Wintergarden-St. John’s Nature Preserve is a living time capsule, capable of transporting visitors back to a time before Northwest Ohio was a quilted patchwork of farms and fields. The Great Black Swamp, however mythical it sounds today, still exists in a sliver of land preserved through the years by the efforts of community minded folk like Stephen W. St. John.

St. John moved to Northwest Ohio in September of 1843. He purchased a parcel of land that includes the current Bordner Meadow and St. John’s Woods. The meadow was tilled and turned into farmland, and he stabled livestock in the woods. St. John lived on his land for 50 years, and when he died, it fell to his son Ezra H. St. John to decide what to do with the land. Ezra allowed the land to naturally return to The Black Swamp and provided for the City to take over management of the property.

Other previous owners of the land that Wintergarden currently occupies were William English and Martha Haynes. English owned property stretching from Wintergarden Road east to the edge of St. John’s property, and Haynes owned property directly north of William English. In the middle 1940s, the City of Bowling Green purchased these properties and used them, along with the St. John property, as a source of well water for several years.

In the 1950s, the B.G. Rotary Club established a day camp for children. They would camp out in the woods in tents and build campfires. This continued through 1966, when Mr. William Schmelty began a petition for the funding and construction of a park lodge facility. The current lodge was built in 1969. The lodge continued to be used by various groups, including American Youth Hostels, until 1995 when the B.G. Parks Department assumed full control of the facility and surrounding property. In 1999, the Department officially became the Bowling Green Parks & Recreation Foundation.

Wintergarden Park was renamed the Wintergarden-St. John Nature Preserve, and a long-term restoration project began. Since then, the Preserve has seen increased interest from the community and has gained additional acreage with the addition of Twyman Woods in 2003 and Sader Woods in 2005.