post page – Cedar Creek Corridor

About Cedar Creek Corridor

Photo by Tony Fleming

For decades, ACRES Land Trust has supported willing landowners in protecting the Cedar Creek Corridor, a twenty mile stretch of the creek from Auburn, Indiana, to its terminus into the St. Joseph River near Leo-Cedarville, Indiana. Our office, in the former home of Tom and Jane Dustin, two of our founders, overlooks the creek from an 80-foot ravine in northern Allen County.

Watch our video on Cedar Creek

Cedar Creek is one of only three rivers in the state to be designated in Indiana’s Natural, Scenic and Recreational River System under the 1973 Act of the same name. ACRES helped the waterway earn this designation in 1976.

Designation extends 13.7 miles, from County Road 68 to the creek’s confluence with the St. Joseph River in Leo-Cedarville, regulating development in the floodway. ACRES works to expand this measure by protecting land within and beyond the floodway.

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Watch ACRES Land Trust’s Cedar Creek Corridor video

Discover the Cedar Creek Corridor, a natural treasure in northeast Indiana, and why ACRES members have rallied for decades to help protect it, for good.

Today, ACRES protects 1,000 acres of this unique natural feature, one of only three rivers designated in Indiana’s Natural, Scenic and Recreational River System under the 1973 Act of the same name. ACRES helped the waterway earn this designation in 1976. Learn more About Cedar Creek.

With interviews filmed by Ryan Schnurr, this video gives you insight into ACRES’ work protecting the creek, why it matters to local inhabitants and how concentrated community conservation takes shape when many people help. Learn more about Ryan Schnurr’s booklet: Cedar Creek Corridor: Changes in the Land, commissioned by ACRES to share our work.

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2019 Cedar Creek acquisition update

James M. & Patricia D. Barrett Nature Preserve
Photo by Jarrid Spicer

The results of wide member and donor support of ACRES Land Trust are evident not only on maps, but also as people fly over our service area. A great example is the Cedar Creek Corridor, the largest natural feature remaining in Allen County. It’s not by chance that it’s still there, but through years of effort by ACRES, the state, county parks, other nonprofit organizations and private landowners.

ACRES’ land acquisitions in the corridor began with an 11-acre parcel in 1984 and have continued ever since, both individually and in phases. From 2014-1019, ACRES set bold land acquisition goals that today have been fully achieved. During these five years, member support helped ACRES acquire 503 additional acres in the corridor, acres worth over $4,500,000. This acquired and paid-for acreage is now protected forever.

Today, ACRES owns and forever-protects just over 1,000 acres in the Cedar Creek corridor.

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ACRES Land Trust plants pace-setting 55,000 trees, reforesting 106…

HUNTERTOWN, Ind., May 15, 2019 – This spring, ACRES Land Trust reforested 106 acres of marginal farmland, planting 55,000 native hardwood saplings on three of its regional nature preserves, setting a new pace in the nonprofit’s land management. Since 2016, the nonprofit has reforested 165 acres, planting nearly 100,000 trees on six preserves during a period of phenomenal growth in the organization’s work restoring and managing land.

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“This is the most we’ve planted in a single year with our largest single-site planting, too,” says Casey Jones, director of land management for the organization’s permanently protected 7,094 acres. “As ACRES continues to acquire new land, our restoration work has rapidly become more efficient to meet our growing demand.”

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Tom & Jane Dustin built a legacy from this…

Their persistence and determination saved natural places in Indiana and across the nation.

The Dustins helped launch ACRES Land Trust.
Inspired by the budding environmental movement, Fort Wayne advertising manager Tom Dustin, his wife Jane, and ten others pooled $5 each to establish the nonprofit ACRES Land Trust in 1960. For 32 years, Jane Dustin led ACRES, then an all-volunteer organization, the oldest and largest land trust in Indiana.

Local citizens Tom and Jane Dustin and ten others established ACRES Land Trust, Indiana’s first, in 1960. Pictured left to right are ACRES founders Ethyle Bloch, Jane Dustin, John Klotz (with binoculars), Jim Barrett, Florence Klotz, Werner Reifsteck and Tom Dustin.

ACRES safeguards natural areas forever.
In 1961, the fledgling ACRES Land Trust acquired its first property, the Edna W. Spurgeon Reserve. Today, ACRES protects hundreds of forests, streams, fields and natural features as well as working land in our region.

