Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Telly Halkias, an award-winning freelance journalist. It originally appeared in the Bennington Banner.
While writing a feature recently about a nearby town celebrating its 250th anniversary, I learned this domain of about 7,500 had a sophisticated trials and byways organization that helps foster a comprehensive system within its borders.
I also recalled what Thoreau once said about walking: “Me thinks when the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”
This made me pause, being the second time in a week I came upon such a land trust — the other being in a town in Maine.
Bennington is a larger community than either of those, yet has struggled with the notion of a byway system that connects trails, and offers something past recreation benefit to its citizens: A magnet to draw visitors.
This isn’t a new concept. The non-profit Rails to Trails, for example, has been converting long-dormant rail lines into paths for decades.
Studies have shown visitors attracted to those paths add substantive economic benefit to the surrounding communities. From my own bike riding, every time I’ve visited a rail trail, I’ve also spent money in the local town where I have either parked my car, or a town through which I’ve biked.
Multiply one person’s contribution by the number of total visitors per year, to include snow-shoers and cross country skiers in the winter, and that’s real cash infusion into an economy. And it continues, year after year.
It sounds easy, but nothing ever is. Nurturing trails isn’t an overnight project, and developing the brand takes time. In Massachusetts, Lincoln and Concord — Thoreau’s old haunts — have extensive networks that are excellent recreational and economic draws. It’s taken generations to establish and protect them.
But the roadblocks are many.
Locally we have a few trails developed, such as Mile Around Woods and its surrounding networks of footpaths, all maintained and preserved by the Trust for North Bennington.
Southern Vermont College has many longtime trails on its land, acres that recently were preserved by the Vermont Land Trust. But only a few are closely monitored. Mostly, hikers for years have kept other trails clear. SVC has contributed to some maintenance, but it has never been a priority, and probably shouldn’t be.
Back to rail trails
About a decade ago, there was a local push by some citizens to examine the feasibility of an interconnecting trail system that would start with, and center around, the old Corkscrew line.
Time has covered it up from South Street. to Dewey Street. But starting at the top of Soule Street and running around the base of the Battle Monument to Gypsy Lane. at the Bennington Center for the Arts, the rail bed is still distinguishable and usable.
The effort was creditable, and as a follow-on project, also addressed converting the current rail spur between Bennington and North Bennington. Concerning the latter, however, the decades-long, conflicting and improbable interest of returning passenger rail service to the area created an impasse that exists to this day.
But he problem with the Corkscrew was its land. Without getting into specifics in the Bennington Historical Society’s realm, the railroad occupying those tracks ceded certain rights of way to our power utility years ago. Land ownership went back to abutting property holders.
In short, this is the story of our lives: Fragmentation, and no central push to help fuse it.
Any development of the Corkscrew would need permission from over a dozen land owners — which won’t happen unless a well-heeled benefactor steps up to the plate to lead a trails and byways non-profit.
Furthermore, Rails to Trails has well-documented data of improved property values in proximity to developed trails. This, too, is economic development of the highest order, but apparently discounted by private property owners.
It’s a shame this won’t happen. New England is the one region where the public’s common use of existing footpaths used to closely resemble the centuries-long British practice of public access being a right, and interlocking trails a goal.
As I’ve witnessed on my own daily hikes, this tradition, at least in our area, especially in town, seems dead. More land owners are cutting trails off, blocking them, and disallowing access. And money talks. It will take deep pockets and solid organization to reverse this trend.
One wonders what Thoreau would say.
