History
Much of the prairie area was annexed by the municipality of Markham, Illinois, a suburb located south of Chicago. In most of greater Chicago, annexations of this type were a precursor to real estate development. However, the prairie patch's relatively poor drainage made it less attractive to land development. Furthermore, in the years after World War II Markham became an economically troubled and relatively slow-growing community. Finally, in 1971, the Gensburg family, owners of a key 60-acre (240,000 m2) parcel at the heart of the prairie, donated the parcel to the Nature Conservancy. The prairie's current name, Gensburg-Markham Prairie, commemorates this donation.
Read more about this topic: Gensburg-Markham Prairie
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)