Time Traveling

by George Jacobi

Like they do every October, Orionid meteors decorate the night sky over the Mt. Hope River bridge. Winding Route 89 encourages slow car travel, and outside of the yips of coyotes, it’s a “quiet corner”. No one occupies the Church Farm anymore. Not even a cow or sheep remains. But this place embodies a story of one family’s journey through time.

It was always a tight pocket of arable, workable bottomland snugly set between the Mt. Hope River and a heavily forested northwest ridge, the steepest in the entire valley. A low stream gradient probably encouraged horseshoe bends to form here, and the Trust’s ill-fated boardwalk is evidence that there will be more to come. The Nipmucks and Wabbaquasetts spent time long before it became a hardscrabble farm around 1791. Listen: There is soft laughter among the women, and infant giggles, as they firmly set last year’s corn kernels into the dark earth. The May sun is warm on their skin and blessedly, a breeze keeps the black flies down. A treasure of Indian artifacts collected from these plowed fields sadly went missing in the 1960s. Very little other land in the valley and northward lends itself to European farming methods; the earlier lifestyle practiced here is better suited to the geography. Nevertheless, on this spot in 1840 a hip-roofed Federal style house and surrounding acres come into the possession of John Church.

For the first time this wild place will be thoroughly tamed. Glimpse: Church stops shoeing his horse, sits, and squints in the sun. He blinks–he can see into the future! There will be a grass tennis court, and horses will share a 2-story chestnut barn with a billiard room, and this will come to be after his newborn son takes the reins.

That vigorous son, John Whitman Church (at right in photo), sustains the sheep farm into the 20^th century while building a profitable clothing business, moving to Hartford, and turning his Ashford birthplace into a summer home. The brook is dammed in 1906, forming a pond shared with his neighbor on the south side. In 1968 his own descendant Henry Church conveys the historically significant estate to his daughter Dorothy Church Zaring, who grew up swimming in that pond, and to her husband Joe. Her fond memories, their wisdom and generosity together allow the Church Farm to remain intact and protected well into the turbulent 21^st century.

In 1984 the Zarings begin donating parcels of land to Joshua’s Trust. They transfer the rest of the property, house, and barn, to Trinity College in 1999, and then again to Eastern Connecticut State University in 2008. Today both universities continue field work on the resource. Joshua’s Trust and ECSU together oversee the 250+ acres. A 2010 Bioblitz identified 62 bird species, 20 butterflies, 156 moths, and 11 reptiles and amphibians. The late Dean of Faculty at Trinity, Miller Brown, wrote: “It’s a gem. It’s just an exceptional example of biodiversity.”

Today Professor Kristen Epp’s biology classes from Eastern track the biomass and the secret lives of red-back salamanders (and in this case, a marbled salamander). The hillside spring, site of Church family picnics, still tumbles down to the brook. The ridge overlooks fall colors across the valley and its second growth forest is home to natural inhabitants aplenty. The former sheep pasture and orchard along the river (where the Trust’s boardwalk got washed away) continues to grow in, half a flooded wetland and great habitat for migratory birds. Don’t peek: Work done, Dorothy and her friends run pell-mell across the road and the meadow to the deepest hole in the river, gleefully shed their clothes, and jump in. None of this would be safe from progress or climate change without the Zaring family’s decision to save it. The Church Farm has become an example of a local conservation organization and a local university finding common ground, thus multiplying the value of a historic and ecologically significant gift.

What would hard-working ambitious Whitman Church think of the present, of preservation and woodland walkers, of his home and barn on the National Register of Historic Places, of nature gently interrupted by academic research? This pocket of house, barn, and fields, woods, earth, water, and stone–and memory–safely continues the slow geologic process of crumbling and washing away south toward the future. Of which, only time will tell.

Any inaccuracies are mine alone.                                                                                                

Happy Halloween!