Kimberly Unlocked a Century-Old Riverfront. Now Sunset Park Has to Catch Up.

"None did. Instead, they formed a loop of cooperation." That's how Outagamie County's then-executive described the five towns that agreed to link their trail systems into one continuous path along the Fox River. He said it at the project's launch in 2018. Six years later, the ribbon got cut at Kimberly's Sunset Park, and the sentence turned out to be more literal than anyone expected. The loop didn't just connect parks. It opened up a piece of Kimberly that residents had walked past their whole lives without ever seeing.

The Site Behind the Fence

For more than a hundred years, the stretch of riverfront behind the old paper mill site wasn't something you could walk to. It sat behind fencing and industrial use, a version of the Fox River that existed for the village but not for the people in it. That changed in 2021, when Kimberly completed the Papermill Run segment: a ten-foot-wide concrete path running from Third Street to Papermill Run along Railroad Street, built with support from a $100,000 grant through the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region. The path cuts through the former NewPage mill property and puts residents on ground that hadn't been open to the public in living memory.

A few years earlier, a smaller $14,600 grant had already funded trail connections and native plantings through the Cedars Development, stitching the east and west sides of that redevelopment together. Today the same footprint holds the Cedars Historic Overlook at 150 Papermill Run, an indoor-outdoor space with a countertop, sink, and beverage fridge that the village now rents out for private gatherings. A spot that used to be fenced-off industrial land is booking birthday parties.

One Loop, Five Towns

Papermill Run was never meant to stand alone. It's one segment of Loop the Locks, a trail network that now connects Kimberly, Little Chute, Kaukauna, Combined Locks, and Appleton along more than 13 miles of path. The contiguous core runs just over 10 miles, with connecting spurs to local parks stretching the full loop to 13.1. Riders and walkers cross four trestle bridges along the way, including the longest trestle bridge in the state of Wisconsin.

The loop touches a park in nearly every town it passes through:

• Sunset Park in Kimberly
• Heesakker Park in Little Chute
• Hydro Park in Kaukauna, connecting to the Konkapot Creek trail system
• Memorial Park in Combined Locks
• Telulah Park and the Newberry Trail system in Appleton

The full network was celebrated with a ribbon cutting at Sunset Park on June 5, 2024, during Wisconsin Bike Week. It took years of coordination across five municipalities and Outagamie County to get there, funded through a mix of local, state, and philanthropic dollars rather than any single agency writing one check.

The Race That Uses It

You don't have to take the trail's popularity on faith. Paperfest, Kimberly's long-running summer festival, has run a Sunset 5K for over two decades. The 2026 race, held July 17, marked its 21st year, and the course description now routes runners along what organizers call "the new Kimberly trail system," starting and finishing right on the Paperfest grounds near Sunset Park.

That's a small detail with a bigger implication. A festival tradition older than the trail itself has already rewritten its own course map to use it. The path isn't a scenic afterthought sitting next to the neighborhood. It's become part of how the neighborhood plans its own events.

A Park Built for a Smaller Crowd

Sunset Park has absorbed most of what the new trail brings to Kimberly, and the village is now working through what that means for the park itself. The village's own park planning materials describe Sunset Park as Kimberly's "crown jewel," serving youth sports, family gatherings, and quiet riverfront recreation for generations. They also describe a park where core facilities, utility systems, and concession structures have reached the end of their functional lifespan, the kind of wear that builds up over decades rather than overnight.

The contrast is easy to see on the ground. The park's newest shelter, built in 2018 and 2019 by students in Kimberly High School's Building Construction class, has updated electrical, a serving window, and a working kitchen. Much of the rest of the park is older infrastructure carrying more traffic than it was built for. The village has launched a Sunset Park Master Plan process in 2026 to guide improvements over the next five to twenty years, gathering public feedback before committing to any specific redesign.

The park has also lost tree canopy to storms and invasive insects in recent years, prompting a new tree-donation program that lets residents sponsor a replacement tree with their name added to a Living Forest plaque near Shelter #1. It's a small program, but it points at the same underlying story: a park that's carrying more use and more weather than it was designed around, and a village trying to rebuild it one piece at a time instead of waiting for a bigger problem to force the issue.

New Places to Land Nearby

The trail corridor is also drawing new business investment, not just village planning attention. Gathering Hub, an event venue on Schelfhout Lane, opened in the fall of 2025 as a space for weddings, showers, banquets, and community gatherings. Owner Jen Plamann brought a request for a full Class B liquor license to the Kimberly village board in January 2026, after the business next door closed and surrendered its own license. Village staff had initially recommended against it, but Plamann made her case directly. "This is filling a need in our community," she told the board, pointing out that the area has no dedicated banquet hall.

Whatever the board's final decision, the fact that a venue like this opened and immediately needed to expand says something about foot traffic and event demand in this part of the village. Gathering Hub sits close enough to the Papermill Run corridor and Sunset Park that its growing pains are downstream of the same trail that's driving everything else in this story.

What This Adds Up To

None of these pieces read as dramatic on their own. A trail segment finished in 2021. A regional loop completed in 2024. A festival race that updated its course map. A park now mid-planning-process for its next twenty years. A new venue negotiating its own liquor license. Put together, they describe a village where a single infrastructure project reopened land that had been off-limits for a century, and where that reopening is now working its way through every part of daily life that touches the riverfront, from race routes to reception halls to how the village budgets for park repairs.

If you walk Papermill Run this fall, you're walking ground that was invisible to Kimberly residents for most of the village's history. The Sunset Park Master Plan process now underway is the village's attempt to make sure the rest of the park can keep up with what that one stretch of trail already changed.

We at Batterman Integrity Group spend a lot of time walking the Fox Valley's trails and talking with the people who live along them. If you're curious how a corridor like Papermill Run shapes daily life in Kimberly, or what it might mean for a home near it, we're always glad to talk it through over coffee at the trailhead.