By Therese Kattner
Northside News
In 1995, the state announced that it would sell 15 acres of land on the Mendota Mental Health Institute grounds as surplus land. The problem was that the land in the 500 block of Troy Drive was hardly lying unused.
About 100 Northside families used it to grow more than 90,000 pounds of produce a year. About 75% of those gardeners were part of low-income households that relied on what was grown to supplement their grocery budgets. Other residents visited the land to birdwatch or to simply enjoy the green space.
The land brought different populations living in the Northside together. It was bordered by neighborhoods that were quite different from one another, according to “Ours to Decide,” a locally produced documentary about the gardens. The Troy Drive land “did what parks are meant to do,” said Dorrie Brooks, the documentary’s narrator and a Northside resident, in the film. “It brought us into contact with one another. It was a literal and symbolic crossroads of our community.”
With this at stake, a group of residents called a meeting. They were concerned that a private developer would purchase the land, build on it and force out the gardens. They teamed up with Community Action Coalition, a Madison poverty prevention group, the Northside Planning Council (NPC), and other nonprofits to form the Troy Community Gardens Coalition. The group began informing the public about the impending land sale.
When the coalition began meeting, its first goal was to delay the sale. If a sale were to go through quickly, the gardeners might not have time to find a new location for their gardens and move their plants. A delay would also buy the coalition time to answer an intriguing question: Could there be a way for the Northside to acquire the land itself?
It turned out there was, but it would take a bit of compromise. The compromise would be to allow limited development on a portion of the land to generate funds to keep the rest of it open. Representatives of the Madison Area Community Land Trust (MACLT) recommended that 5 acres be developed into mixed income, owner-occupied housing, to be financed by MACLT, with the remaining 10 acres staying as garden and open space.
The idea was generally well received. Then the state threw a curveball. It announced that it had identified for sale another surplus parcel — 16 acres immediately north of the gardens site.
This second parcel was landlocked, so when the City of Madison floated plans for housing development there, it meant roads would almost certainly need to be built through the 15-acre site, scuttling the plans the coalition had painstakingly drawn up.
The coalition went back to the drawing board and started a new round of meetings. Instead of giving up, it decided to pursue a bigger dream: acquiring both parcels, all 31 acres, for Northside residents.
Meanwhile University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty asked to join the coalition to help form educational programs that flourish at the location today.
After another round of community input, the coalition presented a few versions of a plan for both parcels. The plans included a permanent conservation zone managed by the nonprofit Urban Open Space Foundation, 5 acres of community gardens, and 30 mixed-income, owner-occupied homes on 5 acres to be held by MACLT.
Even with the housing development, however, it became clear that the coalition didn’t have the resources to acquire the entire 31 acres without assistance. Fortunately, the state was willing to work with the coalition on securing ownership of the land in stages, and it agreed to remove the Troy parcels from its surplus land list in 1997.
The coalition, through MACLT, was able to buy about 18 acres. In 1998, it acquired the rest of the property by signing a 50-year lease with the state. The lease, which the state offered to the coalition at no charge, included a provision to purchase the remaining property. In 2001, with the help of the city and after plenty of fundraising, MACLT did just that.
Meanwhile, residents formed the Friends of Troy Gardens, a nonprofit group responsible for stewardship of the non-housing elements of the Troy land including the gardens, a prairie and a farm. Members included representatives from the NPC, MACLT, Community Action Coalition of South Central Wisconsin, Urban Open Space Foundation and UW-Madison.
(The Friends later became Community GroundWorks. In 2020 Community GroundWorks became Rooted when it merged with the Center for Resilient Cities, which was running the Badger Rock Neighborhood Center’s farm and community gardens on Madison’s south side, said Sheena Tesch, Rooted’s deputy director of North Madison programs.)
Troy Farm began operating in 2001. The certified organic farm was Madison’s first urban farm. Today it has a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and additionally serves the community by partnering with Healthy Food for All to distribute fresh produce throughout the Northside, Tesch said.
In 2002 the Friends of Troy Gardens and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems won a nearly $500,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation. The grant was used to improve the gardens’ sustainability and for agricultural outreach, education and research.
In 2011 the state announced plans to build a 60,000-square-foot storage facility on land right next to the Troy Gardens property. The building would provide much-needed space for the Wisconsin Historical Society’s and Wisconsin Veterans Museum’s growing archives. The plan had worked its way through the city planning process without public comment until a Northside alder was able to convince the city to hold a public meeting. Although most residents attending the meeting said they appreciated the need for archive storage, they had concerns about traffic and noise. The facility, which ultimately measured 180,000 square feet, was built on South Thornton Avenue on the site of an aging state building that was demolished.
Today, the Troy site is home to more than 325 community garden plots tended by about 190 families, as well as a kids’ garden. The CSA farm sits on 5 acres. On another 5 acres is a 30-home Troy Gardens Cohousing Community. The remaining 15 acres are open space, including woodlands and a restored tallgrass prairie.
