Tom Kacich: John Harrison's epic gift to Danville
May 8—In the universe of public-park land donations, John Harrison's gift to Danville 95 years ago is still extraordinary.
There are several parks in Champaign-Urbana where families or estates donated between 11 and 40 acres of land for recreational use, but Harrison gave about six times that amount to Danville.
The editor and part-owner of the Commercial News announced in November 1928 that he was giving the city more than 233 acres of beautiful, hilly and heavily timbered land on the North Fork of the Vermilion River in honor of his late mother, who had died three years earlier.
The gift to the city, which came with the sole stipulations that the land be used only for recreation and that it be named Harrison Park, was from a man who had lived with his mother, Arminta, for nearly all of his life and finally married three years after her death, when he was 61 years old.
The power of the press
He had come to Danville in 1897, acquiring a half-interest in the Evening Commercial and eventually merging it with three other newspapers — the News, the Press and the Democrat — to make the Commercial News. Not unlike D.W. Stevick and his News-Gazette in Champaign, Harrison was part journalist, part promoter and part showman. He was frequently mentioned as a possible Republican candidate for governor or other high office in Illinois, but never ran. Instead, he worked behind the scenes for other Republicans.
He pushed for "hard roads" in downstate Illinois, once sending a reporter to Decatur to write about conditions on the newly built Route 10.
He promoted crushed cornstalks as a possible alternative to pulp. And he constantly talked up Danville and its people, including the tyrannical U.S. House Speaker Joseph Cannon. (The two are buried within 150 feet of each other at Danville's Spring Hill Cemetery).
The motto of Harrison's Commercial News, etched above the entrance to his building in downtown Danville: "The Paper That Does Things."
Harrison took that slogan to heart. Perhaps he knew his time on earth was short and he wanted to see some of his riches distributed, but one Sunday in 1928, he announced his gift to the city in his newspaper.
A well-established vision
"This idea of 'Harrison Park' is not new to me. It has been under consideration for a number of years and was often a subject of discussion between my mother, the late Mrs. Minta Harrison, and myself," Harrison wrote in the Commercial News.
About 64 acres of the land had been used as the first home of the Danville Country Club, which had recently announced that it was moving to a new space west of the recently built (1925) Lake Vermilion.
"She and I had so much happiness at the country club, enjoying its various activities and reveling in the scenery, that we used to talk about what a fine thing it would be, when the country club was through with it, for it to become a public playground," Harrison wrote. "We frequently discussed how much we would enjoy buying it and giving it to the city as a park to bear our names. That which I am now doing was a family secret as long as a half-dozen years ago."
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Harrison said that his new wife, Chicago newspaperwoman Lucille Gilmore Harrison, supported the decision.
"She joins me in visioning the pleasure and happiness that may come to thousands of the present and future generations through a healthful, beautiful outdoor playground," Harrison said. "It has always been my idea that every man should put something back into his hometown. I have held the theory that if a city furnishes a man his opportunity to make a living and to develop his business affairs, he is under obligation to that city to do something more than just live in it."
He noted that in his more than 30 years in Danville, he had written editorials and given speeches promoting the city and its potential.
"I am trying to practice what I have preached and to do what I have urged other men to do," Harrison concluded.
Short-lived dream
Sadly, Harrison had little time to enjoy the new Harrison Park or see the public use it. He died on March 3, 1930, only about 16 months after announcing his gift. He was 63 years old.
At the time Harrison made the donation, there was much speculation in Danville about how all the property would be used. Newspaper stories mentioned baseball and football fields, tennis courts, hiking trails and flower gardens, campgrounds and picnic areas, even a deer park or a small zoo.
But for the most part, Harrison Park has been a public golf course, expanded in the 1930s to 18 holes, as it is today. For a time there were bridle trails, hiking trails and a Girl Scout camp on the west side of the park. But today there is limited use beyond golf.
A new future?
Drew Landis, a Vermilion County native and a member of the Vermilion County Trails Association, has a broader vision for John Harrison's park.
He wants to develop mountain biking trails, hiking trails, a disc-golf course and a natural playground with climbing walls and other features, mostly on an unused, 80-acre portion of the park west of the golf course.
"A lot of the talk at the time of the gift was that this is going to be for generations the crown jewel of Danville and that people from all over the Midwest will come here to see this," said Landis, 43. "And then it just sorta falls away. The Great Depression is part of the reason, so is Danville's economic history, the advent of the car and the fact that that west side of the park, it's hard to get to. It's in a kinda awkward place."
Last year, the city signed an agreement with the trails association allowing it to develop parts of Harrison Park for recreation with city council oversight. The group has been busy raising grant money and is building a parking lot on the west side of the park and soon hopes to start building a mountain-biking trail.
"It's a somewhat selfish desire for me to ride my bike in way more neat places, but it's also way more than that," said Landis, who grew up in southern Vermilion County and now lives about 10 minutes from Harrison Park. "I really view the availability of using public green spaces as a way of making the entire community richer and more prosperous."
It's a view that John Harrison espoused as well.
Harrison's newspaper was sold to the Gannett chain in 1934 for $700,000 (about $16 million in today's dollars). His widow soon moved away from Danville. Much of his $2 million estate ($45.7 million today) went to DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind.
Not many people in Danville today could tell you who John Harrison was. But they know about Harrison Park. And if Landis has his way, even more will be using that "public playground" again.
