Mill River Greenway Initiative

A community-based steward for the Mill River

Mill River Greenway

New Guide: Managing invasives in the Mill River watershed

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We’re delighted to announce the publication of a new guide for land stewards in the Mill River watershed, Making Room for Native Plants and Wildlife.

Screen Shot 2016-04-15 at 1.00.27 PMThe guide, written by the New England Wild Flower Society with support from Smith College, is a plant-by-plant guide to the management and removal of invasive plants species commonly found encroaching on the banks and floodplains of the Mill River. The guide devotes one page per species to repeat offenders such as Japanese Knotweed, Oriental Bittersweet, and Multiflora Rose, offering pictures and description for identification, a table of when and how best to combat each species, and suggestions for replacement plantings of species native to this region.

The guide is available for free download on this website and will also be available in a printed, bound version at cost, $15 per guide (email us at info@millrivergreenway.org if you’re interested in purchasing print copies).

We’re planning to organize educational and stewardship events along the river this summer to distribute the guide and galvanize the community to care for the river. Stay tuned for more info, we hope we’ll see you out there!

Leap Day MRGI Community Meeting!

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CONTRIBUTE YOUR IDEAS AT OUR SECOND MEETING WITH THE CONWAY SCHOOL

Monday, Feb. 29, 7:00-9:00 PM at the Florence Civic Center

Dear Mill River Lovers,

Once again we’re asking you to contribute ideas on how to advance our goals for a greenway along the Mill River. Margot Halpin and Armi Macaballug, grad students at the Conway School, will be on hand to present the results of our Feb. 2nd meeting and report on how they’ve integrated your comments into their preliminary suggestions for priority projects. They’ll discuss opportunities for a variety of projects from multi-use paths to woodland trails to ecological and research sites to scenic overviews and historic sites.

Agenda For The Meeting:

  1. Review input from last community meeting.
  2. Present recent Conway School work including methods, maps, and analysis.
  3. Review regional map from Arcadia to Goshen to see relationships among opportunity areas, current green spaces, parks, public lands, bike routes, pedestrian routes, and paths. Request comments from the community.
  4. Discuss a selection of focus areas with maps and solicit input from the community.
  5. Discuss next steps.

Once again we stress that your contributions are vital: You know specific information about the river itself, but especially about your preferences concerning what you would or would not like to happen to different sections of the river. Here’s your chance to make a difference in the long run because your voices are needed to carry out our collective vision of a beautiful and vibrant river corridor.

See you at the Florence Civic Center on February 29th. If you can’t make it, please send your ideas to Armi and Margot at millriver2016@csld.edu.

Many thanks for making this all possible,

The MRGI co-conspirators

“The River Runs Through Us”

 

Request for Funds for Leeds Interpretive Signs

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1873 Leeds (Beers Map)

1873 Leeds (Beers Map)

The Leeds Civic Association and Leeds Committee of MRGI are seeking funds to provide historical interpretative signage to compliment the Mill River Greenway Initiative’s Self-Guided walking tour through historic Leeds.  Historical signage will depict the village during its manufacturing heyday as the center of economic and industrial vitality in Northampton.  Mills, using water power from the Mill River, produced silk thread, woolen broadcloth, and vegetable ivory buttons, which will all be displayed near their historic locations. A proposal for a small CPA grant is currently being crafted, and, if that is approved, the cost to produce the remaining signage will be approximately $1,500.  Checks can be made out to Leeds Civic Association with “Historic Signage” written in the memo line. Checks can be sent to LCA at PO box 114 Leeds, MA 01053

Thank you for helping fund this project supporting Mill River history!

From Jason Johnson and the gang at the Leeds Mill River Committee and the Leeds Civic Association

Fran Kidder’s 1874 Flood Art Show

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The Flood show announ_Page_1Artist’s Statement:  This work is based on the Mill River disaster, of 1874, which killed 140 people in the towns of Williamsburg, Haydenville and Leeds Massachusetts.

I live on that same river and have watched it, listened to it, and painted it over the years. But after reading Elizabeth Sharpe’s In the Shadow of the Dam, a carefully and beautifully documented account of the flood, I began to think l about making art about this tragic event.  Tragic on two levels: that of man versus nature, but also that of man versus man, since it was shoddy construction, condoned by greedy mill owners, that caused the deaths of so many innocent people.