During 1935, amid the Great Depression and with federal funding available through New Deal programs, the Township of Avon established its first public park. A fourteen-acre portion of the old John C. Day farm along Paint Creek in the northwest section of the Village of Rochester was acquired and opened to the public in the summer as Avon Park, now Rochester Municipal Park. The following summer, in June 1936, Rochester's Boy Scout Troop #39 undertook a project to beautify the new park by planting twelve pine saplings to honor the twelve young men from the community who had earned the rank of Eagle Scout since 1927. The pine grove still stands east of the Community House along the bank of Paint Creek.