Bailly/Chellberg Inner Loop

The Bailly/Chellberg Inner Loop is a 1.1-mile circuit through the Bailly Homestead and Chellberg Farm sites. It’s a good pick for a short walk with two very different pieces of local history; allow about an hour if you stop to look around the grounds. The river-and-prairie perimeter route is a separate, longer 3.4-mile loop, and the Bailly Cemetery spur is another walk beyond this one.

Most of the route is packed soil, with wood chips in places, through mature maple, beech, basswood and oak woods. There are some changes in elevation and several stair sets. The trail can be wet and muddy, and it isn’t wheelchair accessible. This is an easy outing when the ground is dry, but it can feel slower than the mileage suggests when the steps or mud are in play.

Honore Bailly set up a fur-trading post here in 1822, where Indigenous travel routes met the Little Calumet River. The trade network connected Montreal with communities as far away as Louisiana. The main hewn-log house dates to 1834–35, near the end of Bailly’s life, and the homestead became a National Historic Landmark in 1962. The story also sits within the forced displacement of Potawatomi people; this was a crossroads long before the trading post.

Swedish immigrants Anders and Johanna Kjellberg bought 80 acres here in the 1870s, starting three generations of family farming. The farmhouse visible today was rebuilt in brick after a fire in 1884; the barn, built around 1872, is the farm’s oldest surviving building. The Chellbergs began tapping maples in the early 1930s, eventually drawing sap from more than 100 trees and producing about 55 to 60 gallons of syrup a year. Their sugar shack stands beside a ravine carved by glacial meltwater.

Maple Sugar Time brings demonstrations of Indigenous, pioneer and modern syrup-making methods, usually during the first two weekends in March. The farmhouse interior is open only during festivals, demonstrations or ranger-guided tours, so plan on seeing the buildings from outside on an ordinary visit.

Use Bailly-Chellberg Lot on Mineral Springs Road, north of U.S. 20. The paved lot has year-round restrooms and drinking water, plus three covered picnic shelters. A park entrance pass is required. Dogs are allowed on leash no longer than six feet. Ticks are present year-round, and wet soil or wood chips can be slippery.