A look inside ‘MANCKY Park’

WASHINGTON — Somewhere in rural Washington County, south of 270th Street, behind a farmhouse, a handful of fields and a few acres of brush, sits a pristine clearing, flanked by a babbling creek on one side, and a modest pond and shelter on the other.

The land, purchased by Mary and Yaro Chmelar in 1975, is known to them as “MANCKY Park” an acronym for their names, and those of their children: Ann, Nancy, Cathy and Kerry.

“We wanted a place to have our own park,” Yaro said. “It’s kind of wild, and yet so peaceful down here.”

Over the decades, they’ve put quite a bit of work into clearing and maintaining the three-acre property. The initial process involved driving a tractor through the patch of timber with a front-end loader, leveling several of the trees, while others were cut down years later, or died, like the elm trees.

All that remain today are walnut, making for an unobtrusive, but natural-looking smattering of wood in the park’s clearing.

The park has been used for all manner of events, including Lions Club meetups, church gatherings and even a wedding venue, by one of the Chmelars’ daughters.

“We wrapped bows around all the trees, it was really pretty,” said Mary. “It was really fun to decorate for a wedding.”

It takes about two hours to mow, although they now hire a friend of the family to handle that work in the summers. Otherwise, the park requires only as much work as its keepers put into it on a given day. Mary said it did a good job of keeping her husband busy.

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“A lot of people would call it work,” she said. “He just comes down and improves the place. He does a little, teeny bit at a time, but it’s just what he likes to do.”

In 2009, the family added a pond to the property, after extensive consultation with local government officials about how to tile the land and maintain an appropriate water level. They hired a team of bulldozers to level a ditch full of bramble and timber uphill from MANCKY park proper, digging out a basin for the water.

Efforts to stock the small body of water proved unsuccessful, as any fish there became food for otters in the nearby creek, who quickly discovered it.

The pond is flanked by a small, screened-in shelter, and a white cross at the top of a hill, which was once attached to a local church before it was remodeled.

“I put a steel post in behind it and put it up, and it really shows up from the shelter over there, when the sun shines on it,” Yaro said. “It means a lot to us, and we didn’t have to burn off the cross or get rid of it.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com