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Digging our region’s natural groove: Cedar Creek’s Tunnel Valley

You’ve probably read about the Cedar Creek Corridor, but have you stood 80 feet over the creek and wondered how this dramatic topography happened? Right here?

*Tony Fleming, geologist and long-time ACRES member, shares the story of how a glacier carved Cedar Creek’s tunnel valley, from Lanham’s Promontory on the Tom and Jane Dustin Nature Preserve.*

Recently, Tony Fleming, geologist and long-time ACRES friend, shared geologic theory and evidence as we walked along the corridor’s 80-foot elevated Lanham’s Promontory overlooking Cedar Creek in the Tom and Jane Dustin Nature Preserve.

In Cedar Creek, Fleming sees “classic tunnel valley morphology [form]: unusually steep walls, flat bottom and a really straight course. Not a typical stream, no tributaries coming in, just Cedar Creek.”

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View from the Canopy

Editor’s note from Carol Roberts, ACRES Quarterly editor and board vice president: Tom was my friend, neighbor, mentor in the natural world. I cared more about nature after seeing it more closely through his eyes. He fought passionately and persevered to protect the Indiana Dunes, Wyoming’s Red Desert…his beloved Cedar Creek. While Tom’s vision was far-reaching, he always paid attention to what was actually in front of him, grounding him and us in the reality of here and now.

Tom Dustin’s observations compress 40 years of wildlife viewing from the home he and Jane built high over Cedar Creek. His comments (first published in the summer 1998 Quarterly) originally accompanied scientific documentation on land the Dustins later donated to ACRES; their home became ACRES’ office. I know Tom and Jane would rejoice in today’s returning wildlife, a return hastened, in part, by ACRES’ work in the Cedar Creek watershed. Wildlife habitat and biodiversity will continue to increase with future ACRES land acquisitions.

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2018 summer land management intern notes

Photo by Cathie Rowand

ACRES land management crew was quieter in late August 2018, having said goodbye to our team of ever-laughing, occasionally-singing, summer interns. The team disbanded, cheerfully* returning to classrooms across the state, having gained experience they’ll not soon forget.

I think one of my most favorite things from the internship was getting to work with Purdue Fort Wayne and the University of Saint Francis to do a portion of the creek study at Little Cedar. Being able to experience what some field work is like was amazing, and I found it was something I really enjoyed.”
– Phoebe Habeck, a Purdue University Forestry student.

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A surprise encounter

An excerpt from ACRES members-only Quarterly

Last January I walked alone in a preserve, enjoying the brittle cold, the silence of fresh snow. Cedar Creek flowed beside me, black, swift and clear beneath a fragile film of ice shelves.

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ACRES Land Trust, partners, fight invasive Japanese stiltgrass

ACRES Land Trust, with regional partners, is fighting to eradicate Japanese stiltgrass, a non-native invasive plant common to southern Indiana and the eastern United States and newly identified in northern Indiana in late fall, 2015.

Japanese stiltgrass can crowd out native plants, reducing tree regeneration and slowing the growth of tree seedlings and existing plants, creating a monoculture. It is an annual plant, spread by seed, often by foot. Japanese stiltgrass thrives in a variety of soil and light conditions.

*In January 2016, ACRES Land Trust temporarily closed its Little Cedar Creek Wildlife Sanctuary to prevent the spread of the invasion throughout the region, a first for the nonprofit.*

Little Cedar Creek, which borders the preserve where the invasive was first found and the 100-acre area where the species has invaded, is a tributary of Cedar Creek. Cedar Creek is one of three rivers in the state designated under the 1973 Indiana Natural, Scenic and Recreational Rivers Act.

Ben Hess, then Regional Ecologist, Department of Natural Resources, Division of Nature Preserves, spotted the non-native plant during a routine assessment of the preserve. This plant was not on the watch list at the time, as it had never been seen before; it was growing in such abundance, it caught his attention.

Their persistence and determination saved natural places in Indiana and across the nation.

You’ve probably read about the Cedar Creek Corridor, but have you stood 80 feet over the creek and wondered how this dramatic topography happened? Right here?

An excerpt from ACRES members-only Quarterly

Join ACRES Land Trust in protecting land.