ALEXANDRIA — Nearly 500 acres of land – including the peak of Hutchins Hill and about a mile of undeveloped road frontage on Washburn Road – will remain open, scenic and available as high-quality wildlife habitat under a conservation easement donated by the Butman family to the Society for the Protection of N.H. Forests.
The donors, siblings Marcia, Brad and John Butman and their families, will continue to own the land, but the easement permanently protects it from being developed at any time in the future.
One of the reasons the family decided to donate the easement was to honor the memory of the siblings’ father, Bob Butman, who along with their mother Olive bought the land in 1964 and spent the ensuing decades building trails, hiking on and improving the land on visits from their home in Concord, Mass.
“Dad was always going off into the woods. He really loved this land a lot,” said Marcia Butman. “He really appreciated the peace and beauty of the forest.”
The easement donation also satisfies the siblings’ own strong conservation ethic.
“We didn’t want to see it broken up into different pieces,” said Toby Sackton, Marcia Butman’s husband. “It was very important to us that it remain a big, continuous piece of land.”
Keeping it intact will help to conserve the excellent wildlife habitat the land provides. In just one tracking workshop the couple hosted for the Newfound Wildlife Trackers, they found evidence of bear, moose, coyote, deer and turkeys, and they enjoy seeing hawks, owls, warblers and many other birds passing through.
The conservation value of this property is heightened by its proximity to other conserved areas. It abuts and enlarges a 990-acre property owned by New Forestry LLC and conserved with an easement held by the N.H. Dept. of Resources and Economic Development, and it is close to conserved lands on Mt. Cardigan.
The easement will also help to protect the water quality of Newfound Lake by conserving several streams that drain into Patten Brook, a tributary of the lake.
“We are grateful to the Butman family for this gift that not only celebrates the family’s strong connection to the land but also furthers the work we have been doing to connect conservation lands and protect water quality in the Newfound Lake watershed,” said Jane Difley, president/forester of the Forest Society.
The property is identified as having high natural resource values in the Lakes Region Conservation Plan and is within a core focus area of the Quabbin to Cardigan Initiative, a landscape-scale effort to conserve the Monadnock Highlands from the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts to Mount Cardigan and the White Mountain National Forest.
The project came to the Forest Society through its involvement in the Newfound Land Conservation Partnership (NLCP). Made up of three partners – the Newfound Lake Region Association, the Lakes Region Conservation Trust, and the Forest Society – the NLCP works to conserve land and water quality in the Newfound Lake region.
The John Gemmill Newfound Lake Fund provided a grant to cover some of the project’s expenses.