Standing Cedars, A Midwestern Land Trust

American land trusts have become the country’s leading force in land conservation. The United States has approximately 1,000 land trusts that have conserved 56 million acres for wildlife and recreation since 2000. Wisconsin has more than 40 land trusts. One of these, Standing Cedars Community Land Conservancy, protects 1,600 acres of land atop the bluffs of the St. Croix River in western Wisconsin. In 2024, the all-volunteer organization acquired a crucial new property, completing a key missing link in its flagship property and providing a physical base for its operations. The St. Croix is a National Wild and Scenic River and forms the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin. Its southern reaches, where Standing Cedars resides, are on the edge of the spreading Twin Cities. The river here is a delicate ribbon of nature buttressed from the crush of urban sprawl by Standing Cedars, so dubbed after the indigenous name for a prominent bend in the river.

“Standing Cedars has always felt like a hidden treasure to me, sort of like getting to have a state park all to yourself,” said Angie Hong, outdoor educator, internet personality, and author of the 2024 book Exploring the St. Croix Valley: Adventures On and Off the Water. I’d had a similar impression when I moved to the village of Osceola, Wisconsin, and unknowingly to within a few hundred yards of Standing Cedars. Not far from home, I was delighted to stumble upon a clearwater stream with fingerling trout flitting in its pools. Following the rill upriver through a slight valley, passing delicate ferns growing from bleached-looking cliffs, I hit a dead-end at the base of a limestone outcropping. Here, the stream is sourced in a bubbling scoop of clean water. This hike soon became routine, and here I’d always kneel on a flat stone to drink from the spring. This beguiling pool, I was surprised to learn, was not the centerpiece of a state park, but the holding of the low-profile and volunteer-powered land trust.

Standing Cedars was founded in 1994 to preserve 1,100 acres of blufftop land from development plans that included dozens of homes, a private boat launch, and a golf course. The organization’s broader goal was to create a habitat greenway adjacent to the thin ribbon of National Park Service land along the river. This flagship property was calledEngelwood, named after a family who had farmed it for a long time.

Until last year, a ten-acre private inholding containing a house, barn, and other outbuildings rose like an island from the middle of Engelwood’s restored prairies. Then the owner put it up for sale. Since the 2017 completion of the new bridge between Minnesota and Wisconsin, a short distance south, the population of nearby Somerset, Wisconsin, has grown by almost 20 percent as homes replace farm fields and the former village becomes a Twin Cities suburb. The newly listed property in Engelwood included a seven-acre agricultural field that could easily be subdivided into smaller housing lots, further breaking up the continuity of the surrounding natural habitat. Standing Cedars purchased the property. “If some developer got it, there would have been three fancy houses surrounded by Standing Cedars land,” said Dick Burrows, who has long been involved with the organization and is a current board member. “It was a good purchase—it was something we should have done and we did.”

The acquisition not only filled the gap in Engelwood’s spread of grassland, but the move also gave the 30-year-old land trust its first brick-and-mortar home. Standing Cedars had previously rented barn space from a neighboring farm for its tractor, four-wheeler, and other miscellaneous land management equipment. “Right now, we have stuff at six people’s houses,” past board president Deb Murphy told environmental writer Greg Seitz for the website St. Croix 360. Over the years, the land trust’s 15-member board rambled like a band of vagabonds for their quarterly meetings. Finally, this July, after three decades of meetings, the Standing Cedars board held its first sit-down quarterly gathering on its land. Granted, they met in a big shed next to a parked tractor, but this was home. Dick Burrows said plans include creating office space in the footprint of the newly acquired farmhouse.

At over a thousand acres, Engelwood is not much smaller than William O’Brien State Park across the river in Minnesota, which receives hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. Engelwood, which has several miles of hiking trails and a ski trail in winter, hosts less than one percent of the people who crowd the popular state park, a fact that amazed me when I began hiking here. I was also surprised by its planted prairies, which sparked an enduring fascination with botany. The flatlands of eastern Engelwood, adjacent to the precipitous river bluffs, had long been in conventional agriculture before the lands were put into conservation. In 2007 and 2008, 55 acres of former farmland was seeded with prairie plants. Historically, southern Polk County, where Engelwood is located, was situated in the tension zone where tallgrass prairie, hardwood-conifer forest, and oak woodlands intermingled. While the forests have fared better, Wisconsin’s tallgrass prairies are one of the most endangered habitat types on earth. Once covering 800,000 acres in the state, 99.5 percent of the habitat has been destroyed.

