Now home to the Shorewood Little League and Kickers Soccer, River Park has a deep history reaching long before Shorewood came into being. In 1872, an entrepreneur named Frederick Lueddemann purchased land to create an up-country resort that encompassed a good deal of the present-day village. It was a sort of German proto-Disneyland of beer gardens, dining halls and open spaces that attracted day-trippers from Milwaukee by the hundreds. Today, the original land holding has long-since been subdivided, but River Park, with municipal parking as well as baseball and soccer fields, is a small remnant of the green dream of Mr. Lueddemann.