Part I

Part II

Part III

Mark Robinson, Exec. Dir. of The Compact

Brewster landowners joined us for a free public workshop on April 21, 2012  at the Harwich Community Center to learn more about the $50,000 refundable tax credit available to landowners who preserve their land.  The workshop was led by Mark H. Robinson, director, and staff of The Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts, Inc.

The workshop was co-sponsored by the non-profit land trusts of Brewster, Orleans, Harwich and Dennis.  For more details about the workshop, click here. 

For more about the new state tax credit, please click here.  Several Brewster landowners have already applied for tax credit eligibility.  Contact us at info@brewsterconservationtrust.org if you would like a free, private consultation with us about your land.

The land parcel also adds to the BCT’s Huckleberry Hill project, saving the highest (134 feet!) hill in Brewster.  The Trust bought 10 acres near the hilltop in 2011.  This area is a one of the last wild frontiers in Brewster, notable for its very large and visible deer population. 

The Figueras family is also one of the first pioneers in Massachusetts to take advantage of the new State tax credit for conservation land gifts.   They are able to receive a refundable tax credit from Massachusetts for half of the value of the land donated.  This is in addition to traditional federal income tax deductions available for donations of land to non-profits like BCT.  (More information about these new tax credits for landowners is available here.)

Some people know Joann Figueras as a PAL; she is an active Pond and Lake Steward in Brewster who has sampled the water quality of nearby Baker’s Pond for many years as part of the town and county monitoring program.  We honor Joann and John’s commitment to the environmental quality of Brewster.

Mother's Bog in 2006, cranberries

Nature almost always finds it way back.  What man has rent asunder, nature can re-stitch, given time.  And nature has the time. 

So it is with the evolution of the Cape’s swamps to cranberry bogs and back to swamps, an evolution and de-evolution, if you will.  Many of the Cape’s cranberry bogs were white cedar swamps in a previous life.  To see the full progression of Mother’s Bog since 2006, click here.

In 2006 & 2007, the Town of Brewster purchased an assemblage of properties totaling 59 acres straddling Slough Road in SW Brewster for conservation.  Included was an 8-acre working cranberry bog called Mother’s Bog, named after “Mother” Louise Crowell, whose family ran the bogs for many years.  The Dennis town line ran through the bogs and the Dennis Water District contributed $1 million towards Brewster’s purchase– -a nice gesture of intermunicipal cooperation.  The Brewster Conservation Trust bought an adjoining 4-acre parcel on Pine Pond, adding to the conservation area.

Mother's Bog, 2012, emerging marsh

Part of the Dennis Water District’s interest was to see the bogs returned to native habitat, fearing the continued use of cranberry-growing herbicides and the like so close to its main wellfield.  This same bog had destroyed thousands of herring fry in the 1990s, sucking them up from Walker’s Pond through an irrigation pump.  So Brewster conservation officials were not opposed to the bog’s abandonment.  And the sellers had no issue with that idea either.

How quickly the bogs responded, springing back to life from their devoted service to cranberries!  Wetland plants, such as soft rush, almost immediately took hold.  With its tawny tassels, soft rush is just as pleasant to look over as a bog tightly wrapped in a burgundy tarp of cranberry vines.  

The Brewster Department of Natural Resources manages Mother’s Bog on behalf of the Town Conservation Commission.  DNR Director Chris Miller is concerned that the emerging pitch pines not take over the bog, keeping it a more open wetland.  “We might want a work party in there to remove the pines soon, before they get too tall to manage.  Some highbush blueberry bushes might be planted to introduce some more diversity to the bogs.”  Thus, a man-made assist back to nature.   

Brewster still has its share of cranberry bogs still in production. The most visible is little Bill’s Bog, right on Route 124.  Most of the bogs are clustered around ponds, such as Elbow, Griffiths, Seymours and Pine Ponds, owing to their utility as an irrigation source.  Brewster native Washington “Wash” Chase ran the large cranberry bog on Route 6A in East Brewster right up until his death in 2008 at the age of 95, but it has “de-evolved” since then.  For a map showing the location of Brewster’s Bogs, click here.

Brewster’s bogs, both those still in production for cranberries and those being restored to more natural wetlands, are a beautiful and important natural resource.

Main Street at Dollar Pond

Give the gift of land and life!  You can help the Brewster Conservation Trust preserve 2.6 acres at Dollar Pond. Make a tax-deductible contribution in honor of your family or friends.  Use our website’s handy and secure donation-by-credit card link.  Or send a check made out to BCT at P.O. Box 268, Brewster MA 02631, referring to “Dollar Pond.” 

The Swift family owned this property for the past 50 years; we are buying it from Brewster’s Jackson Crocker, part of that family.  The Swifts and Crockers lived on Stony Brook Road for many years.  The cranberry bog on the property was pretty much gone by the time they acquired it, but Mr. Crocker farmed potatoes there for a while.  Now, the land has grown up to maples and tupelos and highbush blueberries, a terrific habitat for songbirds and hiding dens for deer. 

We need $60,000 to buy this property, which includes 450 feet along Brewster’s busy Main Street, just east of the Lemon Tree Shops.  Help us preserve shoreline on little Dollar Pond as well. For more about this acquisition, please see the front page of our December 2011 newsletter.

