PJKP Home

Protect Jean Klock Park

One of Michigan’s oldest public parks, donated by the Klock family as a memorial to their daughter, Jean

Support Our Efforts

The fight to protect, preserve, and save Jean Klock Parks wetlands, dunes, beachfront, and wildlife from private/corporate takeover rages on. It's not a done deal.

We need everyone’s help. These are difficult economic times, but donations of any amount to this very worthwhile effort to save and preserve this natural area for the public will be gratefully appreciated.

Send your check or money order to:

PJKP

P. O. Box 632

St. Joseph, Michigan 49085

Make payable to: Protect JKP

Log into your PayPal account and make a contribution. Use info@protectjkp.com

as recipient email address.

ALL DONATIONS CONFIDENTIAL

Text Box: “The deed of this park, in the Court House in St. Joseph will live forever. Perhaps some of you do not own a foot of ground; remember then that this is your park; it belongs to you. Perhaps some of you have no piano or phonograph, the roll of the water, murmuring in calm, roaring in storm, is your music, your piano and music-box …The beach is yours, the dunes are yours, all yours. It is not so much a gift from my wife and myself as a gift from a little child. See to it that the park is the children’s” ~J. N. Klock, Park Dedication Ceremony, July 14, 1917~

Home

Text Box: Email us Dunes@Protectjkp.com All inquiries confidential.

“The Jean Klock Park site contains a number of ecosystems: the beach, open graminoid sand dunes, wooded dunes, upland areas, cattail marsh, marsh, wetlands, and old river channels. The Park’s greatest asset, other than the beach, is the fact that a dunes ecosystem and a wetlands ecosystem are in very close proximity to each other. Jean Klock Park Master Plan,

The Troyer Group, 1990.

Visit our sister site Save Jean Klock Park

THE DAY THE BULLDOZERS MOVED IN. GRANHOLM: “We obviously want to protect the dunes.” See New YouTube video link here.

Far left: Gov. Granholm with Jack Nicklaus in Benton Harbor;

left, Granholm with Congressman Fred Upton, grandson of Whirlpool co-founder

Hundreds of trees have been destroyed to make way for Holes 7, 8 & 9. They refer to this as “progress.”

~~~

Protect Jean Klock Park was formed to reinvigorate community involvement in the park after long years of neglect by the City of Benton Harbor. It was our fervent hope that the National Park Service (NPS) would reject the conversion proposal for the heart of JKP to be taken for a privately owned golf course and that we might try to assist the City with park maintenance and upkeep. Unfortunately the NPS acquiesced to political pressure, so Protect JKP is backing a federal lawsuit brought against the Department of the Interior (NPS), the Army Corps of Engineers, The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and the City of Benton Harbor.

The golf course subdivision developer named Harbor Shores intervened to be included as a defendant. Harbor Shores and predecessor development projects centering on the Paw Paw River and Lake Michigan are the brainchild of Whirlpool Corporation whose factory operations and those of other manufacturing companies occupied significant waterfront. In order to reclaim those environmentally contaminated, abandoned manufacturing sites, someone decided that a golf course was the answer. Jean Klock Park, fronting on beautiful Lake Michigan, is now in the process of being mangled for three golf holes, because the development idea could not be sustained if the developer had to pay the market rate for nearby, privately owned lake frontage.

Read Governor Granholm’s May, 2006, letter to Whirlpool CEO promising state agency assistance for private sector development Harbor Shores. [LINK]

Please tour our website

***

Text Box: Jens Jensen + Jean Klock Park link

Photo, Tim Baerwald