$2M EPA grant kicks boxboard site cleanup, next phase of Wabash River plan into motion
Brownfield grant aimed at former Lafayette Paperboard/Jefferson Smurfit site in Wabash Avenue neighborhood. Plus, nominations open for WL City Council vacancy
Lead contamination left two decades after the Lafayette Paperboard mill closed and was razed along the Wabash River will be targeted in a $2.5 million cleanup, largely funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, city and federal officials said Wednesday.
At the same time, the Wabash River Enhancement Corp. gave a preview of plans still in the works to build trails and a park on the site, tucked away in the Wabash Avenue neighborhood, just southeast of downtown Lafayette, as work continues to redevelop miles of the riverfront and river access in Lafayette, West Lafayette and into the county.
“We had always seen that this as a key, important property in our riverfront,” Stanton Lambert, Wabash River Enhancement Corp. executive director, said Wednesday. “This really is a huge step in finally getting us there.”
The $2 million federal Brownfields Cleanup Grant is aimed at nine acres of the 14-acre site at 40 Chestnut St. and will be supplemented by $500,000 from the city of Lafayette.
The funding was part of $250 million in similar federal grants announced nationwide in May, Anne Vogel, EPA regional administrator based in Chicago, said. Of that, Indiana sites qualified for $5 million.
“It’s a beautiful property, and it’s going to be so important to this community,” Vogel said. “We’ll be able to remediate, restore this property. I know there's PCB contamination and lead contamination from legacy industry here, and so that's what EPA is able to do, is to come alongside all of you and to redevelop, to be part of the economic engine of this community.”
City and WREC officials are working with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management to help clean up the other five acres of the former boxboard site – which Lambert said is contaminated with PCBs, heavy metals and dioxin in the subsurface and soil, and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, heavy metals, PCBs and PFAS substances in the groundwater.
Cleanup work on the first nine acres is expected to start in 2026 and be done within a year, Lambert said.
Meanwhile, Lambert said, the Wabash River Enhancement Corp. is on the cusp of finalizing a concept for properties stretching from the downtown bridges to Shamrock Park, on either end of the Wabash Avenue Neighborhood.
In preliminary plans displayed Wednesday, the park could include trails, river overlooks, a dog park, playgrounds, an amphitheater, a boat slip, features that play off the Wabash and Erie Canal that once ran near the site and a potential pedestrian bridge to connect to the Wabash Heritage Trail across the Wabash River.
Lambert said the plans would be connected to riverfront plans that continue to the north, helped by recent agreements that will allow trails to access Amtrak’s boarding platform on the backside of the Big Four Depot in the downtown and at a Norfolk Southern maintenance crossing nearby.
“There’s been a lot of transformation in the Wabash Avenue neighborhood already – it’s so different than it was years ago, which is absolutely wonderful,” Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski said. “This is going to take that entirely to a level that I don’t think anybody has ever imagined for what this area can be.”
The mill, called Lafayette Paperboard, Alton Box Board, Jefferson Smurfit and Smurfit-Stone at various stages, opened in 1907, making container board and industrial fiberboard, among other products. For years before curbside recycling, Lafayette residents could take bundles of cardboard and newsprint to the plant and add directly to the slurry being processed at the plant.
Caraustar Industries, which purchased the plant in 2004, closed it in 2007, according to the accounts in the Journal & Courier.
Lambert said that the Wabash River Enhancement Corp. – a collaboration between the cities and Tippecanoe County officials, just a few years into its existence at the time – targeted the property as a prime spot for riverfront development because it covered a large swath along the Wabash and was above the 100-year floodplain.
Lambert said community leaders took the opportunity to John Walling, then CEO of North Central Health Services, a health care and community grant-making organization grown out of the former Home Hospital in Lafayette. Walling offered to have NCHS buy the property for $1.4 million and hang onto it until the Wabash River Enhancement Corp. was prepared to develop it.
“John did shock us quite a big when he agreed just to pay for everything that first meeting,” Roswarski, who also serves as president of the WREC board, said.