Here is a map showing the strategic importance of this parcel, outlined in orange, as it adjoins conserved areas (in green) between Main Street and Stony Brook Road (click on map to enlarge):

Here is a photo showing the healthy wooded shoreline on Dollar Pond along the parcel (click on photo to enlarge).  The arching shrubs in the foreground are Water-willow (Decodon), which is the only host plant for the larval stage of the rare water-willow stem borer moth (Papaipema sulphurata).

BCT hopes to buy 2.6 acres on the Dollar Pond shore

Read about the Trust’s two new fundrasising campaigns to save shorelines on Round Pond and Dollar Pond as part of the Priority Ponds Project; update on recent lands acquired; a profile of land donor Daryl Massey Bladen; our Conservationists of the Year; and the last BCT cartoon by the recently-deceased Gordon Brooks.  Click on this link: BCT News December 2011

 We have made in several new land purchases over the past year and currently have impressive opportunities.  One of my favorite themes is being on the lookout for important pondshore parcels to preserve.  In a 2003 Cape-wide study conducted by The Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts (our conservation advisor), Brewster had 48 of the Top 200 pondshore parcels on the Cape.  In other words, of the most important pond parcels to preserve for water quality and habitat significance in our county, almost one of four was located on a Brewster pond.  And Brewster is only one of 15 towns on the Cape.

The BCT believes that the best way to save water quality is to save the land around a water body or drinking well, rather than having to resort to costly remediation after the water source has become contaminated.  An ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure, to use another old saying.  Buying land around the edges of our beautiful ponds preserves space for wildlife and buffers the drainage entering the pond. 

 Earlier this year, we rallied the Stony Brook Road neighborhood to purchase a 2-acre building lot on Smith Pond.  Now we are raising $185,000 to buy a 2-acre lot on Round Pond and a 2.6-acre parcel on Dollar Pond.  Our steeply-discounted purchase prices reflect a true opportunity for us.  We ask support from Brewster citizens to raise the funds for these bargain sales. Please take this leap with us.  

 You can be reassured to know that 94 percent of general donations to BCT got to land purchase and stewardship.  With an all-volunteer board, only 6 percent goes to administrative services.  We ask you to help us protect Brewster’s land and water.

Burgundy-colored huckleberry atop the 134-foot high hill, highest in Brewster!

The Brewster Conservation Trust has begun a fundraising campaign to preserve 10 acres atop the highest hill in Brewster.  We need $120,600 to buy this parcel in East Brewster.  We hope our members and the public will support this effort.  All donations are tax-deductible and make a nice gift for someone.  You can donate online by clicking on the ”Donate to BCT Today” image at the top right of this screen.

You cannot get a nosebleed climbing Brewster’s highest hill.  At only 134 feet above sea level, you can barely get out of breath.  Still, when we had a chance to buy part of its eastern flank, we jumped at the chance.  But we will need support of the community of Brewster to succeed.  Please contribute.

Huckleberry Hill is our made-up name for this landform located between Baker’s Pond and Nickerson State Park in East Brewster.  Take a look at the photo and you will see the knee-high carpet of huckleberry shrubs at the autumnal peak of their color, a wine-dark sea out in the forest. 

The 10-acre forest tract is composed of white and black oaks, and pitch pine, with occasional wispy white pines, mockernut, American beech and sassafras trees.  It abuts a 90-acre assemblage of town-owned conservation lands.  Well-grooved narrow foot trails wend their way through this area.  It is a favorite haunt for white-tailed deer.  It is truly a forgotten pocket of Brewster, perhaps even more so than the Punkhorn nowadays. 

To be able to secure 10 acres for $12,600 per acre is a bargain at any time.  But the time is now and the need is urgent.   Please help us.

We were particularly delighted to have had John Kemp provide us a humorous and educational presentation on colonial history in Brewster and the Plymouth Colony.  John appeared in character as Stephen Hopkins, a Mayflower Pilgrim.  (Mr. Kemp has “played” the role of Hopkins and other Pilgrims at Plimoth Plantation for many years.)  Hopkins has been described as ”New England’s first free spirit or America’s first true democrat who struggled against rigid other-worldly Puritanism.”

We also hosted the public premiere of several BCT “shorts,” two-minute videos highlighting some of our recent projects.

BCT presented its Conservationists of the Year Award to Mark H. Robinson and the non-profit The Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts, Inc.   The Compact is currently celebrating its 25th anniversary as the nation’s oldest self-sustaining regional coalition of local land trusts.  BCT was a founding member of The Compact in 1986 and since then BCT has relied heavily on the technical expertise of Mr. Robinson and his staff to guide BCT’s open space projects and non-profit administration.   Mr. Robinson also serves as a consultant to the Town’s Open Space Committee, negotiating many of the Town’s open space purchases and securing State and other grants for those purchases.  Founding president of The Compact  Ansel B. Chaplin of Truro, recalled that BCT’s leaders in 1986 were instrumental in getting The Compact off the ground.

The trail will be dedicated to the memory of the late Mary-Louise and Ruth N. Eddy, founding trustees of the BCT and donors of more than 18 acres here.  While we are polishing a trail guide, click here for a simple sketch map of the property and trail.

We thank the volunteer “hot shots” George Thurber, Hal Minis, George Platt and Brent Bowers for their time and effort, cutting the trail and installing the new footbridge over the ditch. 

Watch a short video of the bridge installation, trail-cutting, and happy community gardeners…