Community Corner
Exploring Wagner Park in Royal Oak
Royal Oak has many parks that your family can explore all summer long.
It's summer and it’s time to head outdoors for playtime, picnics, relaxation and fun.
Royal Oak has plenty of neighborhood parks for your family to explore this summer.
Wagner Park, which was dedicated in 1956, is located north of 12 Mile Road at Detroit Avenue between Rochester Road and Main Street. With a picnic area, the city's first disc golf course and a play structure, it is a great place to relax or play.
There are as many as 30 different varieties of trees in the park, according to a tree survey done in 2003.
"The are several kinds of oaks in the park, which is nice because we're in Royal Oak," said Bob Muller, a Royal Oak Nature Society naturalist. "All these trees were in a forest. Someone cleared the rest of the stuff down and then planted grass. But if you look here, you can really still see a forest. We're just missing all the bushes and the wildflowers."
Ghost river
Muller also points out an old riverbed, where the Red Run once flowed. The headwaters of Red Run were once marshes in Oak Park and Ferndale that flowed east into the Clinton River."If you know what Paint Creek looks like in Rochester, it probably was simliar that," Muller said. "There may have been some holes that were 6- or 7-feet deep, but then a lot of places you wouldn't have gone in under your knees. But if it rained heavy, it was the natural drain, which means it was going to roar."
Between the late 1920s and the mid-1960s, the river was buried underground. The Red Run is now a ghost river, but if you know what to look for you can still see signs of it throughout Wagner Park.
Acreage: 13.66
Hours: 6 a.m.-9 p.m.
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