On July 28, 1930, Jacob and Lucinda Kindleberger donated thirty-eight acres of land to create a park for the recently founded village of Parchment. “Uncle Jake” Kindleberger was president of the Kalamazoo Vegetable Parchment Company, and the park was a central part of his effort to form a mill and village that he saw as “models for the world.” Parchment’s village commission voted to name the park after the Kindlebergers in January 1931. Despite the Great Depression, construction began in 1932 under the leadership of the Kalamazoo Vegetable Parchment Company, with employees digging ditches, planting trees, and constructing roads, while volunteers from local Boy Scouts and garden clubs also worked on the park. At the park dedication on June 17, 1933, the company’s baseball team opened the new diamond with a home game victory, and the Parchment News reported nearly six thousand attendees. At its founding in 1933, the park featured walking paths, tennis and shuffleboard courts, and a sunken garden, and it quickly became a central part of village life. Industrial- and city-league baseball games, the annual Fourth of July celebration, and concerts by local bands drew large crowds, while in winter visitors ice-skated on flooded tennis courts and sledded down Scout Hill. By 1955 the park’s care had shifted from the Kalamazoo Vegetable Parchment Company to the City of Parchment. The community continued to hold new events there, fulfilling Jacob Kindleberger’s goal of benefitting “the future generations” through his park. Little League teams began using the ball diamonds in the mid-1950s, the annual Kindleberger Summer Festival of the Performing Arts began in 1982, and in 2007 a new band shell was built on Scout Hill.