T.R. Proctor Park: Features

The most notable features of this park are its playing fields for organized sports of various sorts—a playground, 2 basketball courts, 2 soccer fields, and four baseball diamonds, along with trails for walking and running. Some original historical aspects of this park have been lost, notable the wide lawn along Culver Avenue, which was intended to maintain a bucolic façade to what was always intended to be a park of playing fields principally for organized sports.

Thomas R. Proctor Park today.

Takraw (footvolley) at T.R. Proctor Park.

Like the other parks in this system, it contains features built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal agency that put idled laborers to work during the Great Depression, notably several stone staircases and two of the system’s six stone bathhouses, which originally served as public restrooms. The Buckley Pool, located across Welsh Bush Road, was also built by the WPA.

Also of some historical significance is the Silver Spring Glen, the small ravine, running perpendicular to Culver Avenue, which Thomas R. Proctor permitted area residents to use for picnics, beginning in the 1870s, when the adjacent, flatter property was still used as a hotel farm; it appears that permitting picnicking in this spot helped to inspire his family’s later park-building spree, between 1897 and 1914. The entrance to the glen is marked by a stone boulder, just off Culver Avenue, with the name of the park and the date 1909, the year the Proctors donated the park to the people of Utica (on the same date, Roscoe Conkling Park was likewise donated to the people of Utica).