Going With the Flow: What's Actually Different at Fullersburg Woods Two Summers After the Dam Came Out

"Going with the flow," reads a trail sign at the foot of the old gristmill in Fullersburg Woods. It's a small joke, planted at the exact spot where a 90-year-old dam used to hold Salt Creek back. Most people walking past on a September afternoon won't register it as anything more than a pun. But if you've lived in Oak Brook long enough to remember what that stretch of creek sounded like five years ago, the sign is doing more work than it looks like.

The Graue Mill dam came out in the summer of 2024. That's not new news. What's less understood, even by regulars, is that the creek is still visibly changing this year, and fall is actually the best window to see it, because the plantings from the past two seasons are mature enough to notice and the birds moving through right now are using habitat that didn't function the same way three years ago.

What the dam was actually doing there

The dam was built in 1934 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, originally rigged with a power-generating wheel to run the gristmill. In recent decades it hadn't been doing that job. The mill ran on an electric motor instead, and behind the dam sat a 16-acre impoundment choked with sediment. Fish couldn't move upstream. Oxygen levels in the water dropped. None of that was visible from the trail unless you knew to look for it, but it meant the creek above the dam was, ecologically, close to dead water.

The Forest Preserve District of DuPage County and the DuPage River Salt Creek Workgroup made the case that removing the dam and replacing it with a rock riffle was the only way to fix that, and that it also happened to be the cheaper option. Upgrading the wastewater treatment plants that feed into Salt Creek instead of removing the dam was projected to cost roughly $213 million, a bill that would have landed on local utility rates. Pulling the dam sidestepped that entirely.

What's different right now, not in theory

Two years out, the on-the-ground report is more specific than "the creek looks nicer." Erik Neidy, director of natural resources for the Forest Preserve District, has been tracking the site since the dam came out, and the changes he's describing are concrete. Removing the dam opened roughly 1.3 miles of restored habitat and is projected to drive close to a 30 percent increase in fish diversity across a 17-mile stretch of Salt Creek. That's not a number about Fullersburg Woods in isolation. It's a number about the creek all the way upstream of Oak Brook, which is the kind of connectivity that a dam, by definition, prevents.

On the ground, the restoration crews have put in roughly 50,000 native wetland plugs so far, with another 15,000 planned for next spring, along with more than 350 trees and shrubs across the floodplain. The species list reads like a native plant catalog: blueflag iris, swamp milkweed, marsh blazing star, prairie cordgrass for bank stabilization, rose mallow for the mud flats, and royal catchfly, which Neidy has called out specifically as a rarer, more conservative species that's starting to show up.

"Being here and seeing the changes at Fullersburg, it's magnificent," Neidy said.

The wildlife response has followed. Black-crowned night herons, cormorants, and egrets have come back to the newly formed riparian zones. Paddlers no longer have to get out of the water and portage around a dam, they can run the stretch straight through. And the invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle clearing that opened up sunlight on the forest floor produced what Neidy described as an unusually strong run of spring ephemerals this year, the kind of early wildflower bloom that only shows up once a canopy actually lets light through.

Where to actually see it this month

If you're walking or biking Fullersburg Woods for the first time since spring, a few specific spots are worth the detour:

• The Night Heron Trail, which loops closest to Graue Mill, is the district's own pick for fall color and is also the stretch that runs closest to the restored riffle where the dam used to sit.
• The Wildflower Trail, starting near the nature education center, is where the native plantings are most concentrated and easiest to identify against the restored prairie backdrop.
• Rainbow Bridge, upstream of the old dam site, is the reference point the district itself points to if you want to see what the restored creek is supposed to look like once the plantings mature further.
• The canoe launch downstream of the former dam is worth a look even if you're not paddling, since it's the clearest vantage on the new rock riffle doing the job the dam used to do.

Inside the nature education center, the resident turtles Tina, Lemon, and Daisy are still the fixed point for anyone bringing kids, and the center's exhibit on Civilian Conservation Corps history gives useful context for why so much of the site, including several picnic shelters and the boathouse, still carries a 1930s stamp.

What's still unfinished

None of this is a closed project. The Forest Preserve District's own site still carries a standing note that a habitat improvement project will cause temporary trail closures, with signs posted on site when it happens, which is worth checking before you plan a longer loop this fall. The vegetation management phase alone was slated to run three to five years past the initial planting, meaning the creek you're walking past this September is still an early-to-mid version of what the district expects it to become. The 15,000 additional plugs going in next spring are part of that same multi-year timeline, not a wrap-up.

That ongoing-ness is part of what makes this fall worth paying attention to rather than filing under "already happened." A restoration like this doesn't have a ribbon-cutting moment. It has years where the changes are incremental enough that a regular visitor can walk past them without noticing, until enough seasons stack up that the difference becomes obvious.

The bigger tell: Fullersburg Days

The clearest sign that the Forest Preserve District is treating Fullersburg Woods as an active, evolving site rather than a finished restoration showed up earlier this summer. At the free Fullersburg Days event on August 1 and 2, visitors were invited to wade directly into Salt Creek, water shoes suggested, to help district ecologists remove invasive rusty crayfish. That's a new addition to the event's usual lineup of corn-grinding demonstrations at Graue Mill, self-guided history walks using the Goosechase app, and vintage yard games near the Graue House. Inviting the public into the creek itself, as a working part of managing it, is a different posture than simply asking people to admire a finished landscape from the trail.

That's the thing about a restoration like this one. It rewards people who already live near it and keep coming back, more than it rewards a single dramatic visit. The creek two years after dam removal isn't a museum piece. It's a working system that's still being planted, still being monitored, and still changing season to season, which means the next time you're on the Night Heron Trail in October watching the color come down over the water, you're looking at something that will read differently again by next fall.

If you're weighing what a stretch of restored Salt Creek frontage or proximity to a preserve like this means for a property in Oak Brook, or you're simply trying to understand how neighborhood amenities like Fullersburg Woods factor into long-term value in this part of DuPage County, that's exactly the kind of local nuance AFNR Homes spends its time tracking. Reach out to schedule a complimentary market consultation and bespoke listing plan.