The Northeast Wilderness Trust’s purchase of the 15-acre Steel Addition to the Binney Hill Wilderness Preserve closed Friday, bringing the total acreage of the Wilderness Preserve to 550.
The purchase of the New Ipswich parcel is the latest in the Trust’s efforts to protect land all over New England, and to protect a significant portion of 6,000 acres of uninterrupted forestland along New Hampshire’s southern border.
According to Northeast Wilderness Trust’s outreach coordinator Sophi Veltrop, this particular addition is an important one, despite being a relatively small acquisition.
“It could have been very easily developed were it not for a conservation-minded landowner,” Veltrop said, pointing out that the Steel Addition sits at the end of a road to the east of the Binney Hill Preserve. That sort of development would have made accessing Binney Hill from that direction difficult, Veltrop said.
The conservation-minded landowner in question is Virgina Steel, from whom the Steel Addition gets its name. She inherited the land from her mother and decided to sell it to the Trust after attending a talk on the Wildlands & Woodlands initiative, which calls for 70% of New England’s forested land to be permanently protected by 2060.
“Given the parents that I had,” Steel said, “it was inevitable that I would know and care about the natural environment. I was happy about my mother’s purchase of this ‘woodlot’ and helped her visit and enjoy it to the end of her days. When it became mine, I wondered what I would do with it – until the answer appeared, that it would become an ‘ambassador to forever wilderness.’”
“She reached out to us, and she’s been great to work with through this whole thing,” Veltrop said. “It was a perfect fit, and she worked with us to protect it.”
This included Steel selling the property for less than the appraised value, according to Veltrop.
The fundraising to make the purchase was helped along by Friends of the Wapack, a nonprofit group dedicated to the preservation of the Wapack Trail, a 21.5 mile hiking trail that passes through the Binney Hill Preserve for a mile.
Rick Blanchette, president of Friends of the Wapack, said that the group did its best to spread the word and boost fundraising through publicity and visibility.
Veltrop said that the Wilderness Trust was “lucky” to have contacts like the Friends in the area to help spread the word and drum up donations for the purchase.
“We’re really grateful to be in a long-term partnership with Friends of the Wapack and together with them, we’re hoping to continue preserving land in this corridor,” Veltrop said.
While the trail does not cross the Steel Addition, Blanchette said that its preservation was still of interest to the group.
“It adds to the protected land around the trail and pushes the development further away from the trail,” Blanchette explained. “It helps to maintain the wilderness experience on the trail, so it’s not close to any large developments.”
The importance of the Steel Addition also lies in what kind of land is being preserved there, Veltrop said. There is a “pocket wetland” in the 15-acre parcel, she said, whose headwaters are on the existing preserve. With the purchase of the Steel Addition, the entire watershed of the small wetland is now permanently preserved.
The expansion of the Binney Hill Preserve is also key to the Trust’s interests because it serves as an ambassador preserve, Veltrop said.
“They’re wild areas that are a little more accessible to the public, whereas some other places that we protect are way out in the middle of nowhere or surrounded by other private lands,” Veltrop said.
“They’re places where we can bring people into the wild and cultivate that love of wild places, and also still fulfill our mission in other preserves, in terms of leaving some of the land primarily for wildlife,” said Veltrop.
These preserves typically play host to more events and have more interactive signage for visitors.
The Trust’s goal is to have one of these ambassador preserves in each of its states – they currently have one in Massachusetts, Maine, and New York in addition to New Hampshire’s.
Veltrop said that the Steel Addition is far from the last effort that the Northeast Wilderness Trust will be making to preserve land, both in New Hampshire and in the entire northeast.
“The land that is out there, they’re not making any more of it. It’s either going to be conserved or it’s going to be developed,” Veltrop said. Northeast trust, she added, looks forward to conserving as much of it as possible.