Hickory Woods Is About to Become Delaware's First City Park. Here's Why It's Torn Up Right Now.

Drive out Pollock Road on the south side of town and you'll hit orange construction fencing around a park that's been quietly popular with dog walkers and sledders since 2021. Nothing unusual about that, except for the reason behind it. Hickory Woods Park isn't just adding a shelter and a playground. It's in the middle of becoming the first Preservation Parks property ever pulled inside Delaware's city limits, and the two facts are the same story.

Here's the mechanism. Hickory Woods currently sits in unincorporated Delaware Township, on the east side of Pollock Road and the west side of Berlin Station Road. Preservation Parks wants to add public restrooms as part of its next construction phase, and restrooms mean plumbing, and plumbing on this scale means a connection to the city's water and sewer system. Township land can't tap into that on its own. So in April, Delaware's city council approved a pre-annexation agreement, with an emergency clause attached, to eventually bring roughly 102 acres of parkland into the city so it can be hooked up. City Attorney David Moser explained the logic plainly at the meeting: the restrooms are what triggered the whole process. The city's engineer confirmed Preservation Parks is covering the cost of the sewer extension itself, and that the park will keep its own maintenance crew rather than shifting to city parks staff once the annexation clears.

None of this shows up if you just glance at the trailhead. What you'll actually see between now and December 1 is construction equipment, a fenced-off building pad, and the same trails you've always walked still open around it.

What's actually usable right now

The park's existing 115 acres, an old agricultural tract replanted with oak and hickory and turned back into wetlands and prairie, still function the way they have for the last few years. The short loop trails that wind through the woods and meadow are open. The catch-and-release pond is open. The sledding hill will be there once the weather turns. Leashed dogs are still welcome on the trails. What's missing, and what won't exist until construction wraps, is a shelter, a playground, and the restroom that started this whole annexation process in the first place.

If you're headed out there this fall expecting a finished four-season shelter to rent for a birthday party, you'll find a construction zone instead. If you're headed out for a walk in the woods, nothing about your trip changes.

The same pattern, a short drive away

Hickory Woods isn't the only Preservation Parks project moving through a phase like this right now. A short drive south on I-71, in Orange Township near Lewis Center, McCammon Creek Park just finished a phase of its own. The Delaware County Bicentennial Barn, the one visible to an estimated 150,000 daily drivers on I-71 for the better part of three decades, reopened to the public on August 22 after a two-year rebuild.

Bob and Sue Postle, who donated the barn and the surrounding land back in 2019, were on hand for the ribbon cutting alongside Orange Township Trustee Erica Fouss, State Rep. Brian Lorenz, and Delaware County Commissioner Gary Merrell. Sue Postle said she was glad to see the barn and its trees preserved the way they are. Bob Postle put it more simply: they never had a specific plan for the property, but watching it become a public park felt like a dream realized.

What opened is genuinely open, but on a set schedule rather than standard daylight hours. Barn tours and rental viewings run Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. through November 17, Thursdays from 1 to 3 p.m. through November 19, one Monday evening a month at 5 to 7 p.m. on September 14, October 12, and November 9, and three full weekend days, September 13, October 11, and November 8, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. This weekend's window overlaps with Ohio Open Doors, a statewide preservation event putting the freshly restored barn on public display for self-guided tours and period games from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The trails around the barn are open every day regardless of the tour schedule. Four of them cover the park's three sections: the Red Fox Trail, 1.25 miles of gravel with moderate elevation change, in the North Area off East Orange Road; the Harvest Trail, a level mile of gravel and grass in the Barn Area; the Autumn Trail, a short half-mile loop with the steepest grade of the four; and the Sycamore Bend Trail, 1.4 miles along the park's East Area. Altogether the park now covers 248 acres, assembled in pieces since 2015.

But even here, "open" comes with an asterisk. McCammon Creek's own published construction timeline shows restrooms for the Barn Area aren't scheduled until 2027, and the farm-themed playground and covered patio aren't expected until 2028. The barn is finished. The park around it isn't.

Further out, nothing is open yet

Keep going and the pattern holds at a third site. Perfect Creek Park, a 478-acre property in Trenton Township northeast of Sunbury, isn't open to the public at all. Preservation Parks is restoring roughly 80 acres of wetlands there in partnership with the Stream and Wetlands Foundation, and the old Perfect Schoolhouse on the property is under renovation now, with programming expected to start sometime this year. Everything else, the farmhouse, the trail system, the shelters, is still years out.

Why the distinction actually matters

Line up all three and a pattern that isn't obvious from any single press release becomes clear: trails and land access come first, buildings and plumbing come years later, and a park district announcement that something "opened" usually means one phase of a much longer project cleared a hurdle, not that the whole thing is finished. Hickory Woods is proof that the hurdle can be as unglamorous as a sewer line and a municipal boundary. That's not a complaint about how Preservation Parks operates. Multi-year builds funded by tax levies and volunteer hours move at the pace they move at. It's just the detail that tells you whether a Saturday drive out Pollock Road, down I-71 to Bale Kenyon Road, or out toward Trenton Township will get you a finished amenity, a construction zone, or a locked gate.

The same instinct, reading past the headline to what's actually finished, is the one that serves you well with property in this county generally. A listing description and a press release both tell you what something is supposed to be. What's worth checking is what stage it's actually in.

If you're weighing a move to Delaware or anywhere else in Central Ohio and want someone who tracks this kind of local detail before you make a decision, Straight 2 Closing is a good place to start the conversation.