There has been much community discussion this year about protection of open spaces, landscapes, viewsheds, and habitats on the Blue Hill Peninsula. We feel connections to so many spaces in our towns for a variety of reasons. They might be places we have frequently walked and explored. Or places that evoke memories of friends, neighbors, and loved ones. Maybe it’s a view we have always known and can’t imagine it ever being different than how it is today. So, it seems only fitting that we continue our look at how people in our community have worked with Blue Hill Heritage Trust to protected and conserved land dear to many of us for these very reasons.
Today Ben Emory shares how he and his late wife, Dianna, made the decision to purchase and protect land now referred to as the Dianna K. Emory Conservation Area.
On Route 172 in Sedgwick sits 79.6 acres of land that you may have noticed and appreciated because of the view. Or maybe this just part of the backdrop of Sedgwick that you haven’t spent much time considering. Is this one of those spaces you just assume will always be there? Thankfully, it will be…
Much of this property includes an expansive view that changes with the seasons. This time of year it is dotted with autumnal colors, but during the height of summer its fields are alive with wildflowers, grasses, and a variety of other species who thrive in all nature has to offer them. Each fall the fields are cut and used locally for hay. The Dianna K. Emory Conservation Area (donated to BHHT in 2021) is open to the public with limited parking (that is yet to be formally established). Look for more information about this property in the near future on our website along with an onsite kiosk planned at the small parking area.
The following is Ben Emory’s personal account of the process that he and Dianna, underwent to ensure that this open space they love remains largely unchanged for generations to come. It is with their help, and that of all our community donors, that Blue Hill Heritage Trust continues to conserving land, water, and wildlife habitat on the greater Blue Hill Peninsula.
Ben Emory- Fall 2024
The origins of the Dianna K. Emory Conservation Area’s belonging to Blue Hill Heritage Trust date back to a June 2002 executive committee meeting of the board. Peter Clapp and the late Pam Johnson urgently wanted us fellow committee members to consider what to do about Meadow Brook Farm – also known as Punchbowl Farm — on Route 172 in Sedgwick. The family of Gordon Campbell, the recently deceased owner, wished to sell. Meadow Brook Farm straddled Route 172 six miles south of Blue Hill village and two miles north of Sedgwick village. From the road 68 acres of sloping hayfields, wetland meadows, and forest sweep southeastward to the edge of Meadow Brook just a short distance south of where it flows into the Salt Pond. The hayfields are cut by a second brook, Thurston Brook, which comes under the road and meanders among alders until it empties into Meadow Brook. The latter drains an extensive freshwater wetland known as Great Meadow, which extends south almost to the Benjamin River. For the Wabanaki the Benjamin River and Great Meadow provided a protected portage route from the Penobscot Bay region to Blue Hill Bay.
The farm included 27 acres with a 1792 house and attached barn northwest of Route 172, but that is now in separate ownership under a conservation easement held by BHHT limiting development to two residences. From an environmental standpoint, the 68 acres southeast of Route 172 are the most important, and they are what constitute the Dianna K. Emory Conservation Area along with an abutting 11 acres of fields and woods.
I had driven by Meadow Brook Farm all my life, and my late wife Dianna enjoyed the views across the hayfields during frequent biking from our house in Brooklin. Its importance was obvious. The afternoon of that June 2002 executive committee meeting we offered Blue Hill Heritage Trust a choice. We would try to buy the farm to take it off the market and, if successful, give the Trust an option to buy from us at a bargain sale price so that it could own the land, or we would donate a conservation easement. Dianna and I were quickly able to secure the farm. The board took many months to decide but eventually concluded that a conservation easement forbidding all development of the land southeast of Route 172 would be the preferred course of action.
The habitat significance of the property was underscored by a letter we received from the Vermont Center for EcoStudies (VCE) within a few years of the purchase. At the time, VCE was examining aerial photographs of New England rural areas looking for large hayfields likely to be important for meadow nesting birds such as bobolinks. We had already been educated about the bird importance of old hayfields, and, in fact, the conservation easement forbids haying before August 15 in order to keep machinery out of the fields until young are fledged. As I wrote in my book Sailor for the Wild: on Maine, Conservation and Boats in the chapter on the farm, “High quality habitat for bobolinks, harriers, bitterns, woodcock, and a host of other bird species has been conserved. Scenic roadside vistas have been preserved, and working hayfields supplying local hay markets will never be destroyed by buildings and pavement.” The variety of birds is remarkable. One spring a sandhill crane was in the fields for about a week.
Alison Dibble, a consulting botanist and, at the time of our purchase, president of the BHHT board, did a natural resources inventory of Meadow Brook Farm for us in 2009. She pointed out that for coastal Hancock County the forested portions have some unusually large diameter trees. Although the area was certainly mostly sheep pasture in the late 1800s, the woods in the southwestern part of the Dianna K. Emory Conservation Area do not appear to my amateur eyes to have been harvested in a long time and may be beginning to develop old growth characteristics with not only some large standing trees but also a messy understory and large, mossy remains on the ground of fallen trees with young trees sprouting from the decomposing logs.
Nearly a decade after buying Meadow Brook Farm Dianna and I acquired the abutting small farm to the north along the southeast side of Route 172 and granted a conservation easement forbidding development of its approximately eleven acres of fields and woods. Then in January 2021 Dianna passed away following a long illness. What was now about 79 acres southeast of Route 172, mostly hayfields but also woods, alders, and brook frontage, had limited financial value because of the conservation easements but retains great habitat and scenic values as well as offering a local source of hay. My donating those 79 acres to Blue Hill Heritage Trust in October 2021, which remains legally bound by the conservation easement provisions, as the Dianna K. Emory Conservation Area seemed a fitting way to memorialize Dianna’s great commitment to the Earth and its creatures.