Trollwood

## Trollwood School for the Performing Arts

* **Location:**Trollwood Park, 3664 Elm St N, Fargo , RRDMZ , 58102
* **Type:**Community theater program for metahuman youth

The space where the Trollwood program resides today has a nearly two hundred year history, going back to 1895, when Cass County bought the land off of a local farmer to build the 'Cass County Hospital and Poor Farm'. It was said that the actual “farm” on the grounds was a place where the poor could work, providing produce and goods to the other residents to earn their stay and health care. Many of the individuals who died here, the lonely, the desperate, the hungry, and the poor, were buried on the property’s grounds and forgotten to time.

In the years to come, the farm would be converted into a pauper's cemetary, and then a nursing home facility, changing its name to Golden Acres Haven but eventually closing its doors in 1973 to be torn down. In 1985, a motion was made to move those who were buried after issues of neglect and abandonment surfaced about the park. Though a significant effort was made to move near 300 graves to a different location, some of those who were buried still remain within the grounds of the site today.

In 1978, the Trollwood School for the Performing Arts, a summer theater program for area youth, opened in the park, starting with a performance of 'The Wizard of Oz'. The summer program ran a theater program, teaching the basics of theater and culiminating in a musical performance. This continued for decades until the flooding in the last years of the twentieth century forced them to consider other locales, an effort that ended with them opening in a massive, expensive outdoor venue (Bluestem Stage) in the south of Moorhead in 2009. Leaving the park to just be a park.

The school itself ran for another two decades in Bluestem, until its ongoing struggles with its landlords in Fargo Public School District (who took over the Moorhead site in 2011), culminated in the newly privatized Fargo Educational District Inc evicting the school from the grounds and taking over Bluestem complete in the early 2030's.

By this time, the first generation of those who had expressed as Orks and Trolls in their early adolescence, that is the first wave of Orks and Trolls who actually grew up as Orks and Trolls had grown up. And they knew how hard that was and had happy times of the accepting theater friendships they'd made at Trollwood as part of how they managed to make it through the traumatic events that made them who they were now. A group of Trolls, largely parents and teachers (gym teacher was already a common second career for former Troll athletes), petitioned the city to allow them to use Trollwood as a location to hold a revived version of the Trollwood school as a program to give creative outlets and safe spaces for Goblinized youth (and their human families) to express themselves and form bonds of community. A lot the Ascomanni  swordstrolls got their start with classes in stage combat at Trollwood.

The park is also classified as a 'Class C Watch Site' by BSI's Astral Security Department due to to several recurrent and active spirits that haunt the former graveyard and poorhouse. The Trollwood school has made a kind of peace these spirits and enjoy a kind of protection from them (through several magically-talented alumni).

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