Where we stand a report on Leverett's planning process

[From the U.S. Government Printing Office, www.gpo.gov]

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COASTAL ZONE AUG 20 1974

where we stand
a report on Leverett's
planning process

compiled by
William I Camey
for the Leverett Conservation ommission
and the Leverett Planning Board

november, 1973

contents

Cover Letter
LEVERETTIS PLANNING PROCESS 5
6

WHERE WE STAND

The purist position 11
Pressures 13
A country town 18
Constraints 21
The Planning scene 24
Landscape details 32
Personal space 36
4 visions of environment 39
4 versions of community 47
Shared place 52
The formative community 56
The school 61
Roads 68
Possible public places 73
Historical resources 77
Trails 8o
The public landscape 84
Openness 88
Rural resources 91
The regional context 93
Leverett map locating people interviewed 102
Profiles of the people interviewed 103

NEXT STEPS

Insight and Consensus: A Summary
of the Interviews 109

Action: The Committee Proposals 113

Continuance: Town Meeting Proposals 117

Proposed Statement of Leverett Goals 119
Proposed Leverett Goals Committee 120

END NOTES

Notes on the Interview Technique 125
Notes on the Planning Philosophy
behind the Interviews 127
Credits 128

TOWN OF LEVERETT,,MASSACHUSETTS,

January 1, 1974

For many years various boards and committees have tried to carry
our their responsibilities in accordance to the wishes of the citizens
of Leverett. This has been a difficult task in many cases, mostly
because the wishes and thoughts of our people were never put forth
in an organized manner.

Two years ago the Leverett Conservation Commission had the
foresight to take a step in the right direction. As a result of
this move, we now have in our possession a document that will give
our Town Government some sense of feeling in regards to the wishes
of the people.

In a small town such as ours we have a real chance to live in
a truly democratic society. There are millions of people in this
world that never had an opportunity to express any feelings or
desires in regard to the future of the place they live in. By par-
ticipating in Town Meetings and Town Government, let us make sure
that we never loose this privilege.

A document like this should be of great help in the years to
come in assisting all phases of town government to carry out their
duties to the people of Leverett.

Many thanks to William (Bill) Carney and all others who con-
tributed to this report.

Leverett Selectmen

Philip 0. Woodard
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David A. Evans

Nancy J. Raskevitz

leverett's planning process

In an era of jets and interstates, of houses
built for maximum profit and occupied for minimum

tenure, of bulldozers and machine-made landscapes, of
televised worldwide consciousness, and of power and

attention increasingly concentrated on large-scale
economic and political units, this is a document which
focuses on one place. It expresses the values of a
\,7@. particular locality and considers how those values
may be eroded or enriched by a rapidly moving, rapid-
ly changing, rapidly grow-ing world. And it suggests

actions based on these considerations.

Leverett, Massachusetts, is just north of Amherst,

-where the concrete towers of the University of Mass-

achusetts bespeak an enrollment rapidly approaching
25,000. North of Leverett, bricX factory stacks
symbolize the milltowns of Montague and Greenfield,
where unemployment is 10%. To the west, Sunderland's
tobacco-rich gravel terraces step down to the Connect-

icut River. But Leverett is basically a hilltown,

sharing this identity with Shutesbury, Wendell, and

half a dozen other communities to the east--towards

the immense Quabbin Reservoir, which inundated three
such out of the way places to supply Boston with water.
Leverett is bo,,md by Brushy Mountain which occupies
about a fourth of t-ie town's 22.9 square miles, and
Route 63, its only state road. If one starts down
Roaring Brook at the Shutesbury line, staying on ma-
cada.m and bearing right until reaching the Shutesbury
line along the Sawmill River, one will have wrapped

half way around the mountain, traversing the major,

though winding, roads within the town and seeing its
chief, though small, villages. Similarly, on Route
63, one can very nearly drive from Sunderland to
Sunderland as the highway curves around Mt. Toby.
Connecting these two grand arcs, six other roads work

their ways through gaps among the lower hills.
Along Leverettvs roads, on generally rocky soil,
among generally treed-in fields, in colonial houses,
in trailers and ranchettes, live just over 1,000 people
44 people per square mile, a population increase of
ten percent in the last tenyears. Most of this

document was written, or more often than not, spoken,
by these people. It is a forum for their feelings
about where they live.

Two years ago, the Leverett Conservation Commission,
aware of the natural and social quality of Leverett
and alert to the pressures of change mounting in the
Pioneer Valley, began to think of ways in which the
town could shape its future. The commission met with
the town Planning Board several times to explore the
most productive approaches. The two groups felt that
the surest way to insure Leverett's quality was to
involve the thoughts and energies of as many towns-

people as possible in an on-going planning process.
To aid this effort, the Conservation Commission
applied for and received a $1550 Ford Foundation grant,
which was matched by $800 appropriated at the 1972
Town Meeting and $2210 voted at the 1973 Town Meeting.
North Leverett landscape architects Hugh and Lloyd
Kirley agreed to oversee the project. Town planner
William Carney was hired to help.
The first step was to talk to Leverett people.
The,bulk of this publication consists of quotations
from about 50 townspeople, taped early in 1973. The
consensus which emerged from these interviews gave

rise to anumber of committees, which investigated
specific environmental improvement projects. About
50 more townspeople served on these committees. Their
major recommendations, including several warrant items
for the 1974 Town Meeting, appear after the inter-
views.
The 1974 Town Meeting w:U1 mark Leverett's 200th
year as an incorporated town. At that time one of
the finest tributes to the values of the town's past
would be to take steps to shape its future. In addi-
tion to the committee recommendations, the Conserva-
tion Commission and Planning Board will propose that
the Town Meeting adopt a Statement of Leverett Goals
and establish a permanent Leverett Goals Committee.
These proposals conclude this report.
Leverett's landscape will remain healthy and
beautiful to the extent.that it remains meaningful
to the people living here. By providing expression
to feelings about the town, this publication hopes
to amplify them. And by recording Pnd suggesting
ways of involvement with this landscape, on both per-
sonal and public levels, it seeks to increase the
landscape's meaning.

