None The Nature Conservancy in Vermont Press Releases Search All Press Releases Emily Boedecker Phone: (802) 229-4425 x112 eboedecker@tnc.org

The Nature Conservancy of Vermont Buys Land in Pownal Hills

Pownal, Vermont—November 2002—The Pownal Hills are part of a chain of uplands that descend from Mt. Anthony to the Hoosic River plain in Southwestern Vermont. Three small hills – Quarry, Schoolhouse and Peckham hills – are aligned along the east side of the river.

Of the three, Quarry Hill has the most dramatic setting. From the summit of this 1,000-foot hill a dramatic 200-foot escarpment rises above the river like a wall of limestone. In mid-October The Nature Conservancy of Vermont purchased a 50.7-acre parcel, which includes this sheer cliff face, on the summit of Quarry Hill. A defunct, three-acre limestone quarry is adjacent to the property, hence the name.)

Quarry Hill is one of the most botanically biodiverse sites in the state. TNC purchased the parcel from the Town of Pownal. Our agreement to buy the property helped the town find the means to buy the entire parcel once owned by the Pownal Tanning Company – which included the East Woodlands (Quarry Hill) and West Woodlands, which encompasses land from the Palmer property in Pownal village to North Pownal along the New York border.

Nelson Brownell stated that without the help of The Nature Conservancy, Vermont Land Trust and the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board the purchase and safeguarding of this land and the 755-acre West Woodland property for the Town of Pownal would not have been possible.

Joan Allen, the Conservancy’s Associate Director of Land Protection, helped to clinch the deal with the town. "This is a property that the Conservancy has been involved with for many years," Allen says. "It’s been of great interest to us because of its very high diversity of plants and natural communities. Since the turn of the last century many botanists have made pilgrimages to the property, researching and cataloguing its long list of rare species."

Quarry Hill is an island-like habitat, just north and east enough to host species rare in Vermont. An unusual combination of three features makes this site extremely important: limestone bedrock, relatively warm climactic conditions and proximity to seed sources for plants more common further south. Only three sites in Vermont have a comparable suite of natural communities (assemblages of organisms in a given geological setting) and plant diversity, and no other site elsewhere in New England can boast the same level of biodiversity.

Quarry Hill hosts a hardwood-conifer forest, including an oak-hickory woodland along the summit. The canopy is partially open, allowing sunlight to reach herbaceous plants. Quarry Hill’s limey bedrock supports 30 rare-in-Vermont herbaceous, shrub and tree species, many of which are at the northern- or easternmost edge of their range. Most of the species first catalogued here by botanists in 1910 still persist. Twenty-two of the plants are known to occur on 10 or fewer locations within Vermont. A few of the rare species on Quarry Hill include: sessile-leaved boneset, elm-leaved goldenrod, may-apple, flowering dogwood, deerberry, sensitive plant and bristly buttercup.

The Nature Conservancy of Vermont has been conserving land in southwestern Vermont for 40 years. The state chapter owns 1,493 acres at Mount Equinox and Mother Myrick Mountain in Manchester and Dorset, 169 acres at Dorset Bat Cave and 39 acres at Black Rock in Dorset, 432.5 acres in the North Pawlet Hills, and 26.8 acres at Catharine Osgood Foster Natural Area in Pownal. TNC of Vermont has helped to conserve many other projects in the area including 25,089 acres of the Green Mountain Forest in Bennington County and 4,625 acres of the Green Mountains formerly known as the Harris Property in Readsboro and Searsburg.

The Nature Conservancy is an international, nonprofit organization whose mission is to preserve plants, animals and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive. Since the Vermont Chapter was founded in 1960, The Nature Conservancy has protected over 200,000 acres of the state’s finest wetlands, forests and shorelines. Ownership of much of this land has been transferred to public agencies like the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation and the Green Mountain National Forest.