Revamped Cedar Lake Farm park draws closer in Scott County

As Julie Christian's children were growing up, there weren't many parks to play in.

Though their native Scott County is one of the metro's most rural, finding public green space often meant a trip to Dakota County.

So when the opportunity arose years later to work on Scott County parks planning with a group of other residents, Christian jumped at it.

"Even though my kids are older and we don't use the parks as much as a family as I would like to, I knew it was going to be important for people later on to have those parks," she said.

Most recently, Christian and several others from a 40-member Citizen Design Team have been working on plans to revamp Cedar Lake Farm Regional Park, near New Prague. It's coming at a time when new parks are popping up across the south metro, designed to entice regional visitors for years to come.

Plans for winding trails, an expanded beach and a new play area are well underway, with construction set to begin next year. If all goes according to plan, the $1.9 million project — funded with Parks and Trails money from the Clean Water, Land and Legacy amendment — will be complete by June 2016.

"It's a long-term vision," Mark Themig, Scott County's general manager for regional parks and trails, said of the county's parks plans. "It's like the road network."

"There are so few barns left like that," Themig said.

The farm operated until the 1960s, when the land was sold and turned into a day resort that hosted corporate retreats. But when the resort business started to lag in the mid-2000s, the land was sold again — this time to the county — and turned into a park.

"People have for years understood what is beautiful and attractive about this space, and now we're just trying to develop that and enhance it for regional use," said Erica Christenson, project manager at HGA Architects and Engineers.

Christenson also worked on the recently completed Whitetail Woods Regional Park, the first new Dakota County park in three decades. Though it had more funding than Cedar Lake Farm, she said, it had to be built from scratch.

"The thing that's exciting about a lot of these things is that it kind of expands on what's already there, versus, 'Gee, let's create something from the ground up,' " said Pam Caselius, a Citizen Design Team member who lives on Cedar Lake.

A family home, likely built in the late 1800s, now dilapidated, will be the site of a new maintenance building. The tiny strip of snow-buried beach will grow into a generous stretch of hot sand. And the trail, today a matter of following a path of pink ribbons tied to bare trees, will be a clear walkway through soaring woods.

"It's one thing to look at it from the Google point of view," Christian said. "But when you're actually in there — in the woods, where you can't hear traffic, where you can't hear anything, it's just incredible."

Emma Nelson • 952-746-3287