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114
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the purist position

Frances King There are new people in town, an influx of newer
people. It hasn't been a rapid influx, but gradual
as older people in town die or move a-way; the houses
that they once lived in are taken over by newer
people. There is a very slow building trend. Hang-
ing over our heads is the possibility that some
housing developer could get hold of a piece of land
and find a way of either breaking the zoning code
or adapting to it.

The whole town is a series of rock ledges. So
whereas an individual could buy a tract of land and
find on it a place where the percolation test would
pass and where he could find a well, for a housing
developer to put a hundred houses on a hundred acres
or less than that or whatever, would entail a whole
public water system ultimately. Which would be
extremely expensive in Leverett because we can't
dig here you see.

I would just admit to a prejudice against crowding
houses into a rural town, which is really a precious
heritage in the sense that there aren't too many of
them left. You've already ruined Amherst, so you.
might just as well crowd them into Amherst, and
leave Leverett a place where people can breathe.

Not only for the people who live here, but for the
people who in time may want to walk through here or
drive through here and still see a little peace and
harmony and old houses. After all, it could be
pretty depressing if you got into your car and the
only place you could drive would be up one street
and down another of cheese box houses. It has not
happened here. Selfishly we enjoy that fact, but
beyond that, it's almost a responsibility for future
generations that we don't allow it to happen here.
I feel strongly in this direction.

And that while there are individuals that need a
place to build a house--this seems to me legitimate,
this is slow growth and what we have so far had in
our town--I'd hate to see somebody from Connecticut
come up here, buy a tract of land, build a bunch of
chicken coops, sell them, make a million, and then
leave Leverett to figure out what to do about sewer-
age and schools and even worse than that, destroy
the landscape what we value.

Frances King Schools are easily built.. It's that land itself can
never be replaced. Yes, nobody wants to pay higher
taxes, nobody wants to build another school. And
say if another 40 families moved into Leverett, we'd
have to build another school. There are a lot of
people in town who couldn't afford that. They might
even have to leave town. But my own feeling is
longer range than that. I hate to see the town it-
self built up to the point where its beauty is
destroyed.

Having listened to my neighbors talk--and this not
being the main topic, but over a length of tiTne--I
would say we have two conflicting feelings about
development in Leverett. There are those who do
fear higher taxes, because it seems to be an axiom
that the more people who move into a town, the high-
er the taxes go. On the other hand, what are you
going to do if you're a person who has a low income,
and you own a large tract of land, and you're offered
a substantial sum, and for the first time in your
life maybe you're going to be able to go to Florida
in the winter and own two cars?

There's a feeling that you own your land, and if you
want to make money on it, vhy notl And with 919
these big highways, more and more this part of the
world is going to become attractive to people who
live in Hartford, Springfield. People who wish to
escape urban life are going to conmute.

(These people come here as an esthetic response to
the landscape. Are beauty and development inherently
at odds?)

I think in some ways they are. No matter how
beautiful a home you may biiild, and how much of the
natural tree growth you may try to preserve around
it, you have never the less intruded upon nature
itself.

pressures

Robert Raskevitz They just went to leave the town exactly the way it
is now.

Chester Woodard Practically the only agricultural work is a few
people have gardens, thatts all. And not too many
at that.

Steve Trudel I enjoy being 10 miles outside of Amherst. Every-
thing that's in Amherst is there for me, but I don't
have to be a part of it. I feel almost a little
Machiavellian about ripping off their community.
By going and partaking of it, contributing as much
as I feel is necessary, but not really giving'my-
self to it--giving myself in effect to my home back
here.

Chester Woodard I would hope it wouldn't change too much. But it
probably will. It's bound to grow. If it doesn't
grow more than 100%, maybe it won't be too bad.

Paul Woodard I'd rather see it natural, see the trees. But
people have got to live somewhere. Probably that's
what people thought when I built my house down there.

Clifford Graves They're coming in from everywhere, that's all. And
they'll buy any kind of piece of land to build on.
And the value of land has changed so much, you can't
believe it.

Pat Conklin I don't know whether an exclusionary attitude is
good or bad. All I know is that what happened to
Hadley is ridiculous.

Mrs. Walter Carey Here we have the advantage of the bigger towns--
shopping marts and everything--yet you can enjoy
your rural living, you know. Highways are kept clear
and good and everything.

James Lumley University people don't feel the University is going
to top out at these figures. You can't just shut it
off. New institutions don't pop up overnight.

Robert Raskevitz The Planning Board feels that the only course for
Leverett is it's going to be a bedroom town from
the Amherst area. You can't get around-that. And
the consensus of opinion is to try to restrict it
enough so that it doesn't become thoroughly satur-
ated and degraded. Just try to control the houses,
try to keep it a pleasant, rural residential area.

Edward Field, Sr. No one really knows what's going to happen. Are we
going into a program of regulating population? Are
we actually going to try to preserve what we have
now? Or are these apartment house developments and
the like going to continue?

Clifford Blinn Well, if no one wants to sell their land, nothing's
going to develop. This is one factor. Eventually
the old ones are going to die off and there's no
telling what's going to happen.

