Franklin Park dedicated to Van Wert

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

It took four years and the efforts of Van Wert native Scott Niswonger, The Van Wert County Foundation, and many others, but the Franklin Park project is now officially completed and open to the public.

The idea for a park originally came from Niswonger, who attended Franklin Elementary School as a boy and thought it would be great to make the site into a park for the community. Niswonger provided some seed money for the project and also had his architect, John Fisher, as well as landscape architect Jim Douglas, draw up plans for the park, with input from city officials and community members.

The project then languished for a year or so until The Van Wert County Foundation decided to take it on and see it to fruition.

Thad Lichtensteiger, chairman of the foundation’s Board of Trustees, said the park fulfills all of the organization’s mantra of “supporting purpose, inspiring growth, and building the future.”

He added that a trip trustees made to Greenville, Tennessee, at the invitation of Niswonger, who has lived there for decades, gave the group “a new mindset, a new swagger” and also made trustees reconsider their own mission in the community.

While the foundation gifted more than $3.1 million this past year in scholarships and grants to non-profit and governmental organizations, Lichtensteiger said it had never really taken on a project by itself.

“Now, as trustees, we find ourselves saying ‘can’t we do more, can’t we be more involved’,” he said, noting that it was that mindset that pushed trustees to become involved in the Franklin Park project.

Also speaking at the dedication was Niswonger, who brought a large delegation with him from Greenville, including his wife, Nikki, Fisher and his wife, Mary Louise, and Nancy Dishner, who heads the Niswonger Foundation.

“What wonderful memories this place brings to me,” Niswonger said, noting that he and other Franklin School students, including retired Common Pleas judge Chuck Steele, used to spend most of their summers as boys on the ball diamond that used to sit on a corner of the school lot in the 1950s and ‘60s. “Some of my fondest memories growing up were right here in the summertimes.”

He also talked about his feeling the community needed to replace the school that was demolished shortly after the completion of Van Wert Elementary School with a lasting monument to the educational and other opportunities provided by the site for more than a century.

“Something this historic, and the things that have taken place on the ground where we’re sitting and standing today … is so important that … to not have something here … would have been a travesty,” Niswonger said.

Also speaking was Foundation Executive Secretary Seth Baker, who was very much involved in getting the project completed.

Baker began with a quote from Thomas Edison that he said summed up why people were there to dedicate the park: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and it looks like work.”

“We’re here today because of opportunity; we’re here today because of the tenacity, vision, and hard work of literally hundreds of people,” Baker noted.

He also talked about the foundation meeting where the project was taken on by the organization, noting that the vote was enthusiastic from trustees after a heated discussion of what would happen to the neighborhood if nothing was done.

He also noted that several trustees said they did not want to be a part of an organization that was not actively engaged in the community with these types of discussions or leading these types of projects.

“We started to ask ourselves, if not us, who?” Baker said, adding that foundation decided to answer the call and do the project. “And what a ride it has been.”

Of the project’s total cost of approximately $1.7 million, Niswonger and his foundation contributed $315,000, while the foundation added $1.2 million.

Former Van Wert parks director Sue Heppeard also spoke, and said she remembered seeing kids playing on the site in the evening when it was still Franklin School, and how the new park is “filling a void that this area has had.”

“Now these people on this side of town can have a place that to walk to, rather than have to travel to either Smiley or clear out to Jubilee,” Heppeard said, adding that the first weekend the park was unofficially opened, it was filled with kids.

She also singled out the skate park and the pickleball courts as something unique in Van Wert — something no other city park has, at this point, and something that was needed for those growing activities.

Heppeard also became emotional as she thanked Niswonger for coming up with the idea of making the former school site into a park.

“So, a big thank you to Scott and his wife for your gift to Van Wert, and (through) the efforts of the Van Wert County Foundation … now we’ve got a great addition to the city of Van Wert,” she said.

Although some skaters were using the park as the dedication was held, many more people came by in the afternoon to skate, play basketball, pickleball, cool off at the splash pad, play on the two playgrounds, or just walk around the park or sit on the park’s benches.