A divided Chilmark conservation commission voted last week to approve a project to install a new culvert in Mill Brook headwaters off North Road. Proposed by the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, the project has kicked up a cloud of controversy.
The foundation bought the 1.7-acre property on Nov. 19 for $35,416, a press statement said. The seller was the family of Josephine Smalley Vanderhoop. The purchase will help conserve rare habitat, Sheriff's Meadow said.
Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation is the local land trust for the Island of Martha’s Vineyard. Our mission is to conserve the natural, beautiful, rural landscape and character of Martha’s Vineyard for present and future generations. We are governed by a board of directors which represents the year-round and seasonal communities of the Island. We own 2,000 acres of conservation land across the Island, including land in each of the six Island towns. We protect another 850 acres of land with conservation restrictions.
Take a look at a Vineyard book shelf and you’re likely to find The History of Martha’s Vineyard by Charles Banks or Moraine to Marsh by Anne Hale. For conservationists, Aldo Leopold’s book A Sand County Almanac published in 1949 is equally iconic. “I think anybody can be inspired by what he wrote,” Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation director Adam Moore said this week. “It’s one of the key pieces of literature in our environmental history in this country.”
Tucked among the red cedars, black oaks and white oaks at Cedar Tree Neck Sanctuary stand six Atlantic white cedars, barely two feet tall.
Last year Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation planted 12 of these cedars at the sanctuary as part of a restoration project; the tree is said to be native to the Vineyard, according to executive director Adam Moore.
The place names are familiar and unchanging: Wasque, Cape Pogue and Long Point, Herring Creek Farm, Cedar Tree Neck and Fulling Mill Brook, Waskosim’s Rock and Pecoy Point, to name a few.
But the people who admire, use and could potentially contribute to the thousands of acres of land in conservation on the Vineyard have changed, and Island conservation leaders say this is what frames their biggest challenge today.
The Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation has purchased a new property on Chappaquiddick, the conservation foundation announced this week.
The 2.3-acre parcel sits on Manaca Hill, near Chappy Point. Viewed from the Edgartown side of the Chappaquiddick ferry, it is located on the right side of the small island, across the street from the Chappy Beach Club, and abuts the town-owned Gardner property.
Sheriff’s Meadow Executive Director Adam Moore said this week that the foundation purchased the property on Dec. 19 from Virginia Mattern for $100,000.
