the natural beauty of our rivers, Mr. Kessler incorporated them into a sweeping plan of riverside drives and parks that would bring the Indiana landscape into the heart of the city. Proposed in a report presented to the City's Park Board just days before the devastating flood of 1913, the plan was permanently delayed by the advent of World War I. Despite the lesson of the 1913 flood, no further efforts at natural reclamation of this site were seen until 1929. In that year, Robert B. Hanna, acting as a consultant to the City Plan Commission, published a vision for "A Great River Park." This park would extend, in his words, "up and down the St. Joseph, St. Mary's, and Maumee Rivers, for many miles within and beyond the city, including the development...of the region about the confluence of the rivers and known in history as the ?Gateway to the West.'" Central to his vision was the scenic landscaping of the site on which we stand. Eighty years previously this land had been owned by his grandfather, Samuel Hanna; seventy years later, his dream would be realized by the generation of his grandsons.
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