Mill River Greenway Initiative

A community-based steward for the Mill River

Mill River Greenway

Mid-Summer Newsletter

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Happy mid-summer to you all, and, yes, we are also bewildered by the surfeit of stones and dearth of water in our beloved Mill River. Yet the rain gods have come and we, who follow in the footsteps of the Nonotuck – the People In the Midst of the River – will husband our resources and prepare for late summer’s bounty

Unlike the frantic pace of outdoor activities last year, especially the monthly riverwalks, this summer has been one of gathering up and preparing for the fall. We have been busy, but it’s been like organizing the plumbing and electric in the house that you can’t see happening.

So let’s get on with it. Here’s what is, in fact, happening:

  • After the publication of our collaborative invasive/native plants guide with Smith College, we received lots of requests for hard copies, and then the Hampshire Gazette covered the story in mid-July: http://www.gazettenet.com/Mill-River-Greenway-Initiative-seeks-to-remove-Invasive-plants-3187059. You can find the digital copy of “Making Room for Native Plants and Wildlife” on the MRGI website here: http://millrivergreenway.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Smith-College-invasive-guide-booklet.pdf.
  • We are in the process of completing a new historic riverwalk brochure, once again in collaboration with Smith College. “Florence: Riverside Drive to Meadow St. Bridge,” will be available in September, and we’ll inaugurate the brochure with a guided tour in October led by Wendy Sinton of the Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee, who managed the project. This brochure features the Northampton Association of Arts and Education and the silk and plastics industries in the life of the Mill River.
  • The Burgy Mill River Greenway Committee is working with the Williamsburg Highway Department to alleviate erosion problems and make rough improvements to the trail link (aka the Goat Path) at the Northampton/Haydenville boundary on the rail trail. This fall the town of Williamsburg will be improving sidewalks and signage on South Main Street in Haydenville to provide safer passage for pedestrians, bicycles, and automobiles.
  • In collaboration with the Northampton Office of Planning and Sustainability (thank you, Wayne Feiden!), we are producing handsome new trail markers for the Mill River Greenway. You’ll begin to see them in the Leeds-Haydenville area this fall. Here’s what they’ll look like: http://millrivergreenway.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MIL-trail-markers-03-1.pdf
  • Conway School students Margot Halpin and Armi Macaballug, class of ’16, compiled reams of GIS data for us on the Mill River watershed. The emerging “Master Map of the Mill River Greenway” will be housed at Smith College’s Center for the Environment, Ecological Design, and Sustainability (aka CEEDS) under the able stewardship of Smith’s Spatial Analysis Lab.  Digital or hard copies of Margot and Armi’s report, “Building a Strategic Plan for the Mill River Greenway,” are available from the Conway School: http://www.csld.edu/contact-us/ Unfortunately, since the digital copy is 63 megabytes, we at MRGI aren’t capable of providing the direct link. Thanks again to our members for funding this project!
  • We are delighted to welcome intern Silke Hensteback, a UMass Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning undergraduate, who will be studying options and supporting planning/organizing for the Bay State section of the Greenway, a trail from Smith College (Paradise Pond), along the base of Hospital and Yankee Hills and close to the Clement St. Bridge

As always, let us know your thoughts, keep in touch, keep cool, and keep loving our river!

Gaby, John, and Neal

A Stunning Spring and Summer Ahead

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We’re thrilled to announce a series of great initiatives this spring and summer:

LET’S TACKLE INVASIVES ALONG OUR RIVER!

We’re delighted to make available a new guide for land stewards in the Mill River watershed, “Making Room for Native Plants and Wildlife.” The 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 on our http://millrivergreenway.org 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!

THE CONWAY SCHOOL BOOK WILL BE AVAILABLE BY MAY DAY

We’ve gotten an early peek at Armi and Margot’s work at the Conway School and it looks beautiful. The book, entitled “Building a Strategic Plan for the Mill River Greenway” is 68 pages and chock full of photographs, maps, and data. THANK YOU, Mill River Lovers, this is your gift to the river, and the river will be giving back to you. We can’t wait to get this out to you. Watch this space.

A SELF-GUIDED TOUR BROCHURE FOR FLORENCE

Wendy Sinton of the Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee, with the help of Dianne Jester-Wieland (Smith ’16), Julia Franchi Scarselli (Smith ’18), and Florence architect Scott Laidlaw have a draft prepared for a Mill Riverwalk in Florence. Designed once again by the inimitable Rob and Damia of TransitAuthorityFigures.com, we expect to have copies of the brochure early this summer. This is the third brochure in what we hope will someday be a series of ten!

BAY STATE RIVERWALK OPTIONS

Once again, Smith students lived up to their reputation for amazing projects by producing maps and data that summarize parcel data, historical features, and invasive species challenges on the Bay State reach of the river. This work will provide the basis for Bay State residents and the City of Northampton to envision the Greenway from Paradise Pond to the Cutlery Building, as well as gathering the information that will become another self-guided tour brochure. We will post their work on the website in May. Thanks, Julia Graham, Grace Peralta, and Bryn Gingrich for work that will have lasting impact!

ENGINEERING DESIGN FOR THE RAIL TRAIL DISMOUNT TO SOUTH MAIN STREET IN HAYDENVILLE

…speaking of lasting impact, Joanna Kenneally, Sophia Poulos, Jin Rui Yap, and Eliana Perlmutter, Smith seniors working through the Engineering Department’s Design Clinic, have completed an engineering study to link the end of the rail trail in Leeds to South Main Street in Haydenville (Williamsburg). They presented two options, one earthwork and one boardwalk, at a very well attended Community Forum in Williamsburg on April 9. The students’ design and analysis lays the groundwork for Williamsburg to seek the funding that will be required to complete the project. Our deepest gratitude to Smith and the College’s superb students!

 

 

 

 

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”