Around 1835, the Walkup family settled this land, built a cabin where the playground now stands, grazed cattle in the bowl that is now a pond, farmed the upland areas of the present parking lot and tennis courts, and harvested timber in the woods. Several homes stood on the property until larger homes were built on the west side of Walkup Ave.; the historic home still standing was built in 1856 by local mason Andrew Jackson Simons and is owned and inhabited by a descendant of the early settlers. By 1869, the bowl area and the upper east bluff where the Nature Center sits were owned by Simon Gates; a schoolhouse built on the Nature Center site was later moved to the southeast corner of Walkup Avenue and Route 176, where it is now a residence, and the pond was long known as School House Pond. The farm was sold in 1921 to a developer who built a small golf course, and the nine-hole Oakwoods Lodge course opened in 1923 and was popular for several years, with the sixth hole near the playground overlooking the pond. The course closed during the Great Depression, and in 1939 the land was sold to the young Crystal Lake Park District; long called Walkup Woods, it was renamed after World War II to honor veterans. Today, Veteran Acres Park covers 156 acres, connects to Sterne's Woods and Fen at the northeast corner, and includes miles of hiking trails through the woods and Wingate Prairie, an Illinois Nature Preserve. More than 11,000 years ago, a mile-thick glacier began receding northward toward Canada, sculpting the landforms seen today and leaving gravelly soil and rock with veins of silt and loam that supported the park's woodlands, wetlands, and prairies. The surrounding hills are part of the Cary Moraine, whose ridges and abrupt topography, though softened over thousands of years, contrast sharply with the flatter terrain of northern Illinois; Wingate Prairie on the east side of the park is an example of this moraine topography. The park's lowest area, with a pond at the bottom, is a kettle formed by glacial scooping action; such kettles often hold water or wet areas and usually have acidic soil, and Veteran Acres Pond is naturally fed by springs and seeps from the surrounding hills, though since storm-water runoff was introduced in the 1970s, its water level has fluctuated with rainfall.