Charles Linscott I think the town's coming along pretty well right
now. Building quite a lot of new houses. Of course,
the problem here-and in a lot of towns is high taxes.
A man has to have a good steady income. Especially
a man that's got a family.

Robert Raskevitz The problem is there are a lot of people that buy
5 acres of land and think they ought to be able to
build ten houses on it . . . they don't care about
the water and the sewerage and the trees.and the
land or anything. They just want to make a profit.
And they're looking for a place to make it.

Robert Brown Most of the people today. . . I've got a couple
coming in this week from down in Virginia--answered
one of my ads in the Christian Science Monitor. They
want a place to retire to in four more years. They
want it at least five acres, if possible. Within
Amherst commuting distance. And they want a place
they can fix over. I always jokingly said, What
we need to do is build more old places to fix over.
Though some now want nothing to do. They want every-
thing done for then.

Homer Germain I would like to see it more or less stay country,
but I doubt if it will. It keeps growing all the
time as we get more and more houses. And people
that own land, after they get up, they need the money
and taxes get so high, they have to start selling
them off to help keep them going in their later years.

Charles Roys Where we've noticed a difference in our own living
is having to lock the place, secure the place, where
years ago we didn't. I don't think you can blame
the new people. It's just we have more movement in
town than we used to have. So now you have to be
very conscious. .

Steve Trudel To go outdoors at night and be able to.see the stars
without any diffusion of light from the city. And
just a whole lot of the silence. Walking out and
hearing the river, going to bed with that sound.

Charles Roys My father wanted a small farm because he had a large
family.

Gerald Jackson They want a house that doesn't look like the house
next door, preferably one that can't even be seen
from the house next door.

Nancy Parr I don't have that much of a sense of living in
Leverett. But a lot of the things you were talking
about are really exciting to me, and made me feel
happy about living in Leverett. This road dominates
my life, and I hate it. Cars. I almost get run
over every morning when I go to milk the goats.

Raymond Cosseboom They just go up and down, just as fast as they can,
up and down and back and forth. I don't know what
they get out of that. They're certainly not viewing
the scenery. There's something about handling power
that interests people. Speed, and dashing through
the air, and they think they're getting somewhere.
.It satisfies something within them I suppose. It
dulls the frustrations.

Constantine Kamansky Most of the places now, they want to build back in
the woods. Streets right into the woods. You got
your shrubbery there, trees and all. Everybody
builds in the woods. No one's out in the open.

James Lumley Being against change is not so bad a thing. But
what they're really saying is-, we're against people.

Barry Schonhaut I don't think we're going to be the people here 30
years from now to see what happens. Maybe somewhere
else in New England, but not here. Mainly because
the land prices even right now are just out of bounds.

Charles Linscott Well, if I was a young man, had a million dollars,
I'd start building. As it is, I'll probably never
do anything.

Nick Lenz I sort of had ambitions about buying land up on this
hill here and subdividing-it. Building some really
nice individualistic houses on say 10 acre lots.
Very private and very beautiful. And selling them.

Clifford Graves Look at the land you got both sides of you there.
Have horses down below there, and a garden, and play
ball up here, skimobile. But they didn't buy it to
build a house on it. I don't know what they bought
it for. None of my business . . . Well,.they had
some idea. They may want to stack lumber there you
know. They may have some bigger plans than we know
about.

Pat Conklin I'd have house groups so small that you wouldn't
think it was a community. Maybe a farm, scme sheds
and a house. If it would look like that, I wouldn't
mind if there were several of them. But if there
were one huge one, I'd be really turned off to it.
Like there's a little group of houses up there where
the Careys are. It's not huge, probably not more than
five. The architecture isn't very appealing, just
regular houses. But that would be fine. And cheap,
too.

Robert Brown Off 63 most of the land's pretty level, but it's also
the most uninteresting place to build.

Most of them want (this area) for the college
atmosphere--so they can come in to the goings on you
get in a college community you don't get elsewhere.

My ideal of a lot in the country is not just full of
woods. Most people when they build out in the country
don't cut down enough trees. You need air circulation
to breathe the house and also if you're going to have
any kind of garden, particularly fruit trees.

Of course another thing many people don't know about
is air drainage. It's very important in growing
things, but also in building a house. You take the
foot of a large hill, there'll be an air pocket that's
very cold in the winter and very hot in the surnmer.
It's better to build on top of the hill.

Steve Trudel I think the mind has to come before the place. The
person has to went to centralize his energies here
before the place can come together.

Alice Levenson The quality of life of the kids is something that I
really hope the town could maintain. It offers a
way of life that I wish I could have had as a child.
On the other hand, an elitist feeling about town and
space bothers me. I think we have to think beyond
our borders to the needs of people in general. I
don't think that means we have to lose what the town
has, but I don't know in my own mind how to weld those
two things. I want to keep the quality of life, but
I don't want to deny so many other people from enjoy-
ing it.

Gordon King By and large this planning, this land use, is very
similar to the National Park Service--it's snobbish,
it's built largely for the middle class, the upper
class. Who can go to Yellowstone? People with cars
and campers and time-off and money. And this is true
in Leverett. Who can afford to come in,here and buy
a couple of acres at whatever the price is now and
build a house?

Pat Conklin There are a lot of low income families right now
that are almost being kicked out because the tax
rat,e's going up. It almost got us, but we decided
to stick it out.

Nick Lenz You can't wander out like these big environmental
designers and say, Ok, we obviously know that people
function in such and such a way so we're going to
build this kind of area here and that kind there.
We're going to have this circulation pattern and
another and everyone's going to really enjoy the
place and their heads are going to be much more
open. It never seems to work.

