Field and Forest Fridays at Mettawee Community School

by Cara Davenport, Program Coordinator

As a follow-up to last spring’s “Merck Forest Field Day,” this January through mid-March Merck Forest offered “Field and Forest Fridays” as an alternative program to Mettawee’s Friday JISP (a statewide program that allows students to pursue outdoor recreation half a day per week during the winter - to ski, skate etc.) at the Mettawee Community School. During this season, Chris Hubbard and I commuted over to the school to spend Fridays with a group of about ten Mettawee elementary students, both in the school and outside in the newly acquired 148 acre landblock behind the school, Merck Forest’s new “Satellite Campus”.

During a time of year when the weather is highly variable and unpredictable, we stayed flexible and engaged students in a combination of indoor and outdoor activities, ranging from sledding and snowshoeing, to dissecting owl pellets and learning about sugaring. Over the course of the five Fridays that we spent at Mettawee, we experienced the full range of weather patterns typical of this season: warm and sunny, freezing rain, deep packable snow, windy and gray. On one Friday the sun was shining, the sky was blue, but the snow from earlier in the week that we had hoped would stick around was rapidly dwindling. Nevertheless, we headed out and determinedly tracked down the remaining snow to make the most of it; for most of the students it was their first time using snowshoes. Armed with nature journals and shod in snowshoes, in “Oreo cookie formation” with Chris and I flanking the group, we tromped out across the (mostly bare) playground. Acting as “snow detectives” for the afternoon, we successfully located and thoroughly enjoyed a few stretches of snowy ground near the school.

For the weeks when the weather cooperated, we took the students out past the parking lot, crossed over a small stream, marched through the field, and arrived at the edge of the forest. Some of the students, especially the youngest, expressed amazement at how far we had hiked from the school to the woods. In that space, the students learned how to stay safe in the woods and what to do if they are ever lost, played games like “Camouflage”, and invested some significant time and energy in fort-building. On our second-to-last Friday we spent two and a half hours in the woods, constructing a fort by adding branches to a dead fallen pine tree that was resting in the crook of another fallen tree. There was plenty of teamwork and enthusiasm: some kids worked in pairs to carry or drag large branches over to the fort, and others industriously scoured the forest floor for smaller branches and suitable materials to fill in the gaps.

As our second programming opportunity with the “Satellite Campus” at Mettawee Community School, Field and Forest Fridays were a great and fun way to continue to explore how Merck Forest will continue to step into its new role in facilitating the connection between the community and this piece of land. Stay tuned for our next adventures in this space in the upcoming year!

Intern in the Archives

by K.C. Osofsky; Bennington College, Fieldwork Term

The year 1950 doesn’t seem so long ago: the aesthetics are familiar - poodle skirts and milkshakes - and you probably know someone who was alive then, but it is sometimes helpful to think about just how long ago it really was. 70 years! Over half a century! A gallon of milk cost 83¢. It was only 5 years after the end of World War 2. Harry Truman was president.

It was in 1950 that George Merck founded Merck Forest and Farmland Center, then called the Vermont Forest Foundation, changing the main land use from farming to forestry. Mr. Merck bought up farms that would become Merck Forest and built his foundation so that his conservation efforts could continue after his death. All of this is quite well-known around Merck— if you stop in the Visitor’s Center, anyone working behind the desk could tell you. But what made my last few weeks truly unique was that I got to see and read and handle the history for myself.

As a student at Bennington College, archival work was new to me, but I was instantly pulled in. Most of the documents were from 1950 and forward, but some were from more than a century earlier. I was filled with awe as I held in my hands a bill of sale from 1820 for the Harwood farm. The farm would be passed down for years, before finally becoming part of the land that is now Merck. Even more recent documents, such as the varying maps from dates ranging from 1952 to 1981, are fascinating. To see the progression of Merck in the visible expansion of land on a map is beautiful. Merck has been doing its conservation work for 70 years now, and the concerns being raised then are even more relevant today— the need for natural spaces open to the public, free from industrialization and protected for generations to come.