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The Granville Historical Society Oral History Project 2001 - 2002
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15) Wildwood Park
Building Wildwood Park(Lesa Miller) In 1992 a group of people decided that we needed a playground. So we contacted this Leathers and Associates Company, which is a group that goes around the country and helps communities build playgrounds. One of the Leather’s Associates architects come to the elementary school and talked to a bunch of kids to find out what the kids wanted in a playground. It was called Design Day. The architect just took in all their ideas and sketched out a playground that day. So from the fall of 1992 up until our build in April of 1993 we were mainly fund raising and gathering materials. Next, it was mass coordination of man power – all the volunteers. We had 300-400 people at a time, working twelve hours a day for four days. They came in shifts and we trained them to build the playground, and we fed them. There were two construction supervisors from the company and they were on site everyday. Plus we had twelve head construction people, Granville volunteers who’d also be there through the whole time to oversee things. I think there were 1500 to 2000 people involved in total.
We had a separate area up by the shelter house where the kids could work because there were no children allowed in the construction zone. One job the kids did was soaping screws, and we had hundreds of bars of soap! In order for the screws to go in the boards more efficiently, the kids would run them over a bar of soap, and then put them in the bucket. It was called soaping screws. This was something that they could do to help out. They also sprayed the nails and screws different colors. Like they sprayed the 2 inch screws blue, and the 3 inch screws red, so it was easy for the workers to distinguish the right one. This was something that the construction company told us. On the last day of the build we had constant rain. I don’t know how someone didn’t get electrocuted. It just poured. I remember my legs hurting so bad from trudging through the mud and my boots being sucked off my feet because it was so deep. But we got through it. We had tents up and everybody was bundled up and out there hammering nails and sawing boards in this pouring-down rain.
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