Mrs. Walter Carey I think once you've put down roots you must accept
'vhat comes along. If we were terribly well to do,
it might make a difference, but we're just average.
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a country town

Philip Woodard (What makes Leverett a good place to live?)

Oh, I think just the mode of living, the-speed of
living. The fact that you're not all tied up in
fast moving social life. "You know, it's.a quiet town,
very quiet. Which does allow you to live in this
very relaxed atmosphere. Of course, to me, it's not
nearly as relaxed as I recall. But to someone coming
from other areas I'm sure it's very relaxed. And I
think this is one of our aims, to try to maintain
this. . .

I would say personally if you could just keep the
town from building too rapidly, then you've got it
made. Then the ones that do come in want the same
things that we do as far as the area is concerned.

Chester Woodard The main problem is trying to keep it small. That's
very difficult. Price doesn't seem to mean anything
anymore. We try by making stiff zoning, but it
doesn't do much good. We're just trying to keep
Leverett a small town.

(What's good about a small town?)

That's hard to describe. You know more people in a
small town. In a large town you don't really know
too many people, just your own paxticular group. Of
course that's the same in a small town now. It used
to be everybody knew everybody.

Phillip Woodard The town itself is apart from any major highways.
They pass-us by, thank goodness. They never know
we're here. Consequently, they're not scrambling
to try to buy in or get in or take advantage of us.
Because they don't even know what Leverett is.

I don't anticipate any great amount of change really.
It'll grow. If it grows as fast as it's growing
right now, it won't show much change. Unless some-
one really gets a big development idea. And I think
Amherst has already built so much that I think this
is going to slack off. And I'm glad they did it . . .

In strictly financial terms, the hardest thing for"
any town to face is a lot of low cost housing. I
don't want to belittle any group because of their
income or anything else, but these are hard facts.
The cost of building today, the cost of developing
sites because there's no water, no sewer, all this
sort of thing, does not encourage low cost housing
here. And I think this is to our advantage.

You get nice homes, well-built, the people who can
afford these places many times look for larger plots
of land. I had a call in the last two weeks for a
building permit on a 25 acre lot. Terrific. My
daughter just got a 26 acre lot. People are willing
to do this because this is the way they like it.
With that in mind, I think we're winning. I think
we're going to come out with almost what we want--a
pleasant country town. This is just terrific.

If we can just avoid, and I'don't mean avoid by
restriction, but by attraction perhaps, a lot of
development type homes or this sort of thing, we'll
still end up with a real country town. Not a small
town by any means but a country town, where people
have room to stretch.

If we can keep the tax structure at a point where
people can afford to hold these large plots of land,
then this'll do a lot to encourage it. People can
stand the initial cost, they'll swing it somehow, if
they're not going to be penalized for the rest of
their life for owning a large plot of land. This is
terrific if we can hold it.

Chester Woodard (Do taxes help datermine where people build?)

I don't think so. The availability of land. People
in Leierett haven't been selling their land. They
don't want to develop it at this point. But it's
changing.

(What forces them into it?)

Taxes. Tax them out of it.

(Will the town reevaluate sometime soon?)

Eventually, it'll take place. Taxpayers probably
won't accept the assessors' evaluation, no matter
who's on the board.

We raised the values on Juggler Meadow. Right close
to the University, it's worth more than any other
street on account of being where it is. They didn't
like it. So they were going for a reevaluation.
Wanted an article in Town.Meeting. We had-a couple
of meetings on it. However, now values seem to be
about the same all over town, if sales prices mean
anything.

If lowered, the tax rate would start creeping up again
. . . It's done that in other towns. . . It's easier
to spend money when you've got a low tax rate. They're
afraid of a high tax rate, they don't coincide that
a low rate (on high valuation) may equal the same
thing.

We've changed values right along ever since 145. . .
We doubled them all one year. Put the rate right
down. It was heading up to $130. Six years ago.

It's all valued low. Most of it is valued as either
farmland or forestry land.

(Any-thing the town can do to generate more money?)

Buy a lottery ticket! No, the town won't go broke.
It isn't the town, it's the people.

There are an awfully lot of people in the town today
who are getting real good salaries. They can afford
it. But there are always some people that don't
get those good salaries. That happens every genera-
tion. The retired people are kind of out of luck,
if they have a fixed income. . . You can have a lot
of property but no income.

constraints

Donald Wise There are isolated little pieces of thin till where
you can put isolated houses, as long as you keep
the density down. But the town's mostly bedrock.

Peter Robinson With a low population you can get away with things
that couldn't be tolerated with a high density of
septic tanks.
Wise You should recognize that Leverett is different from
the towns to the south and west where there are vast
areas of gravel and fill. We're basically scoured
bedrock. With septic tank systems you just can't have
a high density of population on scoured bedrock.

Robinson You can have a high density if you want to spend
millions of dollars blasting sewer lines and creating
an independent water supply.

We probably ought to increase the minimum house lot
acreage in some of the bedrock areas. The town
shouldn't plan on a lot of new houses.

(And the few large areas of gravel in East Leverett
and on Long Plain are where the most water is?)

Wise Yes. The same reason that a builder likes it is the
reason we should be preserving it.

Robinson The town I would say has no knowledge of the quality
of its ground water in these large sand and gravel
areas. What exactly is happening to the aquifers?

One of the rock layers in town contains iron sulfide
which weathers and gives sulfates. Certain people
complain about this taste. Generally the rock which
gives the best bedrock wells is the Pelham Gneiss in
the eastern part of town, essentially east of Doolittle
Brook. West of there there's much less certainty as
to what kind of water you'll get. Some wells in mica
schist don't hold up too well, the cracks plug up.
In all cases, drilling for water in bedrock is a
chancy business.