Several other projects already done or in progress are expected to connect in some way with the boxboard site, funded in part by grants from federal or state sources, NCHS and the Lilly Endowment. Among those in the works:
A pedestrian/bike bridge: The bridge, included in a $25 million federal Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) grant announced in 2023 and finalized earlier in 2025, would span the Wabash River between Harrison Bridge and the Sagamore Parkway Bridge. In West Lafayette, it would connect just south of Mascouten Park, near where Happy Hollow Road meets North River Road. In Lafayette, the bridge would connect with the Wabash Heritage Trail between Lyboult Park and McAllister Park, where the former Lafayette Municipal Golf Course was. Wabash River Enhancement Corp. owns property cutting from the Wabash River to the trail on North Ninth Street, including former a former flooring outlet near the intersection of Canal Road and North Ninth Street. Lambert said the plan is to put that project out for bid in 2027.
North River Road/Tecumseh Trails Park improvements: The RAISE grant also includes work on 2.55 miles of side paths and boardwalk on the east side of North River Road, from Mascouten Park in West Lafayette to Tecumseh Trails Park, across from the entrance to the Indiana Soldiers Home. Much of that path cross of some of the nearly three dozen properties the Wabash River Enhancement Corp. owns along the river corridor in the two cities and Tippecanoe County. From Tecumseh Trails Park, a trail bridge will be built across ravines and connect with a new trail linking access to Tippecanoe Amphitheater Park.
Trail connections at the Sagamore Parkway Bridge: A pair of projects bid in fall 2024 will connect trails along North River Road on the west side of the river and the Wabash Heritage Trail on the east side to a dedicated bike and pedestrian lane along the eastbound span of the Sagamore Parkway Bridge. Lambert said the $6.4 million project, being done by Boggstown-based Beaty Construction, is expected to be done by early 2026. That project is part of Indiana’s Regional Economic Acceleration and Development Initiative (READI) grants.
Harbor and dock for paddlers’ access: The new trail funded by the federal grants along North River Road will go by an A-frame home at 3301 North River Road. WREC owns that property and plans to build a trailhead along with a small harbor and dock for a canoe/kayak put-in/take-out along the Wabash. Lambert said that project is scheduled to be done by early 2026. That project also will be funded by READI funds.
Roswarski said that components of the proposals for the boxboard site, while still in planning stages, seem like things that could get done in the coming years.
“From a buildable standpoint, it’s not so pie in the sky that 50 years from now they’ll be saying, well, that was a nice plan, but …,” Roswarski said. “It’ll have to come in phases, but I can see it coming together. … With the READI grant, the Lilly grant, the RAISE grant, the (state’s) Next Level Trails grant and this now – with what North Central Health Services has done – the reality is the foundation is now in place to make these things a reality.”
THIS AND THAT/OTHER READS …
NOMINATIONS OPEN FOR WEST LAFAYETTE CITY COUNCIL VACANCY: No candidates had filed as of Wednesday to replace Leila Veidemanis, who stepped down June 4 as a West Lafayette City Council member. Veidemanis, a Democrat who graduated from Purdue in May and is moving from the city, was elected in November 2023 and has more than two years remaining on her four-year term. Her final meeting as a city council member was June 2, when her pending departure was announced. She represented the city council’s District 1, which includes the Levee and the Village areas along State Street, east of Purdue’s campus. Ken Jones, Tippecanoe County Democratic Party chair, the deadline to file for the position is 12:45 p.m. June 25. Interested candidates must live in the district and file a declaration of candidacy (State Form CEB-5). Forms may be delivered it person; mailed to: Ken Jones, Tippecanoe County Democratic Party, P.O. Box 862, Lafayette, IN 47902; or emailed to chair@tippecanoedems.org. A caucus of precinct committee members is scheduled to replace Veidemanis at 1 p.m. June 28 at the West Lafayette Public Library.
SIREN TESTS: ReComm, a contractor hired for maintenance on Tippecanoe County’s 77 sirens, started work on Tuesday. Tippecanoe County Emergency Management Agency gave a heads that residents could hear a single siren activate during testing periods over the next two to three weeks.
Thanks for all those songs, Brian Wilson.
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Oh the world feels a little emptier without the vibration of Brian in our midst.
What happens if no one submits their candidacy for District 1?