Piece by piece, Northfield Mount Hermon School continues its prolonged effort to divest itself of land across the Connecticut River from its current home in Gill.
The latest piece the school is shedding is 1,300 acres of forest in Northfield and Warwick, with the state Department of Conservation and Recreation the willing recipient.
The sale, expected to be completed by today, the end of the fiscal year, is a boon for those in the area who fear seeing the land become something other than protected forest.
And while the agreement between the school and the state only came to fruition within the last couple of weeks, the work in the background has taken much more time.
“We are turning around what would be six months of work in six weeks,” explained J.T. Horn, a project manager for the Trust for Public Land, the nonprofit that has been the broker for NMH. It has been working for the past four years to find buyers for this acreage and other pieces of the prep school’s property holdings, vestiges of the time nearly 15 years ago when it operated a campus in Northfield as well as in the Mount Hermon section of Gill.
Part of the hang-up has involved another parcel — more than 300 acres of watershed that surrounds the Grandin Reservoir. It’s this reservoir that provides water to 300 Northfield customers through the East Northfield Water Company. Finding the right buyer-operator for the water company has turned out harder than anyone could have foreseen. Originally, the trust had arranged a large-scale divestment of NMH land, with some land going to the state and some to the town and with the water company and its watershed going to a private water company.
But the prospective buyer from Connecticut backed away and the subsequent difficulty identifying a new prospective owner-operator was looking more and more like a deal breaker.
“We realized that we couldn’t meet the original agreement,” Horn told The Recorder. “The project was honestly headed toward a complete failure a couple of weeks ago.”
Thankfully, there was enough interest in finding a way and when Conservation and Recreation made its proposal, the Land Trust figured splitting the deal made the most sense.
But the deal isn’t as simple as breaking off the watershed land. A number of neighbors have been leasing land from NMH for gardens, woodpiles and the like. Thus there has been further carving off parcels of the land, including some the school is keeping.
It’s been a lot to shepherd through and there remains the water company issue. Undoubtedly this will now get the Land Trust’s undivided attention regarding its work for NMH. Only then will NMH’s departure as a major property owner in Northfield be essentially complete.