After years of work by a retired Eastern professor and the City of Charleston, a 206-acre tract of land along Lake Charleston will soon be set aside as a park and nature preserve, Director of Parks and Recreation Scott Smith said.

The land, which will be purchased by the city from two landowners with a grant from the state Department of Natural Resources and a private donation, includes tracts of hardwood forest, hill prairie and wetlands, as well as much of the Lake Charleston watershed, he said.

After the purchase is made most of the land will be open to the public for hiking and bird watching, Smith said, and a southwest portion of the tract will be converted into a memorial park.

The new park will memorialize a family, he said, although the exact family that will be honored has not been chosen yet.

Mary Kay Solecki, a field representative with the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission, said preserving the land is important to the local ecology.

“This (purchase) will ensure that this forest and prairie habitat will not be developed,” Solecki said. “There is a really nice hill prairie called the Waterworks Hill Prairie (on the property).”

Smith said he expects the deal to be finalized with the two landowners within a year.

Construction on the park and preparing trails through the land should take an additional six months or so, Smith said, but there is no tentative date for opening the land to the public.

A key player in the negotiations to purchase the land was Giles Henderson, who taught chemistry at Eastern for 35 years until his retirement last year.

Henderson applied for the state grant to buy the property in 1998 after noticing that the lots were for sale.

“Its credibility as a natural area is something that struck me,” Henderson said. “The property has a large variety of the city’s hardwoods, and a wetlands area.”

In addition, Henderson said, it is important to preserve the land since it makes up a good portion of the Lake Charleston watershed.

“Development (of the land) would have a negative impact on water quality,” he said.

Henderson is concerned, however, that the state grant, and therefore the purchase, might fall through.

“As of yet, none of the (city) committees who applied for those funds have received a penny,” he said. “I’m concerned about whether those funds will materialize.

“The project’s counting on state funding,” Henderson said. “And the state’s in a terrible financial position now.

“Maybe I’m being a bit pessimistic about it, but I’m concerned,” he said. “As it is, the folks at Springfield are looking for places where they would cut funding, and I’m sure this would be scrutinized.”

More than 100 acres of forest will be preserved by the project, which will benefit migrating songbirds such as hairy woodpeckers, scarlet tanagers and warblers, Soleck said.

The land is also home to the false hellebore, a wildflower listed as a threatened plant in Illinois, she said.