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Some Notes on the History of Bear Swamp
Steve Young, 2019
When I first knew Bear Swamp, in the late 1940s, the upper-eastern-part was a sort of secret fishing spot for a few people: especially Glen Fisk and Ken Palmer (according to his daughter, Sara Shevenell). The western portion was actually a hayfield, attached to the Jule Ellsworth farm and reached by a ford across Tamarack Brook. At that time beavers were still rare in our area, so beaver dams didn’t inundate the hayfield, and the upper area was a dense alder swamp, hard for a ten year-old to navigate. It was still possible to find traces of a corduroy winter road that had once been used to bring logs to a sawmill located just upstream from the Tamarack Brook crossing of Town Hill Road. There were also stories about the swamp being cut over during
World War I to provide leaf oil used in the making of explosives. It was possible to find an occasional fence post and barbed wire along a property line immediately north of the brook, but I doubt that many cattle ever went down to the swampy areas; they could easily have gotten mired in the deep peat.
In the 1950s, the beavers returned. Their dams caused the flooding of the low-lying areas. Trees-mainly tamarack (larch)-died and were left as stubs, and most of the alder also was killed by the rising water. The hayfield was abandoned, and the area began to revert to a wilder, more pristine aspect. At some point, Glen Fisk acquired a major portion of the swamp tract, about 180 acres; he held it for a decade or more. In the late 1960s, when was 80 or so, Glen approached my father and asked him if he would be interested in buying the tract. The asking price was, I believe, 100 dollars per acre-not cheap at the time for swampland and more or less inaccessible forest. The Bear Swamp tract adjoined my parents’ land, and there had been some ideas floated about harvesting the deep peat deposits known to occur there, and possibly creating an artificial lake by damming and dredging. This seemed to my family to be a bad idea, especially since I had come to realize that the swamp was an exceptional natural area, for a number of reasons which I’ll touch upon below. My parents decided that it was worth stretching the budget in order to preserve Bear Swamp.
The acquisition of Bear Swamp was a major impetus for the creation of the Center for Northern Studies. The land had many features of the typical boreal forest environment, which generally occurs a good deal farther north, well up into Canada. There were, for example, lowland stands of black spruce and Labrador tea, and breeding populations of boreal chickadees and three-toed woodpeckers (the moose had yet to arrive.) My parents made the gift of an additional ten-acre tract near the road, on which we could build a field station, and the Center for Northern Studies was launched in 1971.
At that time, there was a major portion of the swamp that was owned by another private party. Bob Klein, of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), knew the owner and was able to convince him to donate a 125-acre tract to TNC. My family then donated their portion of the swamp to TNC, who then deeded the entire 300+ acre tract to the Center for Northern Studies, first putting restrictions in the deed that the land must be used for educational purposes.
For the next forty or more years, Bear Swamp was a major feature of the Center for Northern Studies. We made a variety of interesting discoveries. For example, what was now peatland had once, after the glaciers left about 14,000 years ago, been a deep, narrow lake, filling much of the valley. The lake actually still exists: the peatlands and forest form a skim over a body of water which we know is at least 60 feet deep. We discovered and documented the breeding sites and behavior of several boreal vertebrate species, and we made significant discoveries of the activities of northern mammals in winter, under deep snow cover. All this resulted in an array of scientific publications, student senior theses, and the buildup of a body of knowledge regarding the environment of Bear Swamp in all seasons of the year, and over an extended period of time.
