Joe Creason Park: A Gem for All Seasons and Reasons

It’s always a beautiful day in the neighborhood when you’re headed to Joe Creason Park, which has something for everyone: a children’s playground, tennis courts, walking paths, picnic shelter, sports field, bird watching par excellent and miles of beauty. Across the street from the Louisville Zoo and adjacent to the Louisville Nature Center and the 41-acre Beargrass Creek Nature Preserve, the 68-acre Joe Creason Park is one of the jewels in the crown of Louisville Parks.

The park is named for Joe Creason, a colorful columnist for The Courier-Journal in its heyday and an amateur historian. He successfully campaigned to have the Kentucky coffee tree become the state tree because of the tree’s significance in Kentucky’s early history. (Sadly, the state tree was later changed to the tulip poplar.) Creason was playing tennis at what became Joe Creason Park when he died in 1974.

Located on Trevillian Way between Newburg Road and Illinois Avenue, Creason Park has a children’s play area, of course, where kids can swing, climb and slide. Visitors can walk, jog or run along the scenic 3.1-mile cross-country trail and the hiking trails, which the Louisville Nature Center keeps up, that wind through shady woods and dappled meadows. Thanks to the Louisville Tennis Center’s nine clay tennis courts, adults and children can exercise in a scenic setting.

Artists regularly come to paint or sketch at this magnificent park, while youths run cross country or play soccer, lacrosse and other sports on the field in the park’s northeast corner. Families can enjoy a fine day by picnicking at the shelter or at other picnic tables that dot Creason Park.

Joe Creason Park was created from the main portion of the concrete magnate Ben Collings’ estate, including the mansion Collings rebuilt in 1944 after the first 154-year-old, 18-room farmhouse burned. So that the house should never burn again, Collings rebuilt the house with eight-inch-thick reinforced concrete walls faced with brick, concrete floors and a copper-and-slate roof. Metro Parks’ administrative offices are now in the rebuilt mansion that Collings dubbed Colonial Farms.

Owners of this land read like a Who’s Who of Louisville’s famed elite: fabulously wealthy Basil Prather, a captain in the Revolutionary War who became a Louisville commissioner in 1790; Prather’s sons, William and George, who bought additional land in 1850; pioneer Joseph Kinney, whose son would become lieutenant governor of the new state of Illinois; and Confederate General John B. Castleman, president of Louisville’s Board of Park Commissioners. The City of Louisville bought 68 of the 200 acres of the Collings estate in 1966.

History buffs will find much to enjoy at the park, which was variously used as a tobacco farm, orchard (some of the fruit trees remain) and then horse farm. The Prather cemetery remains, and, of course, there’s the mansion to see, although it is not normally open for tours.

Joe Creason Park Creason Park park urban park municipal park children kids children's play area slides swings hiking walking walking paths Collings Collings Estate Collings home Collings mansion trees shrubs flowers artists tennis tennis courts jogging soccer lacrosse football youth leagues games sports sports practice practice picnic picnicking