The West Bloomfield Trail occupies a 6.8-mile, 64-acre corridor through West Bloomfield, Orchard Lake, Keego Harbor, and Sylvan Lake where trains once ran from 1896 to 1985 as part of the Grand Trunk Western Railroad. In the mid-1800s, West Bloomfield was largely wilderness and a few subsistence farms, and a depot on Orchard Lake near the Michigan Military Academy made the rail line the chief route for bringing students from Pontiac until the academy closed in 1909; Orchard Lake St. Mary's later replaced it. In the 1890s, Grand Trunk Western acquired the line, and the Detroit Urban Railroad, an electric line from Detroit to Orchard Lake Village and then to Pontiac, brought people who built summer homes. By the 1950s, Grand Trunk had ended passenger service and shifted to freight only as suburbs, roads, and large trucks expanded, while the Detroit Urban Railway had disappeared. Grand Trunk abandoned this section in August 1984 and removed the tracks, leaving a rock-strewn path. West Bloomfield Parks joined the national rails-to-trails movement in 1987, acquired 4.25 miles of the corridor in 1989, and opened the trail for public use in 1993; an additional 2.55 miles purchased in December 2006 opened in 2013. As railroads abandoned many of Michigan's former rail lines, communities such as West Bloomfield converted them into linear greenways that continue to connect communities. West Bloomfield Parks and Recreation, created by voter mandate in 1970 after a committee formed in June 1969 and township voters established a Parks Commission in August 1970, maintains more than 580 acres across 12 parks and facilities and supports recreation, conservation, and environmental education through programs, naturalist staff, and management of invasive species. The 162-acre West Bloomfield Woods Nature Preserve, first set aside by the Ward family in the late 1880s and early 1890s as a community park while they sold surrounding land, contains many planted non-native flowers and evergreens as well as 200-year-old trees, numerous wildflowers, and wildlife including more than 100 bird species, white-tail deer, red fox, coyote, weasel, mink, and salamanders. Later owners kept the woods from development until the mid-1980s, when West Bloomfield Parks and Recreation Commission, urged by residents and aided by a Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund grant, bought the land; in June 1990 the National Institute of Urban Wildlife designated it an Urban Wildlife Sanctuary, the first nature preserve in Michigan to receive that distinction. The preserve lies in the Franklin Branch of the Rouge Watershed, part of a 467-square-mile watershed with more than 400 lakes and ponds that runs through heavily populated land, where storm water runoff from agriculture, urban areas, construction, and land disposal sites degrades water quality and where households are identified as major contributors to pollution. The corridor also forms part of the Great Lake-to-Lake Trails Route #1, a 275-mile shared-use trail begun through a 2009 project to link Lakes Michigan and Huron across southern Lower Michigan while promoting tourism, transportation, health, fitness, and economic development.