Fassnight Park - Springfield, MO
Posted by: 
silverquill
N 37° 11.486 W 093° 17.690
15S E 473832 N 4116149
This 28-acre historic park features one of Springfield's best swimming pools. The pool building, other structures and stone work along the creek, featuring Ozark Limestone, were built by the WPA.
Waymark Code: WMJPZB
Location: Missouri, United States
Date Posted: 12/15/2013
Views: 2
Fassnight Park is one of the most popular parks in Springfield due to its large swimming pool and water slide. Although the building was originally built by the WPA in the 1930's, the pool has recently been restored and updated.
The Fassnight Creek meanders through the park, featuring more stone work put in by the WPA. Playgrounds, outdoor handball courts, a lighted softball field, grills and picnic facilities are unique offerings within the park.
From the Springfield-Greene County Library:
"Fassnight Park is located at Meadowmere Street between Campbell and Grant Avenues. It contains 28 acres of land with trees and a stream. The Springfield Park Board purchased the land in 1924 from Conrad and Emma Fassnight, who had traveled to Springfield with their parents from Michigan in 1886. The foreman of the Fassnight Park project was Godfrey Messerli. He was greatly skilled as a stonemason and created bridges, the bathhouse, the swimming pool and other structures using the fieldstone and Carthage stone found in the area. The labor was done by the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.)."
From the National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form dated May 21,1999:
WPA (Works Progress Administration) and NYA (National Youth Association) workers did rock work in several Springfield city parks during the 1930s. One of the rock walls lining a stream at Phelps Gove Park bears the letters 'WPA", stamped into the concrete edging, and another section of the same wall has "Apr 25, 1936" scratched by hand into the mortar. In other parks, stone tablets on buildings and even barbecue grills bear the letters "NYA". Other Springfield parks that contain rock structures of note include Silver Springs Park, which has an amphitheater and numerous retaining walls of rock, and the aforementioned Fassnight Park, which has one of the largest collection of rock bridges and other structures in the survey group.
Although most of the Springfield park structures are of simple fieldstone construction, at least one of the bridges in Fassnight Park utilizes the more formal sawn limestone and fieldstone combination found elsewhere in the survey group.
Some of the workers on the New Deal projects learned how to work with native rock as part of their Depression-era employment. An article published n the Springfield Leader and Press noted that "Most of Ed Elkins' 43 WPA workmen were made into stone workers and builders right on the job, although some of them were good to begin with-just had hard luck and were out of a job."