Newsletters

While snow has blanketed us these past two months, we’ve been beavering away on several projects:

1. The Williamsburg Mill River Greenway Committee is making steady progress on a feasibility study for a connecting corridor along the river between Burgy and Haydenville centers. The report is set to be delivered to the Board of Selectmen in late June. There will be a chance for public input later this spring, Williamsburg residents stay tuned. (Full disclosure: MRGI co-moderator, Neal Bastek, is a member of the committee.)

2. Save the date: We will hold our annual spring friendraiser party on Friday, April 26th in Williamsburg. We’d love for you to join us.

3. Beginning in March, co-moderator John Sinton will introduce A History of the Mill River in installments, starting with the river’s geological history, then continuing with the First People, the First Settlers, and on to the end of the 19th century.  Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

4. A self-guided tour brochure of the lower river from Paradise Pond to South Street in Northampton will be available in April.  Guided tours will begin in spring.  The brochure is the product of MRGI and Smith College (Reid Bertone-Johnson and his students).  Damia Cavallari of Transit Authority Figures designed the brochure.

5. MRGI co-moderators Neal and John co-authored a paper on MRGI that Smith College instructor Reid Bertone-Johnson and Smith student Sophia Geller (class of ’13) will present in April at the Fabos Greenway Conference at UMass.  The paper will be available on this site in March.

Apologies for our absence this past summer, we were outside having fun, we hope you were too. Fall is here and we’re rarin’ to go. Here’s a little Mill River Greenway news to take the chill of the first frost away:

[Read more…] about News for Fall 2012

We hope you survived “winter” and are off to a great new year. We wanted to quickly let you know what we were up to in 2011 and what to look forward to from us in 2012. 2011 was a year of making connections and momentum building. We’ve got a great foundation to work from this year.

We got serious enough about the Greenway effort to take it public, and in late March we launched millrivergreenway.org (Thanks for visiting!). The website is the information hub for the Greenway effort. We’ve gathered a great collection of resources already, from stunning photos to historical maps, and we’re always on the lookout for more — send us some great content about the river and we’ll put it up.

Growing Community at the Bean Allard Farm

In July, several of us scoped out a river trail on the Bean Allard farm property in Northampton to be a part of the new recreation and farming complex. Working with Northampton’s planner, Wayne Feiden, and members of the Grow Food Northampton community, students at Smith’s Center for the Environment, Ecological Design and Sustainability led by Reid Bertone-Johnson, a Smith faculty member, will be designing a trail along the newly acquried Mill River greenway from Meadow Street to the Bean farm. Gaby Immerman and her Smith students also did some invasive species surveying, finding a good deal of multiflora rose, knotweed, and bittersweet that needs our attention.

Hurricane and Rain

In August we were visited by hurricane Irene and a 500-year flood event on the Mill River. We all witnessed the raw power of the river as it ran through several sections of Rt. 9 in Williamsburg and the flood control gate was raised in Northampton for the first time in 50 years.

With the ground so saturated, the river seemed to stay swollen all fall, right through the Halloween nor-easter that left many of us without power for multiple days.

Smith College Gets Involved

In November we participated in a Kahn Institute program at Smith, an interdisciplinary collaboration of Smith faculty exploring the possibilities of using the Mill River Greenway Initiative to address the ecological needs of the river while connecting the college to the community in new ways. John has led several groups on tours of the historic Mill River from downtown Northampton to Bay State, pointing out the original path of the river and the early beginnings of the industry on which Northampton depended.

A Look Ahead for 2012

There’s a lot to look forward to in 2012. We hope to spend more time with more people out on the river this year spreading the word about the Greenway Initiative, and we plan to continue to grow and mature this modest citizens group and build public will for the Greenway. To that end we’re in the early phases of collaborating with with the Williamsburg Village Center visioning Committee and the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission on exploring the possibilities of a multi use corridor connecting the two village centers. Northampton and PVPC have applied for a grant to do an ecological survey of the river, which would require volunteer help from our members.

We’re planning several riverwalks, and will be especially excited to welcome Laurie Sanders, who has volunteered to lead a walk on the Bean-Allard land this spring or summer. John will continue to lead walks from downtown Northampton to Bay State, and we’re hoping to corral members in Bay State, Florence, Leeds, Haydenville, and Williamsburg into leading trips. We’ll also plan a paddle in March or April from Hulburt’s Pond (Arcadia Refuge) to South Street in Northampton.

Exciting projects are taking shape up and down the river, and we probably don’t know about many of them all so drop us a note if you hear of something! We’re looking forward to getting involved with all of you.

Cheers,

Neal and John

P.S. Help spread the word about this effort and forward this email on to your friends.
P.P.S. You can connect with us on facebook.

The Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration, one of our close partners, has just published it’s latest newsletter here.  The newsletter, Ebb&Flow, always has some pretty neat stuff in it, but we’d like to draw your particular attention to the grants section, which briefly describes recreational trails grants for which we might well want to apply at some point.

Happy reading!