Almost 20 years ago, the Town of Belle Plaine purchased an island on the Cloverleaf Lakes to keep it from being developed.
Over the years, Gibson Island has been a place to reconnect with nature. Those opportunities include hiking trails and watching a pair of bald eagles that have returned to the area for several years to nest and raise their young.
Now there’s another reason to visit the island, located off of Cloverleaf Lakes Road between Shawano and Clintonville.
More than 100 people showed up Sept. 13 for the official reopening of the island to the public. It now includes a recently constructed accessible trail suitable for wheelchairs.
The Cloverleaf Lakes shoreline is heavily developed with permanent homes and seasonal cottages. However, Gibson Island is undeveloped and will stay that way. The 25.6-acre island is connected to the mainland by a manmade isthmus, a narrow strip of land.
Joy Krubsack is a member of the Gibson Island Stewardship Committee, an advisory committee to the Belle Plaine Town Board.
She recalled supporting the town’s purchase of the island, which happened in 2006.
“We had a town meeting, and we were discussing the positives and negatives of the town taking ownership (of the island),” Krubsack said. “I remember saying, ‘This area is going to become our Central Park.’ If it would have been developed, the doors would have been closed to the public. As these woods get sold off, this may end up being the only undisturbed area around.”
The town purchased the island for just over $1 million. A $416,000 grant from the state Department of Natural Resources helped make the purchase a reality.
The Waterways Association of Menominee and Shawano Counties, a watershed-focused organization based in Shawano, helped organize the dedication ceremony.
“We were first asked by the town board if we could connect with one of its citizens, Pete Jensema, who wanted accessibility to the island for all despite mobility impairments,” WAMSCO President Shanda Hubertus said. “Being a private citizen, you can’t get a lot of the grant dollars to put in an accessible trail. You also needed to stabilize the isthmus a little bit, and there was also some massive erosion on some really steep hill areas.”
The project took about 1 1/2 years from planning to completion.
“The trail is a portion of the island that is improved, so it looks different,” Hubertus said. “The rest of the island is in a natural environment, which means the trees are falling, the fungi are growing, it’s decaying. Kids today don’t always see that.”
WAMSCO helped make Jensema’s vision a reality. Jensema died in July and his wife and daughter, Mary and Morgan Jensema, respecrively, cut the ribbon to officially reopen the island.
“This project was sponsored by WAMSCO,” Hubertus said. “The financial portion came from grants from the DNR and the Shawano County Community Foundation as well as a number of substantial private citizen donations. We had over 60 volunteers with well over 1,000 volunteer hours.”
The island is a popular destination for area residents and visitors, according to Hubertus.
“While we were working, we had to have the island closed for safety reasons,” she said. “We were closed for six weeks, and there were a lot of people that were bummed that they couldn’t get out there.”
Hubertus and Krubsack expect the island to have more visitors now that the trail is complete.
“This place is important to a lot of people, more than one would think, because it is so secluded,” Hubertus said. “It’s not a place where you go in, grab a beer and talk to each other. It’s a place where you are out on your own. This island is used by a lot of people and they have a vested interest in it. It matters.”
