The Wilson Brewer Park Foundation Board received a check from Enhance Hamilton County Foundtion for $10,567.26 at Thursday night's meeting. The money will be used to remodel restrooms in the depot to make them ADA accessible.

If the still-new Wilson Brewer Park Foundation Board could reduce its strategy to a single, simple statement, it might very well be “attack on all fronts.”

The board began life with a park that had survived decades of neglect, but everyone sensed had great potential. Now, as the park’s opening day — Friday May 2 — approaches, there is both progress to celebrate and much to anticipate in the 2025 season.

On Saturday, Wilson Brewer Park will be the site of what will be, without question, the biggest Easter celebration Webster City has seen in years. Enthusiastic people and organizations will put on what promises to be a must-see, must-do event for families with young children. This is all thanks to the cooperative work of the WBP Foundation, the Van Diest Medical Center Foundation, and Trinity Lutheran Church.

This Easter Egg Hunt will begin at 10 a.m. sharp at Wilson Brewer Park, 202 Ohio Street, Webster City. A Color Run will begin at 10:30 a.m. These are free events for all ages.

Other contributors to this event are The Cat Hut, Cera’s Balloon Creations, Rupiper Farms and Asbury Methodist Church.

This latest event comes on the heels of last fall’s successful Fall Festival, a half-day event with a bushel basket-full of family-friendly events. The public came out in good numbers. Then, Christmas in the City saw the park host another well-planned event with something for everyone, which coincided with an unexpectedly mild day. Another success.

Well, there is more good news coming.

This year, repairs to exterior siding of the historic Illinois Central Depot are already underway. Painting will follow. This will not only help preserve the depot, which is more than a century old, but it will make it more attractive for would-be visitors driving by on Superior Street.

This year, too, will see the long-awaited completion of restoration of the First Hamilton County Courthouse. This will include placement of a set of stone letters from the second Hamilton County courthouse in a permanent display, and reconfiguring of the courthouse interior to provide more gallery space for display of historic objects.

Restrooms, long inadequate, will be dramatically upgraded before year’s-end. The historic restrooms inside the depot will become ADA-accessible, and a completely new building, holding modern restrooms, will be built along the sidewalk on the east side of the depot. A dying tree was removed this week to make way for that project.

After waiting patiently for five years, Carolynn Miller, coordinator for historic Mulberry Center Church on the park grounds, will finally see new concrete ramps built to both the church’s doors. This will make that building ADA-accessible and will be much-appreciated by the audiences who attend the popular summertime lectures held in the church.

Board committees are being formed to work on tourism packages and pricing, volunteer recruitment and training, and more events and programming to bring more visitors to the park.

A new website is now up and content will be added to make it a more complete source of visitor information.

And park benefactor Dean Bowden continues to work on restoration of the platform at the depot, as well as the creation of the “Amish barn” he’s dreamed about and designed to house history displays of every town in Hamilton County, a curator’s office, well-equipped workshop, and badly-needed, climate-controlled storage for historic artifacts.

Bowden hasn’t said what he might call the barn, but, functionally, it will serve as The Museum of Hamilton County History.

Worker’s remove a dying tree at the park on Wednesday. The next exterior bathrooms will be built in that space.