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Conservation Commission

Conservation and More

              by Bruce B. Beckley

Issue #98, March, 2001
One Brook, Many Places

As brooks go, Pulpit Brook is rather commonplace. It starts on the shoulder of New Boston Road in Bedford. Five miles later and 330 feet closer to sea level, it joins Baboosic Brook in Merrimack. It doesn't power any mills. It's not large enough to be stocked by Fish and Game. You couldn't hardly float a canoe in its waters. Yet like so many small things in this world and our town, Pulpit Brook has a place, a purpose and a perspective.

The brook takes form in wetlands along the Bedford-New Boston line. In half a mile it emerges from a marsh environment of sedges, ferns and shrubs to drop over The Pulpit. This geological creation of ledge, waterfall and coolness gives the infant brook its name. Now managed by the Bedford Conservation Commission, the Pulpit once drew tourists who paid to visit and listen as its falling water splashed and shimmered over the rocks bedecked with mosses, ferns and spring flowers.

The brook moves on, over beaver dams, under the shading branches of pines and hemlock. Here, otter come to play; deer, moose and bear drink; owls, coyote and fisher look for sustenance. The brook sees them all but doesn't linger even as it passes surveyor's ribbons marking a new proposed subdivision along its shore.

At the Amherst town line, the brook passes between steeper banks dropping here over boulders and there over polished ledges. On the left is land once slated for a ten-home development and now owned by the ACC. Adjoining this 70-acre parcel is a second 20-acre piece also purchased by the ACC. Together, these lands mark the northern bounds of the embryonic Pulpit Brook Reservation.

It is here the character of the stream's course changes. With the help of several beavers the brook enters a 131-acre area of open water, maple swamp and marsh. This wetland is second in size only to Baboosic Lake at 230 acres and Witches Brook wetland at 144 acres. The wetland the brook now feeds ranked third also in the Antioch New England Graduate School evaluation of the town's wetlands. Beyond the land already protected from development by the ACC, Pulpit Brook passes the 123-acre section of Joppa Hill Farm that lies in Amherst.

The ACC believes the bulk of Joppa Hill Farm with a total area of 323 acres should remain open and has offered $25,000 in earnest money for the Amherst parcel to support the Town of Bedford in its effort to preserve the entire farm. Please ask your Bedford friends to support the Bedford warrant article to purchase the farm.

The brook passes below the historic Horace Greeley house and the less-than-historic houses now dotting McAfee Farm into the woods and marsh below New South Road. Nearing its end, the brook flows through the Bedford section of our Bragdon Farm, the downstream parcel of the ACC Pulpit Brook Reservation. Here a variety of wetland habitats follow each other in short order. Moist hemlock woods give way to an alder bordered swamp which blends into the open marsh seen from Route 101 below Bragdon Hill. From here the brook joins Baboosic Brook as it passes under the Stowell Road covered bridge in Merrimack.

We tend to forget the common place, places like Pulpit Brook and its wetlands. That is too bad. They are important and deserve our care and protection. Common places are becoming too uncommon.

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