Editor’s note: This story by Claire Potter first appeared in the Valley News on Feb. 21.
SHARON — A local nonprofit donated 256 acres to Sharon and Strafford for a joint town forest earlier this month.
“I think it’s wonderful. We envision recreation, in many forms. It’s a good educational resource, and a natural resource as a forest,” said Kevin Gish, who serves on the Sharon Selectboard.
Strafford owns about 106 acres of the forest, and Sharon owns about 150 acres. The forest is the first two-town forest in the state and will be managed jointly.
In 2018, the not-for-profit Alliance for Vermont Communities purchased the property for over $300,000 as part of its effort to block a proposed development that would have brought up to 20,000 new residents to the rural community.
Sharon and Strafford are in the process of appointing a committee to oversee the Ashley Community Forest. The town’s respective selectboards will each appoint two representatives, and then the four will together select a fifth, Gish said. He said the boards hope to finalize membership within a month and are looking for candidates “with varied interests.”
The new committee’s first task will be to make a management plan. The forests’ potential uses are many-fold, he said. It may provide firewood for residents in need, and it may be home to a new sugaring operation.
In the meantime, the forest is open to the public.
The Alliance for Vermont Communities donated $20,000 to seed a management fund, said Michael Sacca, who leads the nonprofit. The goal is for the forest to be self-sustaining. Potential income from fundraising or forestry could help pay for maintenance, he said.
The Alliance for Vermont Communities also has discussed continuing its community outings in the forest. Some outings focused on natural history topics including fungi and ferns, while others looked at the stonework running through the forest that hints at its 19th-century history when the land was home to a successful sheep farm.
Sacca said there likely will be meetings in the spring to get public input on the management process.
Setting up an inter-local agreement was a challenge that took years, Sacca said.
For forest connectivity — a critical goal for wildlife — managing forests from a wider, regional view rather than town-by-town has advantages, he said.
“We created something that hopefully could be a model for other communities,” he said.
The Utah native David Hall had hoped to use the property for a 5,000-acre development that would further his utopian vision. The NewVistas Foundation, led by Hall, is dedicated to “sustainable prosperity.” It funds dense, self-sufficient developments modeled on Mormon documents from the 1830s. Hall grew to admire the area as he visited the Joseph Smith Birthplace Memorial in South Royalton.
Hall abandoned the project after vehement local opposition, and the four towns — Royalton, Sharon, Strafford and Tunbridge — have continued to work together to plan for future growth.
