Wetlands Estonoa Home

Wetlands Estonoa is a student initiated, place based, service learning project. It is the epitome of a school/community project. Once the Town's giant mud puddle, Estonoa was transformed into an environmental learning center thanks to student imagination, planning, and sweat equity.

Welcome to Wetlands Estonoa

The Wetlands Estonoa Outdoor Learning Center has been in existence since 1999. The Center is owned by the Town of St. Paul yet managed by a group of dedicated area high school students known as Team Estonoa. The Center is an environmental education site that consists of outdoor and indoor classrooms. The vegetative green roof, rain garden, and native Appalachian flora arboretum are complimented by the three-fourth mile walking trail surrounding Wetlands Estonoa. The beautiful, log-sided building, finished in 2005, offers a large meeting space for environmental education, workshops, and citizen group meetings. Examples of visiting groups include: college groups (Ferrum, Georgetown University, and East Tennessee State), rain barrel & GLOBE Hydrology workshops, Upper Tennessee River Round Table and St. Paul High School Alumni meetings.

*Ed Young, a local artist, created this graphite collage and presented it to Team Estonoa. It is currently on display in the Wetlands Estonoa Learning Center. Click on the image to see the artwork detail.

Comings and Goings

NEWS
Ferrum Students Visit Wetlands Estonoa!

It's always a joy when we get visitors from Ferrum College! On March 31, 2012, Professor Susan Meade and her students joined Team Estonoa for lunch, presentations, tours of the Wetlands, St. Paul's Railroad Museum and the Dante Lives On Mining and Railroad Museum. It was a great visit and we are honored to have them here. Our local historian, Jerry Couch, was on hand to share the exhibits and history at the Railroad Museum. Team Estonoa members Susanna Shepard, Kayla Sullivan, Miranda and Mikaela Campbell, Ethan Mullins, Jacob Chaffin and Devan Crabtree welcomed the group, presented their programs and how Estonoa and the Learning Center got its start, hosted the lunch and Wetlands tours. It was a busy and productive Saturday!

We hope you took back as much of us as we kept of you here!

NEWS

St. Joseph's University Visits Wetlands Estonoa

Most university students spend spring break relaxing and recuperating from their studies. They go home, visit family and friends. Not all! We’ve been fortunate to have a great group of students visit St. Paul this week. Not to kick back and relax… to work! And work they have done, for a solid week. From painting, to mulching, to moving furniture, powerwashing, more mulching, you name it and these young people have done it for us. And they’ve done it with smiles on their faces and love in their hearts.

The Town of St. Paul hosted the group of 27 from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia as they spent their spring break in service to others through their Appalachian Spring Break Service Immersion Program. Wetlands Estonoa is only one of the sites they’ve worked and we were honored to have them here! On Thursday, Team Estonoa hosted dinner and a presentation of our projects… and got to know everyone a little better.

After dinner and the Team presentation, our students were asked to reflect on what they had experienced and what they will take back with them. They used many creative ways to let us know their thoughts. Here's just one: