Gainesville and Hall County hope eventually to have a trail system that runs from Lake Lanier and Pearl Nix Parkway through downtown Gainesville and the southside to the Oakwood campus of the University of North Georgia. While such a system wasn’t visualized at the time, it all started with Ivey Terrace Park, which Gainesville Rotary Club built in the 1920s on Gainesville’s northwest side and Civilian Conservation Corps improved in the 1930s. In the early 1980s, Jimmy Hope, Gainesville park and recreation director at the time, walked through a densely wooded area just west of Ivey Terrace that the city had up for sale for $16,000.