The Last Sundays to Find the Log House at Crow Island Woods
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
You have probably driven past the gravel turnoff on Willow Road a hundred times without slowing down. It sits between the more obvious entrances to Crow Island Woods, easy to miss if you are headed toward the Community House or cutting through to Sheridan Road. Most people who live nearby know the woods as a place to walk a dog or let a kid run off energy after school. Fewer know that tucked behind the tree line sits the oldest log structure in Cook County, and that it is only open to the public two hours a week, one day at a time, on a schedule that is about to shut down for the winter.
The Schmidt-Burnham Log House closes for the season on November 20, 2026. After that, the doors do not reopen until next May. If you have been meaning to see it, this fall is the window, not next spring.
The log house sits at 1140 Willow Road, inside Crow Island Woods, and the Winnetka Historical Society runs it on a deliberately narrow schedule: Sundays only, 2 to 4 p.m., from mid-May through late November. That is the entire public walk-in window for the year. There is no evening access, no weekday tour, and no walk-in visit outside those two hours. Once the season ends in late November, the house sits closed through the winter until the cycle starts again the following spring.
Parking is part of the reason the place stays quiet even during open hours. There is limited gravel parking directly west of the log house, with overflow on Euclid Avenue or along Willow Road east of the entrance. It is not built for crowds, which is part of what makes it feel like a discovery rather than a stop on a tour.
The log house is the destination most people have heard of, if they have heard of anything back there at all. But Crow Island Woods holds more than one reason to detour off the main path. Near the fire pit shelter, ringed by benches and drinking fountains, stands the Council Circle: 21 native oak trees planted in a 160-foot ring, modeled on historical Native American council circles that once marked gathering spaces across this part of the Midwest. Some of the oaks were grown from seedlings of an authentic trail marker tree that stood in the area, a detail that turns a pleasant grove into something closer to a living artifact.
A quick list of what you will find if you walk the full loop:
None of this is signed the way a park with a visitor center would sign it. You have to already know what you are looking at, or go with someone who does.
Part of what makes the log house worth the detour is the story of how it got there, which has nothing to do with Winnetka originally. Built around 1837 near what is now the Indian Hill Club, the house was first home to the Schmidt family, German settlers who arrived from Trier in 1839 and took occupancy a few years later. It stayed a working farmhouse for decades until the artist Anita Willets-Burnham found it on a painting trip and bought it in 1917 for $25, then paid another $100 to have it moved by horse-drawn wagon to 1407 Tower Road. She and her husband raised four children in it, and the Burnham family lived there continuously until 2001, when they donated the house to the Winnetka Historical Society to make sure it would be preserved.
The Society moved the structure a second time, to its current spot in Crow Island Woods, in 2003, and opened it to the public in 2006. It now sits on the National Register of Historic Places, still built from the original hand-hewn white oak logs, with axe marks from 1837 visible on the square-cut corners. The Burnham family's 1917 addition is intact too, so what you are looking at is not a museum reconstruction. It is the same physical house that has been standing, in one location or another, for close to 190 years.
If the closing date alone is not enough of a nudge, the Winnetka-Northfield Public Library District has been running a fall program that gives the visit a second purpose. The library's "Branching Out" tree identification walk through Crow Island Woods, led by Openlands TreeKeeper Lynn Zaransky and sponsored by Go Green Winnetka, meets at the woods' fire pit for a guided look at the trees that make up the canopy, timed for when the leaves are actually changing rather than after they have dropped. It is a small, low-key program, the kind that only shows up if you are already checking the library's calendar, and it turns the same walk you might take toward the log house into something with a bit more context.
Crow Island Woods is not an isolated pocket either. The trail system inside it connects north into the larger North Branch Trail, which runs roughly 20 miles along the North Branch of the Chicago River, passing through the Chicago Botanic Garden before opening into a roughly four-mile loop around the Skokie Lagoons and Erickson Woods. The eastern side of that loop, away from I-94, is the quieter half, winding through woods rather than running alongside highway noise. If you have twenty minutes at Crow Island Woods and want another two hours, the connection is right there.
None of this happened by accident. The Winnetka Park District has owned Crow Island Woods since assembling it in parcels between 1919 and 1997, and a five-phase stewardship plan carried out from 2016 to 2020 removed more than 100 dead and dying ash trees lost to the emerald ash borer, cleared invasive buckthorn, and planted over 100 native trees, including red, white, swamp, and pin oaks as part of a Red Oak Savanna restoration. The woods you are walking through today look meaningfully different than they did a decade ago, and greener than they will look again once the current oak plantings mature further.
The next time you pass that gravel turnoff on Willow Road, the calculation is simple. You have a handful of Sundays left before the log house goes quiet for the winter, and a guided reason to make one of them count. After November 20, the door closes until spring, and the woods go back to being just a place to walk the dog, at least until someone tells you otherwise.
If you are the kind of person who notices details like these, whether it is a 190-year-old log house or the way a specific block holds its value because of the care people put into it, you already understand what makes a neighborhood worth staying in. Mary Grant has spent her career paying attention to exactly those details across Winnetka, Kenilworth, Wilmette, Glencoe, and Northfield. If you are ever curious what that kind of local attention could mean for your own home, whether you are thinking about buying, selling, or simply want a conversation about the market, schedule a private consultation.
Call Mary and learn what so many of her friends and colleagues already know: When it comes to helping you buy or sell your home, Mary will go above and beyond to get it done.
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