Jackson Park and the Oklawaha Greenway Are Recovering Unevenly from Helene
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
Two days from now, the Tree Board sets up shop near the Fourth Avenue East gate at Jackson Park and starts handing out free native saplings and shrubs. Farm City Day runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, October 3, and if you've been to the park recently for a soccer game or a set of tennis, everything around that giveaway will look finished. The fields are mowed. The courts are striped. The mountain bike skills park is open. It would be easy to assume the whole 220-acre property came through Hurricane Helene the same way.
It didn't. Two years out, Jackson Park is a case study in how differently a storm-damaged park recovers depending on whether the ground underneath it is turf or trees.
Three weeks after Helene hit in the fall of 2024, a WLOS report quoted Henderson County Parks and Recreation director Bruce Gilliam saying the park was "ready to welcome visitors back for the weekend." By that point the soccer fields, basketball courts and tennis courts were open. Softball fields 4, 8 and 9 were back in play for youth and adult leagues. The turf-based side of Jackson Park, the part that gets mowed and lined and doesn't have much canopy overhead, cleared the worst of the damage fast.
What Gilliam flagged as still closed at that three-week mark tells you where the real work was: the disc golf course, and the picnic area above the tennis courts, both of which needed more repair and cleanup before they could reopen.
The disc golf course at Jackson Park was designed in 2014, runs 18 holes, and is described by course reviewers as heavily wooded except for holes 1 through 3, 11, 14 and 16. Water comes into play on holes 2 and 11, and hole 9 gets singled out by regional players as one of the standout holes in Western North Carolina. It's rated 4.5 out of 5 on UDisc, which tracks disc golf courses nationally.
That same wooded character is exactly why the course didn't recover on the same timeline as the ball fields next to it. Course listings for Jackson Park carry closure notices tied to Helene tree work dated as recently as November 2025 and January 2026, more than a year after the storm. A hurricane doesn't just knock trees down the week it hits. It leaves standing trees with cracked trunks, split limbs and compromised root systems that don't fail right away. Those trees get identified and removed in stages, often as arborists work through a property hole by hole, which is a much slower and more unpredictable process than reseeding a soccer field. A recent trail review on AllTrails, written from a visit in late winter or early spring, still noted the toll from Helene along the nature trail loop and suggested fresh mulch would help it feel cared for again.
None of this means the course is unplayable. It means the timeline for a wooded course to fully clear storm risk runs in months and seasons, not weeks, and that gap is still closing.
Jackson Park isn't just a stand-alone park. It's the western trailhead of the Oklawaha Greenway, a paved 3.25-mile path that the City of Hendersonville describes as connecting Jackson Park to Patton Park, Berkeley Mills Park, Sullivan Park and William H. King Memorial Park. The trail is flat, ten feet wide, handicap accessible, and marked with mileage signs every quarter mile. Three bike FixIt stations sit along the route, one each at Berkeley Mills, Patton and Jackson Park, and blue light emergency phones were installed years ago with a state DOT grant.
Follow that greenway east from Jackson Park and the same open-ground-versus-wooded-ground pattern that shows up at the disc golf course shows up again, twice.
At Patton Park, the general layout, basketball and pickleball courts, and half-mile lighted walking trail are open. Patton Pool remains closed due to damage from Hurricane Helene, with no reopening date posted by the city.
Near the Seventh Avenue trailhead, Pet's Own Place, the city's fenced dog park across Mud Creek from the greenway, is only partially open. The city's parks page notes that the bottom lot remains closed while repairs continue, and asks for patience as recovery work goes on.
So the honest picture of the corridor right now looks like this:
That's not a story about one broken amenity. It's a pattern across an entire connected system, and it's the kind of detail you only notice if you use more than one piece of the park on a regular basis.
The greenway was never meant to stop at 3.25 miles. Henderson County commissioners have already directed staff to study extending the trail south from Jackson Park to Blue Ridge Community College, and a broader county planning effort, laid out through American Trails, describes a proposed 14.65 miles of new greenway that would build on the existing Oklawaha corridor to create a network approaching 18 miles total. That larger vision links Fletcher, Mills River, Hendersonville and Flat Rock along the French Broad River, Mud Creek and Bat Creek, with downtown Hendersonville and Blue Ridge Community College as anchor points. The Friends of the Oklawaha Greenway, a local advocacy group, has been gathering letters of support for those extensions for years.
None of that changes what's true on the ground this week. Jackson Park is also the starting point of a trail system the county is still actively building outward.
If you're planning a Saturday around Jackson Park, whether that's the plant giveaway, a round of disc golf, or riding the greenway toward Berkeley Mills, a few practical notes based on where things stand right now:
Enter from the Fourth Avenue East gate for the main park facilities, or from the Glover Street entrance off US 176 (Spartanburg Highway) if you're coming from that side of town. The park is open daily from 7:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. If disc golf is the plan, it's worth checking course status before you load up your bag, since tree-work closures have continued to pop up on individual holes well into 2026. The nature trail and mountain bike skills park have both been open and in regular use. If you're bringing a dog to Pet's Own Place afterward, expect the top lot to be available and the bottom lot to still be fenced off.
Farm City Day itself is straightforward: free native plants and shrubs, distributed by the city's Tree Board, this Saturday from 10 to 4, right at the park that's been quietly working through its own recovery in the background the whole time.
Aaron Chapman, Benjamin Johnson and Kathy Clark of Aaron Chapman spend plenty of weekends on this same greenway, so if you spot the team out on the trail near Jackson Park this Saturday, say hello.
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