Founding
The Briarwood Falls Conservation Trust was chartered in the spring of 1962 by a small consortium of five families — the Alcotts, the Hollenbecks, the Pettit-Marsdens, the Vaughns, and the Whitford heirs — whose adjoining holdings described the upper and middle reaches of the Briarwood basin. The original conveyance, drafted over three successive winters with the counsel of conservation attorneys retained for the purpose, placed the combined parcel — 1,412 acres by the 1964 resurvey, including the falls and their associated cataract pool — into an indivisible tenancy to be governed by covenant rather than by market.
The covenant's principal instruction is simple and, in its own way, severe: the land is to be held, observed, and very occasionally restored, but never improved, developed, or opened to the public. Membership in the Trust is not purchased; it is inherited, or occasionally extended by unanimous vote of the standing trustees to individuals who have demonstrated, over a sustained period of association, a temperament suited to the work.
The full text of the covenant, together with the four subsequent amendments (1978, 1991, 2003, and 2016), is held in the Brook House archive and may be consulted by members and by invited researchers under the usual arrangements.
Governance
The Trust is administered by seven trustees who serve staggered nine-year terms, so arranged that no more than three seats turn over in any three-year interval. Day-to-day stewardship is the responsibility of a resident warden, presently in the sixteenth year of appointment, assisted by an associate warden retained on a seasonal basis and by two to four graduate assistants drawn each summer from the allied programs at sponsoring institutions. A standing research compact, renewed biennially, governs the work of visiting ecologists, hydrologists, and field botanists.
All material decisions — the staged removal of a check dam, the extension of membership, the publication of research findings outside the Review — require a supermajority of five trustees in concurrence and are recorded, in the warden's hand, in the minute book, which is held in the archive and which dates without interruption to the first meeting of 14 April 1962.
The Parcel
The Briarwood parcel comprises the whole of the Briarwood sub-basin and a narrow buffer of second-growth mixed hardwood forest on the surrounding uplands. The falls themselves — for which the Trust is named, and from which its quiet reputation derives — drop in three stages through a basalt bench at the midpoint of the main stem, gathering into the cataract pool below. No vessel has been permitted upon the pool since the covenant of 1968; no permanent structure has been raised on the parcel since the repair of the Brook House roof in 1974.
A fuller account of the parcel, its three named reaches, and the seven standing research stations is given on the Parcel page.
The Reading Public
The Trust publishes its Quarterly Review not as an act of outreach but as a working document for members and for the research community with which we maintain standing relationships. Fifty-four consecutive quarterly numbers have been issued since the first dispatch of Michaelmas 1971; a listing of the volumes may be consulted on the Volumes page.
We are grateful for the interest of serious readers who encounter the Review by other routes; we ask only that they understand its private character and the reasons for it. The covenant of 1962 is older than any of its present custodians, and will, we hope, outlast us.
A Note on Nomenclature
The reader will encounter in these pages certain proper nouns that are particular to the parcel and not to be found on any published map. The three reaches of the main stem are known, from headwaters to pool, as the Upper Run, the Middle Stem, and the Cataract; the three draws descending into the east bank are the Sugarloaf, the Hemlock, and the Pettit; the principal meadow above the falls is the Whitford Open; the residence of the warden and the archive together is called the Brook House. These names are used consistently throughout the Review and its working papers.1
1 The Whitford Open takes its name from the last resident agricultural tenant, whose lease was retired in the conveyance of 1964. The draw names are older, recorded in the 1878 timber survey that preceded the salvage cuts of the following century.