Robert Brown Sometimes you get a lot of houses close together
usually on good flat land, and you get so many the
wells start drying up one by one. Somebody suffers.
That's because somebody allowed too many houses to
be built in the area.

(What can the town do?)

Well, your zoning's supposed to take care of it.

(I'm not sure it does, but something should.)

It's definitely happened in other places. There's
a development down in Connecticut built on the out-
skirts of an area. beyond the water line. I think
he put in 30 or 40 houses. And he sold out and made
pretty good. So two years later he bought some
adjoining land and put on 30 or 40 more. One July
morning a lady called up from one of the houses and
said, We aren't getting any water. Came out and
check the plumbing. So he did. Found that the well
had gone dry. While he-was out there his wife called
that 2 or 3 other people had called. Within a week
practically the whole development went dry. The
water table just dropped. He finally went in an
insane asylum. He just couldn't take it.

Charles Linscott I wouldn't want to build a place unless I had a good
supply of water. These fellows up in the woods here
went way back, drilled a well down 1,000 feet. That's
expensive you know. Another fellow up there, he's
thinking of building. I was talking with him the
other day. I told him he wanted to find out whether
there's a supply of water before he started in
building. Well, he thought that was a good idea, he
hadn't thought of it. And he's started to clear a
piece of land up there where he decided to build.

My son-in-law, he can find water, you know, with a
stick. I don't know whether you believe in that or
not. It's a genuine discovery. He said there's a
vein of water running up through here, down 20-25 feet,
he said. That's quite reasonable, of course.
Arnold Glazier down here now, he can find water. You
know the parsonage they built over on the other side
here? He found that water was there. Of course, he
belongs to that church down there.

Clifford Blinn (How do you justify telling someone he has to have
an acre of land before he can built a house?)

Well, you have your own well and septic tanks. You
can't have them too close together, or you're going
to have pollution problems.

Gordon King Enforce the percolation tests. Theoretically, all
tests should be made from March to May when the soil
is saturated with water. This is when you get a true
percolation test. This is what the law is, and it
isn't enforced.

Frances King The selectmen say a man comes to them in June want-
ing to build a house. How are we going to make him
wait till next spring? So they'll let him build it.
So really the percolation test ought to take place
before the transaction takes place.

Robert Brown The trouble is, people don't know what they're getting
into. I cannot conscientiously sell a lot that I
know darnn well they're going to have problems. But
most of Leverett is gravelly, so with a few except-
ions where it's wet, most of the septic tanks work
pretty good.

But when you build in the country you've got to have
enough room to handle your septic tank in the event
you have to move it. A lot of people wouldn't want
a five acre or ten acre lot, but on the other hand
you've got to have enough room for that.

(Is this sort of 'conscientiousness' pretty general
practice among realtors here?)

Some have some conscience left, and some don't. It's
like selling cars, you know. . .

(Might the town require percolation tests and test
pits before land transactions take place?)

Well, yes, a person should know. But you're saying
the land is going to be used for houses.

(Most is. Would this pose difficulties to a realtor?)

No. It would eliminate people buying lots that
wouldn't be suitable for a septic tank.

David Evans You might go into disposal systems other than septic
tanks. Aerobic digestion coupled with seepage
through a disposal bed. Chlorination can be used
with this as well. But a good aerobic digestion
system costs $80-100-125,000. That could serve 20-
25 units. ($4,000 a piece).

And you.,just can't set them up and let them run by
themselves. They require technical assistance to
operate properly. Now you could go into anaerobic
treatment. A septic tank is basically anaerobic.
You can go into a larger scale, but again you're
back into maintenance of nutrient supplies for your
sludges, back into controlling the pH. . .

(What about several units on one large septic tank?)

That can be very effective, providing your tank and
leach area are large enough for the discharge and
that soil conditions are adequate.

(How would costs on that for 25 units compare to
individual systems?)

When you figure piping, problems of blockage, and
varying elevations and topography, basically you're
still further ahead under the present situation.
But it's close.

It's going to be some time, but if the region contin-
ues to grow I think the town will be forced into
supplying utilities.

Robert Brown (To what degree does steepness and ledge in Leverett
limit development?)

Not much. Any land that's too steep would be diffi-
cult to put roads on. But you can always hang a
house on a ledge, make it cantilevered. I think a
lot of California where they,keep putting in beauti-
ful houses overlooking the ocean, overlooking some
view, just chopping holes into the mountains.

participatory planning
site research
LANDSCRIPT ASSOCIATES aesthetic analysis
environmental manuals
Box 741IAmherst, Massachusetts 01002 interpretive paths & signs
successional landscaping
Box 9451Greenville, North Carolina 27834 land poems
Box 3831Converse, Texas 78109 local history
environmental education

1974
/M
Richard R, Gardner
and' Atmalb 9142 dM st ion
National Oceanie"
Washington D.C. 202.30

Dear Mr. Gardner,,

Charles Little of the Conservation Foundation tells me that
you are interested in assessing coastal esthetics. He thought
that some of the participatory planning techniques developed
by Landscript Associates could aid that effort. So I-am en-
closing for your inspection the central document of a planning
process which I recently conducted forLeveretts Massachusetts.

