A $790,300 state Landscape Partnership Grant announced last month by the Baker administration will help preserve 707 acres in Wendell and Montague, while creating a 30,000-acre corridor stretching from the Connecticut River to Quabbin Reservoir.
“It’s an excellent project,” said Leigh Youngblood, executive director of Athol-based Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust, which is coordinating the project centered around Millers Falls and Wendell together with the two towns and the state Department of Fish and Game.
“It shows strategic investments in conservation. We’re building existing blocks and supporting the rural economy at the same time.”
The project, part of more than $3 million in awards handed out by the state, stretches from the headwaters of Mormon Hollow Brook near Wendell Center and grew out of efforts to protect the 74-acre Sugarbush Farm in Wendell, owned by Laurel and Bill Facey.
Facey’s brother, Warren, was instrumental in creation of another Mount Grace-coordinated Landscape Partnership in Leyden, in 2014. That 782-acre project, which brought together 10 Leyden neighbors, was one of three brokered by Mount Grace, with a fourth now being arranged, said Youngblood.
This project, which largely runs along the periphery of Wendell State Forest, includes nine properties in the two towns — with conservation restrictions being held by Mount Grace or the towns themselves, except in the case of a property near the Connecticut River that will be purchased by Fish and Game to become part of the Montague Plains Wildlife Management Area.
It includes five family farms, none of which meet the criteria of the state Agricultural Preservation Restriction program.
“Even with high quality soils,” the funding application for the project says, Hilltown farm fields “often do not meet the eligibility criteria established for ‘valley’ farms for conservation through the APR program. And yet, these farms have always sustained Wendell and Millers Falls residents with local vegetables, meat, dairy, and wood products and contributed to the local economy. … Not surprisingly, 439 out of the 707 acres in the project are considered prime or state-wide important agricultural soils.”
The land being protected, which has been in the same families as far back as six generations, includes property of both Diemand Farm and Sugarbush Farm, which are exploring protection options, and produce beef, maple syrup, poultry, and a sawmill.
The land incorporates part of the New England National Scenic Trail, the Robert Frost Trail, and destinations such as Mormon Hollow Ledges, Fiske Pond Conservation Area and Jerusalem Hill Summit.
“This project creates corridors of protected land knitting together the Montague Plains and the Wendell State Forest,” said Youngblood “That’s good for hikers, and great for the enormous variety of species that live in the woods, wetlands, and fields we’re helping to conserve.”
She said the state money provides about half the total cost of the project, which depends on “bargain sales” by property owners as well as more than $100,000 that remains to be raised by Mount Grace.
“The nine landowners really represent the rural economy,” she said. “That’s why we’re so thrilled about this project. It protects the landscape for habitat, but also the working land and working farms.”