The Land Where the Rivers Meet

The Land Where the Rivers Meet. . You're looking at Knoch Knolls Park. Beyond the pond are the scattered trees of the savanna, then the West Branch of the DuPage River. Early settlers called the forest on the other side of the West Branch the "Big Woods." , , An Interesting Piece of land , The East and West Branches of the DuPage River began trickling between moraines left by the last glacier about 12,000 years ago. , , About 10,000 years ago, roving hunters followed mastodons and mammoths here. Their descendants, the Illiniwek tribes, continued hunting and gathering amidst the rich variety of plants, trees, and wildlife the river land provided. , , In 1673, Illiniwek met the first European explorers in this area, Marquette and Joliet, and began trading fur pelts with the French. By the 1690s, Potawatomi fur traders from Wisconsin drove the Illiniwek out of the area. , , The earliest white settler to come to this land between two rivers found a dense forest in the midst of miles and miles of prairie. , , Farmland above the Confluence , Since the first claim on the land by Stephen Scott in 1830, there have been farms near the confluence-grain, dairy, and hog farms. , , The last farm in operation before the land became a public park, was Knoch Knolls Farm owned by Judge Win Knoch and his wife, Irene. This pond was on their farm. , , The Pond , In the early 1950s, Judge Knoch hired a man to dig a pond on his farm. A dam on McDonald Creek diverted water into a culvert that emptied into the pond. The Knoch family called it the Eisenhower Dam. (President Eisenhower had appointed Knoch as a U.S. District Court judge in 1953.) Overflow from the pond was then diverted back into McDonald Creek and into the West Branch. Today, the pond at Knoch Knolls Park is fed by groundwater and runoff. , , Historic Sites , 1 Approximate location of the DuPage Trading Post (circa 1800) , 2 Sawmill site 1839 , 3 Site of Stephen J. Scott log cabin 1830 , 4 Site of Win and Irene Fauth Knoch farm and summer retreat 1932