A hidden asset. A classroom of the natural world. A wildlife corridor. A fabulous forest.
These are some of the ways that members of the Hawk Hill Committee describe the 231-acre protected area next to Otter Valley Union High School, which was deeded to the school district in 2001 by the Vermont Land Trust. Since then, it has served as an outdoor classroom for the school’s Moosalamoo Center program, a trail network for the cross-country team, and a haven for hunters and nature lovers in the know.
This June, the school board adopted a new management plan for the forest, prepared by the committee with help from county forester Mark Raishart and focused in part on increasing community use of the forest. It is the first overhaul of the plan since 2004.
“It was very needed,” said committee member and local forest owner Len Schmidt on a recent walk at Hawk Hill with the Current. “We updated the plan with a fresh set of eyes and a view to current management practices.”
Hawk Hill Committee member Len Schmidt next to a quartz outcropping on the property.
Brandon residents have also recently formed a committee to expand trails and safe walking and biking routes around town. A revitalized Hawk Hill could well be part of that broader vision. Brandon’s recreation director Bill Moore, who represents the town on the Hawk Hill Committee, said he’s excited about the possible synergy.
“There’s some real opportunities,” he said. “Hawk Hill, it’s ready for walking, it’s really just some promotion away from people using it more.”
Yet as the Hawk Hill Committee starts to put the new forest management plan into action, they must balance recreation with four more goals: historical preservation, education, conservation, and hunting. Committee members and others in the community are still debating what that balance should look like.
A shift in focus
When the Vermont Land Trust handed Hawk Hill over to the school district, preserving it as a unique historical site was named as the primary goal. Brandon’s first Euro-American settlers — Amos Cutler, followed by John Ambler and the David June family — came to Hawk Hill via Otter Creek in 1772 and 1773, building cabins and a forge and blacksmith shop there. They called the settlement Neshobe. By 1784, Old Brandon Road had been constructed along Hawk Hill’s western flank and was an important transportation corridor. The land also bears signs of later Euro-American inhabitants, and of earlier Native American communities including the Abenaki.
These sites have been left largely untouched. The two double gravestones of the historic June cemetery, located on town land just next to Hawk Hill, sit quietly in the shady woods, surrounded by crumbling stone walls. Old cellar holes are buried beneath brambles. An abandoned gold prospecting site is unmarked by any sign. Fifteen historic sites have yet to be documented at all.
Grave markers at the June cemetery, located directly next to Hawk Hill.
The new management plan calls for conducting archaeological research “as resources allow,” but Schmidt said that the current committee hopes to focus most of its efforts elsewhere.
“Historic preservation is important but probably a little skewed as the primary goal,” he said. This has to do with a larger reinterpretation of Brandon’s history spearheaded by Hawk Hill Committee chair Kevin Thornton, who holds a doctorate in history.
“The persistent story that Hawk Hill was the original ‘center’ of Brandon is incorrect,” Thornton wrote in an email to the Current. “It was just the first of many areas in the town that began to have scattered homesteads settled there before the American Revolution. There was nothing particularly important or distinctive about it. It’s far more important as an ecological and educational site than it is an historic one in my opinion.”
With resources limited, a more thorough archaeological inventory or excavation looks unlikely in the near future. Education, however, remains a core goal.
An outdoor classroom
For almost two decades, the school district has used Hawk Hill mainly as the site of outdoor learning for students in the Moosalamoo Center program. Founder and director Joshua Hardt said that the program brings about twenty ninth-grade students and ten upper-grade students onto the land each year for intensive real-life learning. They hone survival skills, learn about ecology, history, and culture, and help manage the forest by removing invasive plants, clearing trails, and maintaining signage.
“[Hawk Hill] is everything,” said Hardt, who has been on the management committee almost since its founding. “Without Hawk Hill I would have a hard time facilitating a program with the same curricular opportunities.”
School district superintendent Rene Sanchez said he hopes to expand those opportunities to more students.
“We’d like to make it available to more students and more courses, not just Moosalamoo,” he said. “The plan is to begin meeting with other teachers and seeing how they could possibly use it as more of an instructional tool.”
Sanchez especially values the way that classes in the woods inspire broader learning.
“If you talk about the history of Hawk Hill, then you need to start talking about the indigenous peoples. You need to talk about the early settlers. You need to talk about the people who created the national parks. And so all of a sudden, you're learning more than just about Hawk Hill,” he said.
But Hardt worries that the current talk of greater recreational use and visitor infrastructure could spoil what makes those woods so special. He pointed out that while the forest is far from primeval, it has been largely left alone for the past sixty years — and that’s rare for land so close to a town center.
“I can take students to Hawk Hill, and every time they feel like Indiana Jones,” he said. “They’re always in a state of discovery. If there were signs everywhere and it were very manicured, I think that sense would be seriously compromised.”
To share more of Hawk Hill without leaving a heavy footprint, Hardt is planning a cloud-based interpretive trail. Working with students, he wants to link information about history, culture, and nature to a GPS map that visitors could access via their cell phones. He hopes to start this year and has already cleared the plan with other members of the committee, he said.
A large red oak on Hawk Hill, likely a century old or more.
Keeping the forest healthy
Schmidt is an enthusiastic supporter of the GPS map idea, but he also wants to do more, like improving signage on the maze-like trails that wind through the property, intersecting and branching sometimes with little guidance for which way to go.
In contrast to these trails, Old Brandon Road offers a straightforward walk along the property’s western side. It’s accessible from Nickerson Road, but there’s no parking lot at that end. The new plan recommends creating a small parking area to improve access, and possibly an informational kiosk, which the 2004 plan also recommended. Moore said that if the committee and community decide to move forward, the town would “work to make it happen in a way that’s within the town’s right of way.”
Schmidt believes that all of this will help more people fall in love with Hawk Hill and ultimately join in its stewardship.
“There’s work that needs to be done to keep the forest healthy. That requires that people be engaged and know about it,” he said.
On his recent walk with the Current, he pointed out trails that are eroding, contributing to flooding when heavy rain rushes down the paths into Otter Creek. Creating water bars — diagonal channels that cut across trails to divert water into the woods — would fix the problem, and is recommended in the new plan.
At another spot, Schmidt paused to yank a Chinese bittersweet vine out of the path, noting that the invasive creepers can strangle trees to death. He pointed out a “carpet” of glossy buckthorn pushing out natives that provide better food for birds, and a “wall” of multiflora rose that blocks hunters and others from walking through the forest. The new plan calls for removing these invasives — a job that students can do in part, though outside help will probably be needed.
In other places, however, the forest was remarkably healthy, its open floor dotted with ferns and its canopy made up of diverse tree species. Orange, red, and tan mushrooms sprouted from logs and frogs hopped across paths. There was a vernal pool (in July, more of a mudflat) that Schmidt said provides crucial salamander habitat in spring (who knew that salamanders can account for more biomass per acre of temperate forest than birds or bears?).
Nearby, a giant red oak towered among the younger trees, likely spared from the clearing that in earlier centuries turned most of these woods into pastures. Elsewhere, a white quartz ledge jutted from the earth, and still further on, the mossy stones of old cellar walls conjured up images of early settlers making a life on this hill.
Indeed, it was easy to slip into that “state of discovery” that Hardt observes in his students — and clear that what the new management plan seeks to preserve is of value to the entire community.
The updated management plan is available here.
Photos by Winifred Bird.
