The intersection of Blossom Street and Crestwood Drive has long been an informal way for pedestrians to enter Memorial Park.

For years, all you could see was a gap in the fence, a bridge and a scruffy footpath into a thicket on the park's eastern edge. Unless you lived on that side of the park, you might not have known it was there.

In the summer of 1917, though, this was Gate #2, the soldier's entrance to Camp Logan. A hundred years ago, some 34,000 soldiers would come in waves to Houston to train as the U.S. entered World War I.

But that's not a story the park has been good at telling about itself. "People don't always understand why it's called Memorial Park," says Shellye Arnold, the president and CEO of the park's conservancy.

What, exactly, does Memorial Park memorialize? A new master plan is designed to bring the memorial back to the park – with one extra idea that might push the limits of what we think a memorial should do.

CONSTRUCTION STARTED on Camp Logan in July 1917 and took about six weeks. The camp was one of 45 bases established by the war department to train a military of 2 million soldiers, according to Louis Aulbach, who with Linda Gorski, his partner, wrote a history of the place.

Aulbach grew up in Houston, but he says even he didn't know why it was called Memorial Park until he began his research in his 50s.

He learned that the site, which over the years had been home to charcoal manufacturing, logging operations and orchards, was graded and trees were removed to make way for some 1,500 pier-and-beam buildings and tent encampments to house all the soldiers. Showers and latrines were built on concrete foundations, the remains of which can still be found inside the park – if you know where to look.

RELATED: Kinders pledge $70 million to fast-track Memorial Park restoration

The park's new master plan, approved by City Council in 2015 and and designed by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBWLA), begins with this history.

"NBWLA wanted to listen to the stories of the park," says Arnold. "What do the soils say? What does the human history say? What does the future say? The master plan is grounded in listening, grounded in research."

In a section called the Eastern Glades, which is currently under construction, NBWLA's design reimagines the soldier's entrance.

That out-of-the-way gap in the fence will be widened and formalized, supplemented with interpretive signage. And that as-you-like-it footpath will be paved in crushed granite, lined with trees and extended, inviting users into the park along the same route the soldiers took into the camp for the first time.

BUT IT'S in another section of the park where the design gestures become larger and more poetic. Still in a conceptual phase and not currently funded, the Memorial Groves would be sited near the railroad tracks that run perpendicular to Memorial Drive, between the hiking trails and the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center.

Here is where you can see the concrete remains of the camp's showers and latrines. And it's here where Thomas Woltz, principal and owner of NBWLA, imagines a complicated living memorial that both honors and evokes the park's histories.

First, the archeological remains of those showers and latrines would be curbed in weathering steel and filled with crushed granite.

"We live in an era where we are longing for authenticity in everything we see," Woltz says. "It was never our intention to recreate a moment in time or rebuild those buildings, but rather to reveal them."

RELATED: The ugly history of Camp Logan

Second, in this 90-acre section of the park, towering regiments of loblolly pines would be planted in precise formations reminiscent of the soldiers who left the city to fight – and, sometimes, to die – for their country.

"It could be laid out similar to the spacing of the original tents of the camp," Woltz says. "You could start to evoke it, through a poetic representation of the scale that was Camp Logan."

The "regiments" would be supplemented with interpretive signage. Aulbach gets excited about the educational opportunities Memorial Groves would provide. Outside of the San Jacinto Monument, he says, there aren't many places where students can physically inhabit sites that are important to Houston history.

"EVERY DIRECTION you look," Woltz says, "you'll see these long lines of trees. That itself will be impressive, and it will start to get at the scale of the camp and scale of the sacrifice."

About that sacrifice: Woltz has floated an idea for a two-part ceremony that even Arnold says has been met with "mixed reviews."

The idea isn't part of the approved master plan. It's not funded. It's purely speculative. Aulbach has heard from people who don't like it.

But it goes something like this:

The average age of a soldier to die in World War I was just 25. (And it just so happens that a loblolly pine reaches maturity around the same age.) Woltz envisions a pair of events, 25 years after the Memorial Groves have opened to the public, during which Houston comes together to ritually fell one of the "regiments" and then replant it. The cutting would happen on Memorial Day and the replanting on Armistice Day.

"Bringing gravity to Memorial Day and hope to Armistice Day could be a great way for Memorial Groves to weave itself into Houston's civic life," Woltz says.

"People love [the idea] for its poetry and its poignancy and for the service it honors," Arnold says.

In turn, the trees could be milled and turned into lumber, which could be used to build public housing. Because, for Woltz, there's an additional nod to history. This landscape was once used for logging. And pine, he points out, is used to frame houses. "This [proposal] gets at both ecological sacrifice and human sacrifice," he says. "It would evoke this idea that something in the prime of life is sacrificed for the common good."

Here, Woltz discusses the proposal at The Cultural Landscape Foundation's Leading with Landscape conference in Houston in March 2016. (Skip to 14:13 to hear him discuss the Camp Logan history in particular.)

AS THE master plan was presented to the public, Aulbach says, one of the first questions that was asked was whether it was known why it was called Memorial Park. "Only a scattering of hands went up" out of the group of 400 people, he says.

"That immediately told the conservancy and [NBWLA] that a lot of education needs to be done. We've lost the sense of why the park was established, which was to commemorate the soldiers who fought there."

RELATED: Putting the wilderness back in Houston Arboretum

Camp Logan is the only one of those 45 training camps, Woltz says, that hasn't been paved over and developed. Aulbach recalls a time when he was visited by a scholar writing a history of the camps who was moved to tears by the quality of the archaeological remnants that can be found inside the park.

"It seems we forget about World War I, because of all the major wars that occurred since," Aulbach says. "But it was the first big mobilization of the country in terms of military activity since the Civil War. We've lost that. I think this fills a gap in our story of Houston."

Get the Gray Matters newsletter. People love it for its poetry and its poignancy.