At the time, I knew nothing about prairies and was perplexed by the bizarre grasses that rose six and seven feet tall. An array of flowers with a rainbow of blooms grew amongst the grasses, flowers I soon learned to identify—wild bergamot, anise hyssop, bottle gentian, golden alexanders, prairie blazing star, and so many others. What looked unremarkable at a glance was, on closer inspection, a remarkably diverse collection of life, ranging from the plants themselves to hosts of insects and birds they supported. To the south of Engelwood, in an irregular topography of hills and valleys, small remnant prairies remain, amidst the remains of a downhill ski resort that operated in the 1950s and 1960s. The tow ropes of the resort were powered by vehicles set on blocks and run from wheel rims spinning in the air. Some of the oddly perched vehicles remain rusting in the trees.

A larger and very different remnant prairie persists at the second property Standing Cedars conserved. A few miles to the north of Engelwood, Buffalo Skull contains the clear spring stream that had first enchanted me. While only a quarter the size of Engelwood, Buffalo Skull has a rich history with evidence of pre-Columbian inhabitants in the form of ancient burial mounds. Much more recently, about a century ago, a health fad swept the country, and Americans began to value the supposed healing properties of spring waters. Resorts sprang up where believers could “take the waters.” Buttermilk Falls Health Resort was founded on the stream, and its buildings still stand on a neighboring property. After flowing through the property, the spring stream enters National Park Service land and, shortly before flowing into the St. Croix, tumbles down Buttermilk Falls through a luxurious stand of the locally uncommon evergreen shrub Canada yew.

After the mineral springs fad faded, the property was purchased by the heirs to the St. Paul Casket Company. On weekends, Thora and Ernie Reiff liked playing the part of western cowpokes and dubbed the land Buffalo Skull Ranch. One story associated with this name is that the Reiffs previously owned a hobby ranch and branded their cattle with a buffalo skull. Another version states that someone found a bison skull on the property, leftover from the evocative lost era when wild bison roamed the Wisconsin prairies. Futurist Buckminster Fuller was purportedly a guest at Buffalo Skull. The property was later purchased by Otto Silha, who was the publisher of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune newspaper.

On a thin-soiled shelf on cliffs above the St. Croix, Buffalo Skull’s remnant prairie survived otherwise ubiquitous settler farming. Stone piles rising from virgin, copper-colored little bluestem grass attest to past agricultural use. Due to the poor soil above limestone, the prairie was never torn by the plow but instead used as a hayfield. A large population of an endangered plant called kittentails thrives here. Kittentails hang on in several states in the Upper Midwest, thriving in well-drained upland sites with partial sun. A species requiring wildfire to fight back sunlight-hogging woody plants, kittentails are further at risk of extinction because their preferred habitat is also the preferred habitat of wealthy homeowners wanting blufftop views.

Kittentails also live on Standing Cedars’ third property, butting up to the edge of the village of Osceola. Named Tewksbury after the farmer who sold the land to the land trust, the property occupies two shelves of different heights above the river. The National Park Service owns part of the lower shelf, where the kittentails live, along with early spring blooming pasque flowers, whose delicate purple flowers sometimes appear while snow still melts in the woods. Standing Cedars owns a fourth property, a few miles inland, named the Brown Conservation Area, which was bequeathed to the organization by resident Molly Brown. Maps showing hiking trails and parking lot addresses for all four properties are available at standingcedars.org.

Urban sprawl, increased farming, and industrialization continue to erode American wildlands. This summer, conservative politicians were narrowly stopped from selling off millions of acres of public lands. In this climate, land trusts are becoming even more critical for those who value nature. Find your local land trust through the Land Trust Alliance, a national umbrella organization: https://landtrustalliance.org.