Today this landscape is dense with stands of sugar maple shading 30-foot-high granite-block walls; birch groves grow out of sloping rubble fields. Many of the pits are now shaded, ebony pools filled with fish. Wrist-thick, rusting steel cables—a reminder of the quarry enter- prise—emerge from the ground beneath cool green hemlocks. The hill is coming to life with birds, moose, bears, and other wildlife, and also with cross-country skiers, snowmobilers from the local Thunder Chickens snowmobile club, kids with fishing poles—and especially mountain bikers bewitched by the vertiginous cliff-edge views and gnarly singletrack. Two of them, Mike Fraysier and Cindy Lindemann,
stop their bikes to consider my fate. We’ve been riding for about an hour since leaving the Millstone Hill Trails and Touring Center, housed at Pierre Couture’s store. Fraysier, a Barre City resident, is president of the non- profit Millstone Trails Association, which manages 70 miles of trails on and around Millstone Hill—trails with names like Screaming Demon. “Should we take him to
Roller Coaster?” Lindemann asks. “It’s not super crazy- ass wild,” Fraysier reassures me with a smile. I’ve seen pictures of this trail in several biking maga-
zines: its twisting ramps swoop down over a huge jumble of boulders, just like an old-fashioned wooden roller coaster. I’ve already made up my mind to walk that stretch. But I can see why mountain bikers from across the Northeast make pilgrimages to Millstone Hill. It’s one reason why the blue-collar town, working with The Trust for Public Land, has formed a plan to create a town forest on the former quarry lands. Making the land public will guar- antee the future of a trail system that is loved by locals and an important source of revenue from out-of-town visitors—while providing income from timber and protecting drinking water. “This truly is a great piece of property with an impor-
tant history,” says Barre Town selectboard member Jeff Blow. He also points out that the recreational benefits go far beyond mountain biking. “From the point of view of the municipality, this project is to support recreation of all kinds—to give all our residents, as well as visitors, access to open space.” If it succeeds in creating its town forest, Barre
Town will be applying an 18th-century tool to meet a 21st-century goal and joining a growing movement of communities nationwide that have decided that the best way to benefit from and control the fate of nearby forestlands is to own them.
FORESTS FOR COMMUNITIES Town forests are a New England tradition dating back to colonial days. Towns once owned forests to supply fire- wood for public buildings and timber for local mills. By the end of the First World War, both Vermont and New Hampshire had passed “enabling laws” to help towns es- tablish timberlands. The Great Depression created a new crop of town forests, when property owners failed to pay taxes on their lands and a town would assume ownership. Today more than 160 towns in Vermont have town forests, which are also common in New Hampshire and Maine. Often these forests are little known and little used.
Courtesy of Vermont Granite Museum
In the late 1800s, the granite quarries on Millstone Hill fueled the growth of central Vermont. Previous page: Mountain bikers admire a former quarry, now filled with water.
36 LAND&PEOPLE Spring/Summer 2012
But in the last decade, communities across the region have begun to show how locally owned, locally controlled forest- land can be more than a sleepy woodlot on the edge of town. It can be a tool to contain sprawl, maintain open space for