Walk the paved loop around Todd Pond on any weekday evening and you'll pass the same landmarks regulars always point to: the gazebo at the water's edge, the overlook on the hillside, the old white farmhouse at the corner of Zig Zag and Cooper. Most people who make that loop a few times a week could tell you where the playground is and which shelter has the good shade. Fewer could tell you why the ground rolls the way it does, or why the open turf stretches wider than it does at Montgomery's other parks, or why there's a pond at all in a spot that was farmland a century ago.
The short answer is that the ground spent forty-three years as a golf course before it ever became a park, and 2026 marks fifty years since that conversion happened.
A Farm First
The land started as the Wilder family farm. James and Susan Wilder moved to the area from Rhode Island in the early 1800s and built the house that still stands today, around 1832. For eighty-five years it stayed a working farm. Then in 1917, Orville Swaim, principal of Montgomery School, bought the house and the acreage around it. His name is the one that stuck, but his ownership was the short chapter, not the long one.
Forty-Three Years As A Private Fairway
In 1933, the farm became Swaim Field Golf Course. It ran as a golf course until 1976, forty-three years of private fairways on land most residents now think of as having always been a park. As of 2026, the park chapter has run exactly fifty years, only seven years longer than the golf course chapter did. That's close enough that the course's fingerprints haven't had time to fade. Montgomery didn't build Swaim Park from scratch after 1976. It inherited a golf course's footprint and repurposed it.
That distinction matters if you've ever wondered why the park doesn't read like a typical municipal green space with a grid of paths cut through mature trees. It reads like a course, because for over four decades, it was one. The open lawns that feel almost too wide for a neighborhood park were fairways. The gentle rise where the overlook now sits was built into a layout designed for line of sight, not for shade.
What Didn't Get Erased
When the course closed, the city kept the shape instead of starting over. Todd Pond stayed. The rolling turf stayed. The farmhouse at the corner, the one Orville Swaim once owned and the golf course likely used as a clubhouse or office for over four decades, stayed standing too. Today the city maintains historic documents, photographs and artifacts inside it, and visitors on tours can see pieces of that timeline up close.
That's the pattern worth noticing across all three chapters of this land. Orville Swaim didn't clear the Wilder farmhouse when he bought the property in 1917, and he didn't clear it again when he turned his own land into a golf course in 1933. The city didn't clear it either when Swaim Field closed in 1976. Each stage worked with what it inherited. The park you walk today carries physical evidence of a farm, a golf course, and fifty years of public use stacked on the same footprint.
Fifty Years Of Additions, Not Replacements
What's happened since 1976 follows the same logic on a smaller scale. Local clubs and volunteer groups have kept adding to the park rather than redesigning it, and the additions read like a list of who's shown up to care about this spot over five decades.
- The Lazy Daisy Garden Club maintains an heirloom garden in the farmhouse's backyard, tending plantings that connect back to the property's original use as a working farm.
- The Montgomery Kiwanis Club holds a fishing contest for kids at Todd Pond every June, turning a leftover water feature into an annual tradition families plan around.
- The gazebo at the pond's edge was built in partnership with the Blue Ash Montgomery Rotary Club, and it's become the default backdrop for the park's photos and small gatherings.
- The overlook and its decorative fountain on the hillside came from the Montgomery Citizens' Leadership Academy Class of 2008, a civic education program whose graduating class chose to leave the park with a permanent seating area.
None of those four additions replaced anything that came before. They filled gaps in a layout that was already there, the way a golf course filled gaps in a farm, and a park filled gaps in a golf course.
The Layer Going On Right Now
This year the city has been telling this story on purpose. As part of Ohio's America 250 commemoration, Montgomery has been highlighting a different local theme each month, and it used its June installment to walk through Swaim Park's own transformation from farmland to fairways to green space. If you've seen that post on the city's site, you've already gotten the short version. This is the longer one, with the reasoning behind why the ground under your feet looks the way it does.
Summer at the park is closing out the way it usually does. The city runs an annual Dog Swim at the Montgomery Community Pool, where members and their dogs get in free before the pool shuts down for the season, and a Movie Night at Montgomery Quarter with Top Gun: Maverick on the big screen. Earlier this summer, the Laf-N-Lunch series brought free midday shows to the Swaim Park Large Shelter, with the Cincinnati Circus, magician Brett Sears, and Cool Critters Outreach each taking a Tuesday in July.
The next scheduled piece of that programming lands on September 13, when University of Cincinnati botany professor Dr. Denis Conover leads a guided walk through Johnson Nature Preserve, a Montgomery green space most residents drive past without ever pulling in. The Parks and Recreation Commission has also run stargazing nights with Dr. Wes Ryle of the Cincinnati Observatory, telescopes included, as part of its ongoing calendar. None of this is new activity invented for an anniversary year. It's the same volunteer-and-city partnership model that's been adding to Swaim Park since the Rotary Club built the gazebo, just running its current cycle.
That's really the whole point of knowing the golf course history. Swaim Park isn't a static amenity that's always looked the way it looks now. It's four separate owners' worth of decisions, layered on top of each other over nearly two hundred years, with the current one being a city government and a rotating cast of garden clubs, Kiwanis chapters, and university professors who keep finding new ways to use ground that used to be a fairway. The loop you walk tonight is the same loop golfers walked in 1950. What you're doing with it is the only thing that's changed.
If you're the kind of person who wants to understand a place at this level before deciding whether to put down roots there, that's exactly the conversation worth having before you start touring homes. Laura Zembrodt spends as much time on the history and bones of a neighborhood as she does on square footage, because the two usually explain each other. Schedule a consultation when you're ready to talk specifics about Montgomery or any of the other Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky communities she works in.
