88 Acres Conserved in Gill and Greenfield
Franklin Land Trust is thankful to the Stotz Family, whose land in Gill and Greenfield we have just permanently conserved with a Conservation Restriction (CR). The Stotz Family donated a CR over 88 acres of forestland, protecting over 6,000 feet of the bank of Fall River, a cold water fishery that originates in Guilford, VT and the hills of Colrain, MA before joining the Connecticut River just below the dam at Great Falls (Turner’s Falls). As it passes through the Stotz Family’s land, the Fall River flows within a steep, rocky ravine that is remarkably unaltered despite intensive industrial uses that occurred in “Factory Hollow” in the 19th Century.
A dam along the river, a remnant of this industrial past, was removed in 2014 by the US Fish & Wildlife Service, increasing the potential for anadromous fish such as eels, sea lamprey, and shad to utilize it as spawning grounds. The land is nearby Peskeompskut, a fishing and agricultural village that was a seasonal home to the Pocumtuck people and their neighbors for thousands of years, and which was the site of a massacre of Native Americans during King Philip’s War. These 88 acres contain traces of an engaged human-land relationship that extends back millennia, and FLT is grateful to the Stotz Family for their decision to conserve this ecologically and historic significant landscape for generations to come.