As you look around the Top O’ the Town neighborhood you can see that it’s built on top of a hill that stands a little taller than the area around it. This hill isn’t really the highest point in the city, but it does give the neighborhood a clever name and you have a good vantage point looking toward downtown. The park was created in 1954 at the same time as the addition.

The land for this park was part of the boyhood home of Harry Mark Coppinger and was his family’s homestead from the Land Run of 1889. At the age of 9, Harry became an orphan and was sent to a military school, so when World War I began he was among the first American soldiers to go to war.  On June 26, 1918 at the Battle of Belleau Wood in France, Lt. Coppinger sacrificed his life leading his men into the fighting to reinforce a unit of Marines. Today Belleau Wood is one of the greatest battles in Marine Corps history because of the ferocity of the fighting, earning them the nickname “devil dogs” by the enemy. His fellow Marines so respected Lt. Coppinger’s heroism that they named the local Marine veteran association in his honor.