In a second major transaction coordinated by the Kestrel Land Trust within the last year, a New Hampshire timber company is acquiring 2,864 acres of forested land across 10 towns in Hampshire and Franklin counties from W.D. Cowls Inc.
The latest deal by The Lyme Timber Co., on top of almost 2,400 acres it purchased last fall for $20 million, continues ensuring that woodlands next to existing conservation land are protected, and more forests are secured for permanent public benefit.
W.D. Cowls President Cinda Jones praised Kestrel and Kristin DeBoer, its executive director, for helping the company, based in North Amherst, imagine and achieve its forest conservation goals.
“Over the past 20 years, we’ve conserved over 10,000 acres of forests together,” Jones said. “That’s a legacy we’re proud of.”
Previously, more than 5,500 acres of W.D. Cowls woodland in Leverett, Shutesbury, Pelham and Amherst were conserved as working forests in 2011 and 2020, and are now known, respectively, as the Paul C. Jones Working Forest and the Walter Cowls Jones Working Forest.
DeBoer said this marks an opportunity to accelerate the pace of conservation locally when conservation at a national level is facing challenges.
“From the North Quabbin region to the hilltowns west of the Connecticut River, each of these parcels represents important forested areas for local towns, the region and the country,” DeBoer said.
While W.D. Cowls still owns and manages two-thirds of its original holdings, including those working forests, Jones said the recent conservation deals with Lyme are private sales in which the properties, as she puts it, will have “land trust management futures.”
Like in the previous deal, Lyme is working with Kestrel and The Trustees of Reservations to keep the properties open to the public for recreational use and to permanently protect the land from development for wildlife habitat, climate resiliency and water quality benefits. The company acquires land with investment capital, previously working with partners to protect hundreds of thousands of acres of land in New England.
“Each of these newly acquired properties is critical to maintaining connectivity to benefit wildlife habitat and water quality in the Connecticut River Valley, and is part of a broader national effort to protect the broader Appalachian landscape,” said Peter Stein, a managing director at Lyme, who also appreciated Kestrel and The Trustees of Reservations. “We greatly appreciate the initiative that W.D. Cowls has taken to conserve these and other important tracts of forestland over the last 15 years.”
Lyme, founded in 1976, focuses on forest-related investments in both the United States and Canada, with a portfolio that includes about 1.3 million acres of third-party-certified working forests in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and other states. Lyme has also conserved over 800,000 acres of working forest in the past 20 years and developed business lines in forest management services, wetland mitigation banking and carbon sequestration.
Scheduled for completion by fall, the latest project will protect several designated coldwater fisheries critical to the health of the Connecticut River watershed, including 6,000 feet of the North Branch of the Manhan River, 3,000 feet of Rice Brook, 3,000 feet of Foundry Brook and 1,550 feet of Tucker Brook.
There are several local peaks included as part of the deal, such as Breakneck Hill, Cub Hill and Catamount Mountain, as well as important headwaters, like the Johnny Brook, Bean Brook, Roaring Brook, Nye Brook and Beaver Brook, and several vast wetland complexes, for instance part of Lily Pond.
The previous conservation initiative had 2,396 acres in Pelham, Belchertown, Amherst, Gill and New Salem, which included two of the largest unprotected contiguous forested tracts in the state, several miles of the Robert Frost Trail and the opportunity to return miles of the Metacomet-Monadnock Trail to its original route.
While Kestrel declined to say how much the land sold for, property deed transactions listed as of Tuesday show that Lyme paid about $10 million for the 19 parcels. The biggest transactions are $1.81 million for a parcel off Burt Road in Westhampton and $1.63 million for a parcel off East Catamount Hill Road in Colrain, with the other six-figure transaction being for $1.05 million for a parcel on Breakneck Road in both Huntington and Westhampton.
Other parcels in Hampshire County are on Bates Road and Huntington Road in Chesterfield, on King Street in Pelham, on Reservoir Road in Westhampton and on South Street in Williamsburg.
Other parcels in Franklin County are on York Road in Colrain, on Chestnut Hill Road in Montague, on Buzzell Place in Warwick and on Chestnut Mountain Road in Whately.
“Protecting this vital habitat and keeping these forestlands open for public recreation are
among our key strategic priorities at The Trustees,” said President and CEO
Katie Theoharides. “We are proud to protect these lands with Kestrel, Lyme and Cowls, and
add to neighboring conservation land.”
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
