My home county of Jo Daviess has done a wonderful job in recent years of creating conservation areas for the public. I hope you stop to spend time at this site!
This area is open from dawn to dusk, and the cache should be an easy Park and Grab, but you can spend more time walking around the site and learn about the history and natural beauty of this area.
There is a small pull-in that looks like a driveway near the cache; don't park here (blue address sign 8636) -- use the official parking area (blue address sign 8642), which also has picnic tables and a porta-potty. I'll name this one Wapello 1 in hopes that future geocachers will place more caches on this site.
Wapello is what Hanover, Illinois, was originally called, named for the chief of the Fox Indians, one of whose villages was located here. Many know this land as the John Chapman Archaeological Site, where the University of Illinois in 2003 excavated significant artifacts from two different American Indian cultures dating back to A.D. 1050.
Based on its significance as a meshing point of two Native American cultures, this 79-acre site south of Hanover, Illinois, was accepted into the National Register of Historic Places. It now boasts one of the premier prairie restorations in the Midwest, so significant that the Field Museum has partnered with the Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation on several projects there.
Learn more about this site