At 10 am this morning, I arrived at the Apple Barn Cafe on Route 20 in Palmer, for the Annual Meeting of the Opacum Land Trust.  I haven’t been a member long, but the Trust does work in my area, and I’m committed to supporting its mission.  While we enjoyed coffee and pastries, a small group of us listened as Trust President Jennifer Ohop summarized the year’s accomplishments and described plans for future land protection projects.  Perhaps the most exciting news is that the Trust is ten years old this year! State Senator Steve Brewer (D-Barre) and Representative Todd Smola (R-Palmer) both congratulated the Trust on its work and presented certificates of appreciation.

Author and English professor John Sheirer was the featured guest; he spoke about his experiences hiking the Shady Brook Trail at the McCann Family Farm in Somers, Connecticut, a property maintained by the Northern Connecticut Land Trust, for 365 consecutive days. He explained how he came up with the idea and spoke candidly about some of the obstacles he overcame to fulfil this goal. He then read some of his favorite passages and took questions from the audience.  Of course I ended up buying his book and look forward to reading it.

By then it was close to noon, so I got back in my car and continued south on Route 19 to Wales, the next town over and only a fifteen-minute drive. Inasmuch as I had an hour before my next engagement, I decided to walk at the Conant Brook Dam, a small property in Monson maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. Other than flood control, I’m not sure what the land is used for, but cut trees all over the place suggest that the forest is managed, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

I was thrilled to see this sign of the changing season, on this the first day of spring: skunk cabbage, or Symplocarpus foetidus.  It was very exciting.


At 1:30 I arrived back at the Norcross Wildlife Sanctuary in Wales for a lecture on the Flynt Quarry Land. Although the Monson residents who’ve been walking on quarry land trails for years may not have known it, this parcel totalling around 165 acres is privately held, and the Opacum Land Trust is working with the town to purchase it outright, for a total of $380,000. Geologist-Archaeologist Alan Smith and OLT Vice-President Leslie Duthie described the history of the land, both physically and culturally.

The rock mined here for many years was Monson gneiss, a metamorphic rock which is basically granite transformed by high temperatures and pressures. So, how did this rock form? Although this obscure location in our little state may seem insignificant today, it was a happening place, geologically-speaking, millions of years ago.  In his book Roadside Geology of Massachusetts, James W. Skehan says:   “Central Massachusetts is essentially where Gondwana and Laurentia collided between 425 and 370 million years ago in late Silurian and Devonian time.”

Where I live in central Massachusetts, near Route 32 which runs north to south from the New Hampshire border to the Connecticut border, we’re squarely in the Bronson Hill volcanic belt; the Monson gneiss, consisting of stratified and layered gneiss with biotite and plagioclase, amphibole schist and large crystals of microcline, with some ultramafic oceanic crust, is the dominant core rock of this belt.  The early settlers to this area surely did not know the ages of the bedrock, but they did realize that the rock had a special property — right-angle cleavage — which made it prized by quarriers and stoneworkers.

The Monson quarry was originally worked from 1790-1809 to supply granite for the Springfield Armory foundation. In 1809, it closed for a number of years until it was opened again by Mr. Rufus Flynt in 1825; the quarry and surrounding lands would remain in the Flynt family for the next 100 years.  The Flynts, through marriage allied with the Norcross family, were prominent Monson citizens active in the civic and economic life of the town.  The Opacum Land Trust website says of the quarry:

The quarry provided granite for not only some of the town’s unique historic structures including Memorial Hall, the United Universalist Church (both designated historic structures), and the Monson Free Library, but also several buildings in New England, Washington D.C. and beyond.  The Flynt Quarry attracted Italian, Irish, and Polish immigrants who were seeking employment, adding to the community’s ethnic and cultural history and diversity.

I took a photo of Memorial Town Hall:

By my map, the Norcross Sanctuary is on the road to Monson, so after the lecture, I drove northwest on Monson Road, which changes its name to Wales Road as soon as it crosses the town line, and which then intersects with Route 32 near the town center. In my local paper, I had read something about the Monson Art Show, a juried exhibit in the Art Center at 200 Main Street, so I stopped to see it. The show was titled Black and White and Everything in Between and lived up to its moniker. There were prizes awarded in different categories, such as Painting, Drawing, Photography, and Sculpture, as well as a Best in Show prize. My brochure listed which works had won prizes, so I compared them with my judgments.

The verdict? I can’t say. All works were for sale at reasonable prices, but I didn’t see anything I liked well enough to buy it. I’m sure this says more about my taste than about the quality of the work displayed. It’s true that I have many friends who are artists, and personal loyalty  would compel me to patronize them if I wanted to collect art, but I haven’t bought a lot of stuff from artist friends either, because basically, I don’t like most of it.  To be polite, I’d describe their work as avant-garde, and I have more conservative tastes.  I prefer graphic arts kind of stuff: posters, woodcuts, that sort of thing.