GRAND ISLAND, Neb. (KOLN) – Tucked into the southwest corner of Stolley Park, 12 garden sections bloom with history, culture and community — tended by volunteers who fought to keep them alive.
Vikki Deuel, a member of Friends of the Grand Island Parks who spent more than three decades as an educator and principal in the community, said each part of the garden has something to offer.
“And each part has such a powerful story to tell,” Deuel said.
Visitors can walk through a woodland shade garden, a Nebraska certified pollinator garden, a children’s remembrance garden, and a plot that blooms for nighttime pollinators. Sculptures and artifacts are woven throughout the flowerbeds, shaded by trees that may date to the land’s earliest days.
Deuel said some believe those trees were planted by William Stolley, a German immigrant who filed the first squatter’s claim in Hall County in 1857 and homesteaded the property. The Nebraska Legislature designated the farmstead as Stolley State Park in 1927.
A little library on the grounds connects visitors to that history.
“All of the books in here represent the themes of the garden or tell history, historical kinds of facts about pioneers and early settlers,” Deuel said.
One section honors Indigenous history. Christina Running Hawk Ellison, a former student of Deuel’s and a Native Indigenous specialist for Omaha Public Schools, leads cultural programming in the Healing Garden, which she helped design.
“There is sage in there. There’s also bluestem as well, and there is some sweet grass on the totem pole that is located in it,” Running Hawk Ellison said. The plants are medicinal and used by tribes.
She said the space holds personal meaning.
“It means a lot being near the Healing Garden, having my former principal here, a lot of friendly faces as well as being in a beautiful place,” Running Hawk Ellison said.
Other beds replicate the gardens planted by pioneer women on the homestead. Deuel said the plots reflect life in Grand Island before and after early settlement.
“It replicates the original kinds of gardens that pioneer women had and when they first started beyond subsistence living, planting gardens,” she said.
The garden exists today in part because of a fight that took place in 2017, when city budget cuts threatened the garden’s greenhouse. Deuel and fellow Friends of the Grand Island Parks member Jim Truell took the matter to city hall. Todd McCoy, director of Grand Island Parks and Recreation, said the greenhouse was among the services on the table.
“The budget was a difficult budget and they were asking administrative mandate to cut back on expenses and cut some of our services and the greenhouse at that time was on the chopping block,” McCoy said. “That was a discussion on city council and to Vikki’s credit, they attended those council meetings and said don’t cut the greenhouse. We’re going to form a group to support it more.”
Truell said the group’s persistence paid off.
“So we went to the city council, needless to say, objected to the cut, and threw our proposal out eventually, and they started listening to us, and we started working,” Truell said.
Deuel recalled the goal they set when the work began.
“What we imagined when we started in 2017, and our laugh was, we want this done in our lifetime,” Deuel said.
“And we did,” Truell said.
Today, the garden is maintained by volunteers and the City of Grand Island, with Friends of the Grand Island Parks playing a central role. McCoy said the partnership has made a difference.
“It’s a great partnership. Obviously we couldn’t do a lot of things at the park. It wouldn’t have happened without Friends of the Grand Island Parks, and of course, they need staff support at times. Sometimes they need the resources,” he said.
Truell said the community support runs deep.
“It’s a cross-section of the entire community — whether it’s just a couple of kids wandering around, higher ups that make great donations so that the park can really shine,” he said.
Stolley Park Gardens is located at the southwest corner of Stolley Park Road and Park Drive, Grand Island, NE 68801.
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