Walter C. Wetzel State Recreation Area in Macomb County near Coon Creek covers approximately 900 acres and developed through a series of changing plans after the Department of Conservation appropriated $250,000 in 1968 to acquire a new state park. A 1969 master plan called for intense recreation development, and in October 1969 the site was officially named Walter Cline Wetzel State Recreation Area. That same year, nearly 20 years after it had been approved, a Citizens Advisory Committee met to begin a master plan, and a boundary totaling 935 acres was approved with a new emphasis on natural areas, hiking, hunting, and passive recreation. In 1999, the DNR's Wildlife Division and DEQ began wetland development following a mitigation settlement, and in 2003 the plan expanded to include landscape development and extensive wetland and lakeplain prairie planting. In 2008, the DNR Parks and Recreation Division completed a general management plan for the park. Volunteer support also shaped the area's history: the Friends of Wetzel State Recreation Area, active since 1997 in cleanups, maintenance, installing benches and nesting boxes, removing invasive plants, fundraising, and watching over the property, received the Partner in Conservation Award from the Natural Resources Commission in 2007 for 10 years of work. The area honors Walter Cline Wetzel, a United States Army soldier from Roseville, Michigan, who received the Medal of Honor for his actions in World War II. At Birken, Germany, in the early morning of April 3, 1945, while acting as squad leader with the Antitank Company of the 13th Infantry and guarding his platoon's command post in a house, he detected enemy forces moving in to attack, alerted the occupants, and defended the post against heavy automatic weapons fire. When Germans forced their way close to the building and hurled grenades into the room where he and others had taken firing positions, he warned his fellow soldiers and threw himself on the grenades, absorbing the blast and suffering wounds from which he died. His action saved his comrades from death or serious injury and helped them continue defending the command post and break a dangerous local counterthrust. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor on February 26, 1946, and was buried in the Netherlands American Cemetery at Margraten in the Netherlands. Another long-standing presence at the recreation area is the Radio Control Club of Detroit, one of the country's oldest radio flying clubs, which began in Detroit in 1952, became a chartered club in 1953, moved among fields after losing its original flying site, began using a field in the recreation area in 1982 with DNR permission, and relocated in 1993 to a site north of 27 Mile Road, where it remains after making numerous improvements and partnering in future planning for the area.