CONWAY — When Tony Borton moved to Conway with his wife in the early 1970s, they thought they were in heaven — especially compared to their native New Jersey. He wants to keep it that way.
A lover of the outdoors, Borton, who sought a place where the couple could raise and ride horses, discovered what’s been described as a haven for wildlife, with streams, a waterfall and a pond, as well as the woods to hike or ride horses through.
It was especially important for Borton, who grew up in New Jersey, “which became very highly developed. I’ve seen what happened in the past, and I liked it here so much.”
At 85, Borton, a retired University of Massachusetts professor of veterinary and animal science, still enjoys daily hikes and rides, as well as watching deer and moose, bear and otter, foxes and beaver.
In winter, Borton says, “We get a lot of otter slides. They look like they have so much fun. They come down the hillside and go back up again, just like kids.”
The 114-acre former dairy farm, which had been a sheep farm and apple orchard purchased in the early 1930s by William Fitzgerald (whose son went on to be a dairy farmer in Ashfield), also hosts an array of birds, including bluebirds. On what had been a subsistence farm since the 1700s, there are three mill sites, including an 1830s button mill that made use of bones from the slaughterhouse that was right there.
“The field across the road, a fairly large grassland, I rent as a pasture to a neighbor,” he said. “But, I don’t let him cut hay until mid-July, because we have a great population of bobolinks. I have a lot of milkweed in the field, and I released over 100 monarch butterflies last summer. Those fields are kind of special for their open land.”
With hayfields, horse pasture and the mixed hardwood and coniferous forest that makes up 80 percent of the property — part of a three-mile-long corridor surrounded by open space that includes Poland Brook State Wildlife Management Area — it’s so special, that Borton said he looks forward to sharing that natural wonderland with future generations. (his wife Ann Borton died in 2012.)
The Bortons first enrolled their property under a farmland assessment program in 1977 and developed a forest management plan a decade later, but in 2006, they began the 18-month process of donating a conservation restriction on 106 acres of forest and open space to the Franklin Land Trust, to be held by the Conway Conservation Commission.
“Then we thought, ‘We ought to tell the neighbors what’s going on,’” he said. “We invited in a lot of neighbors who were on land that had been farmed. A lot were long-time residents, who thought it was a good idea.”
Over apple pie and coffee, those neighbors — the Taylors, the Clapps, the Streets and the Dashevskys — agreed to meet with Franklin Land Trust Executive Director Richard Hubbard to learn about permanently protecting their land with conservation restrictions that would be held by the town.
“Tony planted a seed here by conserving his land,” said Hubbard at a Nov. 30 land trust gathering that included a hike around the protected Borton land. “And he had all his neighbors in and invited me to talk about how we do this work, and all of sudden, we started seeing other people in the neighborhood wanting to do the same thing. Sometimes, that’s what it takes.”
The protected land, which together with the state’s 1,100-acre wildlife management area, Borton said, backs up to nearby Conway State Forest and the Trustees of Reservation’s 265-acre Bullitt Reservation extending into Ashfield. In all, appearing from the air in summer like a giant head of broccoli, the heavily forested land up to a wildlife corridor extending over what Boron estimates at about 3,000 acres.
“We’re blessed having this large corridor here that the wildlife really like,” he says. “My theory about land protection is that the trees and fields out here aren’t sending kids to school and don’t require fire and police protection. Some people get concerned, saying that we can’t protect this land, because we need the taxes. When you develop land, it costs more than it brings in in taxes. So for the future, for sequestering carbon, I’m very much an advocate of preserving land.”
The property rises from about 650 feet to almost 1,000 feet above sea level, and Borton said, “There are two important streams with nothing above them, coming out of undeveloped woodland. Both go down to the South River. It’s important to protect our water sources. Water is so important to the future of our civilization.”
Borton, who boasts that he can go from his house all the way to Williamsburg without ever crossing a road,” also volunteers for the land trust and is on its board.
“He’s such an amazing ambassador for what we do.” says Hubbard. “He knows the business and goes out and talks about it, encouraging people people to think about preserving open space.”
Borton said that even without receiving a tax break for conserving the property — to which he invites the public to walk and hike — he would have protected it.
“We don’t really own the land,” Borton told the University of Massachusetts environmental conservation program. “We just have stewardship of it while we’re here.”