About four miles southeast from the city of Barre, Vt., on Millstone Hill, near the unincorporated settlement of Graniteville, 14 UVM students are studying a photograph taken in 1905. The grainy black-and-white image shows perhaps 200 stonecutters, posed in a quarry, some on ladders, some holding steel cables, dwarfed by sheer white walls of cut granite. In the photo, the terrain surrounding the men is a wasteland of rubble — and there is not a tree to be seen.
Today, the students stand in a deep-green September shade of middle-aged maples, only a short walk from where that photo was taken. What was once a bustling quarry, full of pits and crisp blocks of world-class granite, was abandoned by the 1930s. The pits filled with water, the cables left behind like rusting serpents. And the trees grew back, rising silently atop huge piles of scrap rock, softening the edges of chiseled grey cliffs — forming a new forest.
In March of 2013, the people of Barre Town, Vt., completed the purchase of 355 acres of this resurgent forest on Millstone Hill, most of it from the Rock of Ages Corporation that still runs quarries nearby. With $1.3 million from numerous funding sources, they formed the Barre Town Forest, 109 years after the photo was taken — and 99 years after the Vermont Legislature passed a law enabling towns to create town forests.
On Saturday, Sept. 27, these students in professor Cecilia Dank’s course, "Community-based Natural Resource Management," will help staff and faculty from UVM Extension — and many other partners — with a public summit organized to mark the near-century of official town forests in Vermont — and to support other communities like Barre Town that might want to create a new one.
“Forests for the People: Return of the Town Forest,” will offer workshops and conversation at a school in Barre Town followed by tours of the forest; it’s open for registration and costs $20.
Enabling laws
“From the very earliest, there is evidence of New England colonists trying to conserve woodlands,” says UVM’s Robert McCullough. A professor in the Historic Preservation Program, he is one of the leaders of the upcoming summit and the author of a 1995 book, The Landscape of Community: A History of Communal Forests in New England. Timber and firewood from town-owned woodlands were sold to generate revenue to pay for schoolbooks and ministers in the 17th and 18th centuries, he says. “And then in the middle of the 19th century, the town poor farm become a way for many communities to care for their indigent populations and many of those poor farms had wood lots.”
But official town forests are really a 20th century invention, McCullough says, brought to the United States by European scientific foresters, and a response to depleted timberlands and the growing conservation movement. In 1913, Massachusetts passed the first enabling law authorizing towns to acquire land for the purpose of planting trees. “Then Vermont followed in 1915,” McCullough says.
Throughout the 1920s, the mostly New England-based town forest movement encouraged towns to buy lands and plant them with coniferous trees that would grow fast to produce a paying crop of timber quickly. A lot of these lands had previously been clear-cut and were often low-quality stands that didn't deliver robust profits. Other lands were dumped on towns during the Great Depression as people were unable to pay their taxes.
Still, by 1950, more than 70 Vermont towns had established municipal forests, and by 1962 the number had risen to 104, McCullough writes. But many of these forests were little known to the town’s residents and were often neglected. And that problem continues to this day. A 2009 study by UVM researchers David Capen and Sean MacFadden showed that of Vermont’s 246 towns and cities, 163 had some form of municipal forestland ownership. But of these only about half had a forest management plan in place — and a mere 17 percent had the forestland under conservation easement protections. Most town forests could be sold for development at any time.
Starting in about 2000, the threat of development and lost connections — for wildlife, hikers, snowmobilers and others — has helped propel a new wave of interest in town forests — or, as they’re now often called, community forests. For the first time in 150 years, forest cover is declining all six New England states. In response, some communities, like Barre Town, are looking to buy and protect local forests as a tool to manage sprawl, protect water supplies and wildlife, maintain open space for recreation — and generate revenue from timber sales.
“New England has had this long tradition of managing woodlands with a strong sense of stewardship,” McCullough says, “And that's where we are today, keeping that tradition alive. That's one of the goals of the upcoming town forest summit: to help with that.”
“I think of town forests as a laboratory where we can demonstrate what good forestry practices look like to help educate Vermonters,” says UVM Extension’s Kate Forrer who is helping to lead the summit — along with UVM’s Environmental Program and Historic Preservation Program; the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation; the Trust for Public Land; the Northeastern States Research Cooperative; the Northern Forest Center; the Vermont Land Trust; and leaders from Barre Town. “It’s not only harvesting trees or recreation,” Forrer says. “A town forest can hold multiple uses.”
New uses
In Barre Town, the old quarry photograph is pinned to a large bulletin board at one of the trailheads into the town forest where the UVM students have been walking with members of the summit organizing committee. Some of the other signs and posters under the plexiglass tell other parts of story of this place — and its multiple uses.
One invites photographers to submit their shots in the forest for a contest. Another describes each of the 18 holes — or baskets, really — of disc golf that wind through the forest. (At the beginning of the walk, two young golfers demonstrated their backpacks of many discs to the students: heavier drivers, tiny putters, ones with a left or right hook. “Selling disc golf supplies has been good for local businesses,” says Carl Rogers, the town manager of Barre Town who was instrumental in completing the new forest purchase.)
Another sign warns that the parking lot will be closed on a Sunday for a bike race. In some ways, it was mountain bikers who led to the creation of this town forest. About 2002, local riders began discovering that the stunning views, rock-strewn landscape, and gnarly single-track made Millstone Hill a mountain biking mecca — and soon riders began showing up from across New England. The Millstone Trails Association, established in 2005, eventually built more than 70 miles of high-quality trails and became a significant force in this largely blue-collar, low-income community.
Then about 2008, “Rock of Ages made it known that they were likely to sell this land,” recalls Mike Fraysier, a local rider and one of the founders of the trails association. “If they sold this land for development or the new owners didn’t allow us access, the heart of the MTA trail system would be gone.” So the bikers and other local people began to mobilize and with leadership from the Trust for Public Land, additional help from the Vermont Land Trust, and funding from a new U.S. Forest Service community forests program, the state of Vermont, the biker’s association, and others — plus $100,000 from the town coffers — they completed the deal.
Kyle Schwartz ’15, an environmental studies major, sits in the sunshine of the new town forest. He’s listening to a conversation between Cecilia Danks, Kate Forrer, Chittenden County Forester Keith Thompson '04, and UVM Extension Forester Mary Sisock about the New England wood supply and the biodiversity benefits of forests. Schwartz looks out across a granite pit — that’s now a blue pond surrounded by trees. “This looks good for being clear-cut 80 years ago,” he says. “They were blasting mountains apart here. It's a completely different landscape now, and it's cool to see how a forest adapts and regrows, even after that.”