As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, it is worth remembering that some of the most remarkable pieces of American history are not preserved behind glass. They are preserved in the land itself.

Across Cook County, the Forest Preserves protect landscapes that have witnessed thousands of years of human history, long before the United States was even founded. Walk the trails today and you are stepping into a reminder of the natural wonders of our country, as well as a history lesson.

Archaeologists have documented hundreds of sites within the Forest Preserves that reveal a continuous human presence in our region stretching back more than 10,000 years. Discoveries of pottery fragments, stone tools and other artifacts tell the story of Native American communities who lived, hunted and traveled through the lands of the Council of Three Fires—the Ojibwa, Ottawa and Potawatomi—as well as the Miami, Peoria, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sauk and Meskwaki peoples. Many diverse Native Americans still live and practice their heritage and traditions on this land today.

For centuries, Indigenous peoples used a narrow stretch of land in the Chicago Portage preserve to travel between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River. In 1673, the Kaskaskia tribe shared knowledge of the portage with French explorers Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette as they searched for a route to the Mississippi River, helping to continue the legacy of Chicago as a transportation hub.

Forests and river valleys in and adjacent to the Forest Preserves played a role as routes used by freedom seekers traveling north on the Underground Railroad, moving carefully through natural landscapes that provided shelter and concealment on their journey from slavery.

In a way, the Forest Preserves themselves are now part of American history, part of the same movement around the start of the last century that created the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service. Civic leaders created the Forest Preserves of Cook County in 1915 to protect open natural lands from rapid development.

The first purchase in 1916 included 500 acres at what is now Deer Grove. Over the decades the system has grown to more than 70,000 acres of protected land across the county. American history has left a mark on the Preserves too, from the Skokie Lagoons, picnic shelters and other projects of the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression to the many lakes in the Preserves created due to the construction of the Interstate Highway system after WWII.