"Where We Stand" consists almost entirely of quot ations, from
townspeople, gleaned from about fifty taped interviews. The
gist of this technique is to find out what an environment means
to people and then hold up the results-as a sort of-mirror which
strengthens environmental involvement. The interviews reveal
many insights into how the environment is experienced, not only
in its physical form but through the human associations which
are its "content." I think the booklet demonstrates a very
direct. means of documenting and developing environmental images.
In Leverett, the emphasis was not strictly on esthetic percep-
tions; it may be that inerviewing could likewise prove a valu-
able tool in general efforts to involve the public in the coastal
zone management which NOAA oversees. On the other hand, the
collection and analysis of interview material strictly for
esthetic content has potential which the Leverett 'work just
begins to suggest. Perhaps we can discuss these possibilities
soon. At any rate, I think you will enjoy "Where We Stand,"
and I look foreward to hearing your reactions to it -and how
you think its techniques might apply to your own efforts.

Sincerely,

William Carney

the planning scene

Robert Raskevitz If someone wants to build a house, they ought to be
able to build it in Leverett. Ana we're glad to have
them. But we do insist that they have the large lot
sizes so they won't infringe on somebody else's
sewerage or water. . .

(I think according to the SCS mapping, a lot of this
gravel land is suitable for building and septic systems
an half acre lots. I wonder if you would see any
merit in maybe designating some of this Long Plain
area for smaller lot sizes than the one and one-half
acres, the idea being to take some of the development
pressures off the less buildable areas in town.)

I wouldn't personally. . . I don't like to see houses
on quarter acre lots. Just house after house after
house after house. . . A lot of times when a fellow
builds on an acre he doesn't build right on the road,
he builds back so he can have trees in his front
yard. And it's better to look at, that's all. But I
think if we had to have half acre lots, this would
be the area to do it.

What I'm saying is we don't need it right now. There's
still enough land in town to build on.

David Evans As things stand, our zoning is restrictive to full-
scale growth such as has occurred in Amherst.
This is expressive of the feeling of the town. As
time goes by, there is going to be a change. I don't
think we can continue with restrictive zoning inde-
finitely. . .

(Would you prefer cluster development?)

If growth should come to that stage, it would seem at
least from the standpoint of preserving open space,
that clustering would be preferable. This is from a
theoretical standpoint. It may be impractical. Do
individuals want to live that close together? It's
basically a matter of psychology. Under present
conditions, most of the people want to be fairly well
separated.

(Even if it means eventually dividing up the landscape
into fairly inaccessable chunks, rather than large
chunks everyone might use?)

David Evans Yes, this is reflected in the present zoning.

(Yet at a.certain point, the spaces in between start
filling in and you haven't really accomplished privacy
after all. Whereas, if you submit to a compromise
from the beginning, you can insure some lasting open
space. The problem is to recognize the point when
you need to shift gears. What would indicate that
such a stage had been reached?)

Fewer and fewer front lots available. But there are
plenty left now.

Denzel Hankinson What attracted us to Leverett was the relative avail-
ability of space. Of course the amount of available
open land where you can place a dwelling and not be
concerned with a neighbor is disappearing very
rapidly. If the situation 'when we came was -what it
is today, we probably would have looked further out.

The zoning by-law was put in to require building along
the main roads. Soon that available land is going to
be gone, and the growth is going to be in subdivisions.
While I think there's quite a bit of potential here
for this, it will change the nature of the town a
lot. And not for the best.

William Bramlage The Planning Board really wants to encourage people
to build back off the roads. So you're not driving
along seeing nothing but houses. They are built
back because that's the way people want to live.

(Is cluster development, perhaps back around cul-de-
sacs, one way of encouraging this?)

The main problem I see with that is water. You
squeeze the houses together, they've got to get their
water nearby. You start compressing the septic tanks
and the wells and you're asking for trouble.

(It seems to me the virtue of the thing in principle
is that you combine yoiir services in one place. In-
stead of dividing a given tract into equal sized
lots and then having to run your road to touch every
lot, you reduce your lot sizes so you can fit them
all on say one third the land. The rest stays in its
natural state as shared open space. That way you get
to choose the best part of the land and just run the
road there.

Couldn't that same principle apply to other services--
water and sewerage? Wouldn't it be possible to have
a common septic system, a common water supply? This
would allow the developer to choose the best sites
on the acreage for the septic system and.the well.
You could monitor the single systems more easily
from a health standpoint, and one big system might
be cheaper than 40 separate ones.)

William Bramlage if. if you could come up with enough water and a
good enough disposal situation. There are very few
good sites around town.

(Yes, but the odds seem better of finding one good
disposal site on 60 acres of land than of finding
40 good sites, spread out at 1@'2 acre intervals. I
would think one could write a clause into a cluster
zoning by-law stipulating that facilities be shared
for this reason. And of course that the sites be
proven adequate.)

In theory you get people to build on the best sites,
but in practice the people who want to build on
hillsides are going to come in anyway. You're just
enabling more people to come in. It would not serve
the purpose of reducing the growth of the town.
Robert Raskevitz What I wonder is what would be the advantage to this
clustering really? . . . The only advantage I could
see would be to a developer, in that he could put
more houses on what little bit of actual building
land he had, letting the rest go for conservation
purposes. Which is what you have happening in the
town right now. Because we have so little suitable
building land, when somebody buys 20 acres of land,
he'd be real lucky in most cases if he got four
house lots off it--and go along with the Hatch Act,
and go along with our zoning laws, and go alo@g with
the Health Board.

(I think that's sound logic. But clustering might
be limited to a small and more or less buildable
part of town, namely Long Plain. Where in fact you
do have the possibility of dividing up quite a number
acres contiguously. I would find it more desirable
to encourage groups of houses with some amount of
fields or other open land in between in this parti-
cular area, where you don't have those topographical
restraints and your soils can take density.)

This would be about the only area in town where I
think that would be even remotely possible. And like
I say, I'm not against development at all. If a per-
son wants to build a house he ought to be able to
build it.

Frances King If we were forced to have 20 dwellings in Leverett,
I would rather see them in a.cluster development than
20 houses on 20 separate acres.

