Its visitor features include hiking trails, a nature center, children's camps, a gift shop, and picnic facilities.

After settlement by Woodland culture Indians for a thousand years prior to the arrival of whites, the Lewis and Clark Expedition camped near or at the location of the forest on July 27, 1804.

The younger Fontenelle participated as interpreter in negotiations for the Omaha cession of land in its 1854 treaty with the United States, and many European Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thought he was a chief.

In 1919 the historian Melvin R. Gilmore wrote an article explaining the Omaha patrilineal gente system, which he believed prohibited Fontenelle as a chief because of his American father, as he was never adopted into the tribe.

Dr. A.A. Tyler and Dr. Harold Gifford, Sr. founded the Fontenelle Forest Association in 1913 with a mission to preserve the woodlands south of Omaha, Nebraska along the Missouri River.

It offers educational spaces adjacent to the Gifford Memorial Boardwalk, a 3/8-mile path that leads to a two-story observation tower overlooking the Great Marsh, and was opened in 1999.

Other species of note seen in the forest include Kentucky, prothonotary, and cerulean warbler; wood thrush; grasshopper sparrow; and whip-poor-will.