About 10 years ago, Janet Wehrle and Irene Lewis were sitting at the Corner Restaurant in Rhineland and came up with plans for a new playground in the village.

“We just thought we needed to replace the old equipment,” Wehrle said.

Their dreams came to fruition on May 10 as the new playground at Stiers Memorial Park was open for business. A 10-minute ribbon-cutting ceremony was held near the playground with about 40 people in attendance.

The playground was part of the $250,000 project that included a new pavilion, sidewalks to accessible parking, storm water drainage and safety fencing along Highway 94 at the small town that is located in southern Montgomery County. The playground is located next to a new horseshoe facility that was built in early April.

“This is the first in a stepping stone of what we would like to do to rebuild and really establish Rhineland,” said Alex Heldt, a member of the Rhineland Board of Trustees. “Rhineland is on a roll. We’ve got a lot of things going for us. There are a lot of things that are being planned for the future.”

Rhineland received a $101,260 grant from the National Park Service through the Missouri Department of Natural Resources in 2021 to make improvements on the park. Construction on the project was going to start as early as spring of 2022, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed those plans.

Wearing their bright neon Rhineland Youth Park Fund T-shirts, Wehrle and Lewis were thrilled that the ADA accessible playground was built so children in Montgomery and Gasconade counties can play on it every day.

“It’s something that all ages can do,” Lewis said.

Heldt said the idea of having a new playground at the village started three decades ago.

“We go back to 1995, when there was a pretty big sense of emergency to take the whole village of Rhineland and ship it uphill,” Heldt said. “What was left in the community was a little bit of a hole down here, a little bit of a flat area. But it kind of separated what we had as a community down here up until that time.”

Heldt said the Rhineland Area Volunteer Fire Department, which held a 50th anniversary party at the park on May 10, helped construct a facility for tractor pulling several years ago. But the village still needed something for residents to hold special events as well as have fun.

That’s when Lewis and Wehrle came to the rescue. They started the Rhineland Youth Park Fund to raise money to make improvements to the park.

“That was the start of the effort to replace the single slide and two swings that were down here for decades and decades,” Heldt said. “At their initiative, they kind of got the ball rolling, that’s for sure, on starting to raise funds and coming up with a mission, a scope and a picture of what we wanted this park to turn into. That’s a dream for Rhineland, something to bring the community together.”

Funds for the park project were raised from events such as Pullin’ In The Park, which has been held every August since 2017. Heldt said a group of individuals, which included Wehrle, helped start the event eight years ago.

“That has been the primary fundraiser for helping the city and helping the community not only to give another event that we do every year, but to really raise funds to get this what we are seeing here today,” Heldt said. “So a big thank you to Pullin’ In the Park and that group of individuals for helping to really get this where we are today.”