William Bramlage Any mention of conservation in your zoning by-law,
and the Attorny. General throws it right out. Every-
thing has to be based on public health. Of course,
in Leverett, this gives us a good deal more to work
with than a lot of other towns. Everybody's depend-
ent on a well for water. That's the way we justify
the lot sizes. Most of the land shouldn't be built
on. . .

The acreage requirements are probably about as far
as we can stretch them. It's more a matter of re-
strictions based on soil types. There are some areas
around town where you could build on smaller lots
than are now allowed. It wouldn't really be fair to
increase the acreage on a blanket basis. That isn't
a very good way of using land. . .

I haven"t really thought about the feasibility of
tying zoning to soil types. I don't know if it's
ever been tried.

Robert Raskevitz And then we have the backlot provision. That's kind
of a funny law. What it allows people to do is to
build one house or several houses back away from the
road, as far back as they want to, on a double sized
house lot, but they can have much less frontage, 30
foot. . . When the zoning laws came in there were a
lot of people that objected that they had large
acreages out back with no apparent use for them. And
they had children in town that wanted to build out
there, and they just couldn't do it. So we put in
this law.

Clifford Graves Everybody was going to be tickled they had an acre,
you know. But the fellow that's selling the land is
not pleased. But an acre, you've got a chance to
spread out every-thing, you see, your septic tank and
your well. I wouldn't kick on an acre. I think an
acre's good for anybody. It gives you a good big
garden. An acre's lquite a good sized piece of land.

Constantine Kamansky Half an acre's big enough. Because if you get an
acre you ain't going to keep that acre clean. Most
of it'll grow up in brush anyway. It's too much
land,for a building lot.

Fred Muehle One of the big disadvantages I see to a five acre
lotiten acre lot situation is, that you're really
tying up the-land under one individual's ownership,
And that land, which he'll never really use, is being
taken out of production. The residents of Leverett
have all these barriers put around them so they don't
have free movement throughout the town anymore.

I don't like everybody setting up his own private
little ten acre kingdom. This is why I think the
cluster concept is good. I'm a great fan of common
land. I think every resident of a community should
to a certain degree have the freedom to walk on the
land. I'm not saying he should be waJ_king through
my backyard so he's within sight of my backdoor.
But up on that ten acres there are plenty of places
he can go without disturbing me, and I can have my
thing in my backyard without disturbing him.

I think land wants to be used. And I think it's
almost impossible for an individual that's working
for wages, paying taxes, paying mortgages, to really
have the opportunity to reap the value that land is
producing. I think cluster will do something like
that. Maybe the common land, if it's wooded, could
be actively under forest managment.

I mean, I own 15 acres and I haven't seen that back
quarter for the last two years. I'm not that big of
a fan of having under my jurisdiction 15 acres. What
I'm really glad about is I live across the street
from a 1,000 acre state forest. And I like the option
of going across into that 1,000 acre state forest.
And that thing is being managed for me because I pay
taxes, OK?

David Fife I would think you would have to give some incentives
to people to build in villages. I mean most people
think it's much more pleasant to see a village in the
hills and then a stretch of country. But I think
now especially, having seen it's gone this far, un-
less you could give water supply, drainage, to encour-
age people to build in a town, I would assume they're
going to build mainly where there are open spaces.
Because most people that come sort of in the country
want an acre, an acre and a half around them. Or
perhaps ten acres.

I suppose if you can't keep the village centers, you
might at least try to keep some country centers.
Greenbelts. Like out in the back there I think it's
6 miles to the fire tower. As you look out I don't
think there's anything between us and 63. So you
could keep that center just as a wilderness.

Clifford Graves This is old, and you've got timbers, hewed timbers. . .
The ones now, well, you buy a 2x4 today and you know
what you get@-you don't get a 2x4. Why, it isn't an
inch and seven eigths. And plywood. No, I don't
look for those houses to stand up the way the old
ones aid. I don't see how they could.

Gerald Jackson This house is pre-cut. The only difference between
this home and a conventional home is really a price
advantage. This log home you can build by yourself.
It doesn't require any vast construction knowledge.
The logs are numbered. It's.just like a lincoln log
kit. So most of the log homes I've sold in the last
few years have been sold to people who put them up
themselves. A house like this is maintenance free.
It fits into the woods. And it's certainly more
durable than a frame house, weighs about six times
as much. Really I think it seems to fit the land
better.

I've looked at all the material on modular housing
to date, and unfortunately they all look so much
better in the brochures than in real life. I'm not
turned on by 4x8 panels of textured plywood with
sandwich insulation. Modular housing's got to come,
but the choices available right now are not much of
an incentive.

William Bramlage The sort of thing I detest seeing is the log cabins
down on Montague Road. It shouldn't be. But it's
legal. I can see this sort of thing happening often
at least as long as University students are willing
to come out and pay high rents. I don't have any
great objection to the sort of houses being built
down along Juggler Meadow Road. I'd prefer if there
weren't any thing there, but people have to live
somewhere. And those are tastefully designed.

Edward Field, Sr. (Do you like your mobile home?)

I didn't want to leave the old house. We had done
quite a lot of work on it, tried to restore it.
After putting in all that time and effort it was kind
of hard to give it up. It just got too much for us.

Clifford Graves Boy, if you have a trailer, make them have an acre
of land, just as well as you would a house. Then
when the trailer goes, you can put a house up.

