NORTHFIELD – Labor Day weekend meant working for free for the 25 to 30 who volunteered time and muscle to help clean and restore the Mill Brook Trail on Sept. 5 and 6.
The Northfield Open Space Committee made a public appeal for assistance replacing several small bridges near School Street, adding a length of boardwalk to the “bridge to nowhere” across the marsh by the bend in Dickinson Street, adding some bog bridges, sprucing up the trail, and removing some invasive species. Lunch was provided for those who registered in advance.
Chair Julia Blyth said about a dozen people helped construct a boardwalk to the “bridge to nowhere,” finishing around 11 a.m. on Sunday.
“We were shockingly efficient,” she said. “The older-looking part was all that was here before and so people weren’t really using this section of trail because you would get your feet very wet.”
Blythe said about 48 feet were added to the roughly 15 feet already there, and steps were constructed on the south side.
Voters at this year’s Annual Town Meeting approved a $5,530 CPA funding request, which Blyth previously said enabled the purchase of materials for these projects. She said the lumber came from Leader Home Centers and the metal poles, with auger feet, were Tommy Docks brand from Home Depot.
“We had to go through permitting, but we weren’t really impacting the wetlands by just screwing (them) in,” she said regarding the state’s Wetlands Protection Act. “If we were digging posts in, that would be more problematic.”
The Mill Brook Wetlands Trail is located on the Snow family’s property, and the family hired workers in addition to the volunteers.
Closer to School Street, a handful of people (including Blyth, at one point) spent time forcibly removing barberry with weed wrenches, pitchforks, shovels and their bare hands.
“We don’t take ‘No’ for an answer,” volunteer Magda Ponce-Castro said as she ripped the plants from the soil.
The volunteers dumped the debris into a pile after removing it piece by piece. Ponce-Castro said she typically avoids pastrami sandwiches because of their high fat content but she ordered one for lunch because she knew she would have earned it.
According to Northfieldmasstrails.org, the 1.5-mile loop trail has an elevation gain of 180 feet and is located on the wetlands “sandwiched between” the village library and the Northfield Golf Course. Traveling the loop counter-clockwise, the trail descends from Holton Street toward Main Street and crosses a footbridge across Mill Brook. A side trail goes to the edge of a pool in the brook.
Blyth previously told the Greenfield Recorder that Native American camps were located along the Millbrook for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and the land is also the location of one of the first settlements in Northfield. Additionally, trail users can see remains from the foundations of a large chateau from when the Northfield Mount Hermon School’s Northfield campus was founded in the late 1800s.
Part of the trail is included in a snowmobile trail network. Blyth had mentioned Open Space Committee members were interested in repairing a snowmobile bridge on the terrain located near Route 63 as part of the project, but it proved too expensive and they opted not to include the repairs as part of the Annual Town Meeting CPA project request.
The snowmobile bridge was then washed away during July’s rainstorm. Blyth said the Open Space Committee plans to speak with the Northfield Snowmobile Club and the Snow family to discuss repairing or replacing the bridge.
Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com to 413-772-0261, ext. 262.