Montgomery County High School students are working on a project that will help restore land back into a prairie.

Tom Westhoff, a longtime county resident who worked as a conservation agent for 20 years, is heading the project, which includes students from a conservation class at MCHS. The area is located south of the campus.

“Historically, that area which is between Montgomery and New Florence was prairie,” Westhoff said. “There weren’t many trees. It was basically native prairie there. On that very southern tip (of the area), that native prairie has never been plowed. There’s a patch about four acres just adjoining that to the north side that has kind of grown up in trees over the last years, but we cleared those out. We planted two native wildflowers and native grasses about five, six or seven years ago. It kind of grew up again, so we’re making a renewed effort to restore that to native wildflowers and native grasses.”

Westhoff said the project will help the students learn more about prairie management since two of them plan to go to college and major in conservation.

“We’re trying to get them aware of what a prairie is and how it’s managed and what needs to be done,” Westhoff said. “Eventually, once we get it looking good, we hope to have tours for the public out there, maybe like a Sunday evening walk for an hour just to identify prairie plants and wildlife that use it and that type of thing. It will be for the community down the road. They’ll be able to go out there and enjoy it and learn about prairie plants.”

Westhoff said he first discussed the project with R-II School District administrators about 10 years ago.

“No one used that prairie down there as far as any activities,” Westhoff said. “Back 15-20 years ago, the school and the Missouri Department of Conservation made that exercise trail through that. They planted some native stuff then. We kind of expanded on that over the years and try to make it a little bit better and enhance it with more wildflower species. The school has supported this all along and has basically turned it over to us to manage.”

A $5,000 grant from Ameren will help pay for the project. Westoff said a man named Gary Winter received the grant.

“We’ve been spending that by removing trees, spraying it out, putting up new signage and buying some more native wildflower seed to enhance,” Westhoff said. “That’s what we did. We’ll burn it whenever the weather cooperates. We’re going to burn it off, which native prairies need every few years to keep the woody vegetation down.”

Westhoff, who moved to Montgomery County in 1980, said more plans are being made for the project.

“What we’ll do is we plan to burn it as soon as the weather cooperates,” he said. “After we burn it, throughout the summer, we will continue to spray out any exotic species. Then, we’ll evaluate it. We may add some more species if we need it next year. Then, we’ll probably burn it again at some point within the next year.”