Fannie Taylor I'm selling all my land. My house, my land-about
40 acres--is up for sale. I hope that somebody will
buy the hous@e for use as a residence, rather than to
be put up and-made-into an apartment house. I don't
think it'll be made to an apartment use because it's
not very convenient for it. It's a very old place.
YT family has lived in.the house for more than 10 '0
years. It's been handed down from one group to
another. And for that reason, and a1so for the
appearance of the place, I think it would be much
more desirable if someone buys it as a residence.

Nick Lenz You need participation in the actual physical envir-
onment. I suspect that -when someone comes in and
builds spaces for people, the kind of people they
attract are those that go away to do their thing.
When people buy the land and build on it themselves,
there's a greater possibility they will bring some
uniqueness to it.

(Who would you want to build for?)

Someone young and interesting. You can have some
rich people. You've got to have some poor people,
too. The sort of person you would not build for,
but build with. The concept of me being a developer
or helping the community develop is-new to me. I've
always thought in 30 years in Leverett highrises will
be towering up and I'll be putting super hormones on
the trees trying to get them up to 300 feet to screen
out the highrises.

Dorothy King (Looking back say from 100 years from now, what would
you say was the essential quality of life in Leverett
now?)

Well the essential quality probably is simplicity of
living. And of course the religious quality is
important . . . We don't believe in physical heavens
with gold houses and gold streets and that. For after-
all, as Christ said, the future is a future of the
spirit. It's only your spirit that goes on, not your
body. You don't need a house made by hands. It's a
spiritual thing. What survives after you is your
spirit. What you take with you is what you've given
away.

(Hemenway Road)

Charles Linscott I'd like to see houses built everywhere there's a
good place for them. But the Blacks who own the upper
side of the road here, don't want anyone building
here. They think-they'd get some undesirables in
there. Course they got a point there. Everybody's
entitled to his own opinion, of course. I'm not
going to try to change their minds for them. I'd
be glad to see people build up through this section
of woods here. it,s good land. I don't know about
the water. Wouldn't cost too much to put a road up
through there., clear off the land and build up houses.
I'd rather see them come up into the woods like that
then see them build up over there in the fields.
Those fields are good fields, and they ought to be
kept cultivated.

(Moore's Corner)

Clifford Blinn There aren't so many new families at this end of
town, yet. More the old families that have been here
for generations. North Leverett.is probably similar
to Moore's Corner, though they're beginning-to get
a lot of new, well, a lot of people call them hippies.
5-6 in a house. And a lot of the old people down there
are no more. Up here it hasn't hit so much yet. Of
course the other end of town, you have a lot of new
families moving in because it's being developed be-
cause of the University. They're going to get up
here sooner or later.

(North Leverett)

Clifford Graves Well, there's a lot of good building lots up here.
An awful lot of nice ones.

You just let somebody know you've got some land for
sale and see. I had a fellow here last night, just
begging for me to sell him that last chunk I've got up
on the hill. Cause that's been the biggest thing
anybody had any investment ever was--the land. And
it looks as if it'll go on for awhile, too.

(Cave Hill Road)

David Fife We would sort of fear those fields being built over
because a lot of our walking.begins in them. Also
in that field you can see deer almost any evening
in the summer. But we've built a house here. It's
just.as fair really for someone else to build over
there. I suppose that someone who wanted to assure
themselves of living in the country would buy ten
acres . . . We wouldn't be surprised to see folk build-
ing on either side of us, even this spring . . . You
sort of see folk looking as though they might be
thinking of building there. . .

Even if it's built over there, if somehow the back
can be kept, that would still provide most of the
trails. As.long as there are ways of getting on the
trails. There are logging roads all out in back of
here.

(East Leverett)

Charles Roys You have perhaps a reluctance on the part of same
people to sell building lots and such. My mother is
in a position of having a good number of desirable
building lots, but I don't think she's interested in
selling them because it would mean a change in the
immediate community here. Not only Leverett in gen-
eral, but right in this area. A lot of people around
this area could make a good quanity of money selling
their land because of the demand right now, but I
don't think they're interested in money as much as
in their way of life here.

Peter Robinson As far as recharge the lowlands are too swampy and as
soon as you get outside that you're into bedrock.
Most of the houses are essentially along the edge of
this gravel field. Most of the wells are in bedrock,
and most of the septic systems are in gravel. That
edge is an important recharge area (for the large
aquifer contained in the gravel). The most important
recharge areas are where the streams go underground.
Some possible sources of pollution that concern me
are this large horse farm and piles of salty sand at
the Town Garage.

(Brushy Mountain)

Charles Roys This whole mountain back here is ideal for snow-
mobiles. I can leave here and go all the way over
to Rattlesnake Gutter.

James Lumley There are large parcels there that one day will
probably make a prime subdivision. It has good
proximity to Amherst.

Frances King We own a good stretch of that land up there, and we'd
never build on it or sell it unless we were driven to
starvation.

(Long Plain)

Robert Raskevitz As far as right now.and-the availability of good
soils to handle sewerage, the only place that's
really good for building is this Long Plain section,
where it's all gravel. . .

Route 63 used to be the main access route from Route
2 up above, which would come from Boston, into the
Amherst area. Then 91 came in. So this road is no
longer a real main thoroughfare. It probably carries
almost all local traffic now. It's dropped off I would
say 50% since I've lived here. We used to get a
lot of truck traffic you see. . .

I think most of the people along 63 at the time the
zoning laws came through would have liked to have
seen a lot of it zoned for business. And of course
some of it is . . . But now I think all of it will be
sold off to building lots. In the last two years,
there's been probably 8 houses from here on down to
the line. . .

(T am uncomfortable about the possibility of losing
this Long Plain agricultural land.)

Another thing you ought to consider, I'm sure you
never even thought of. And boy is it a big point.
The Long Plain area, probably from the Bull Hill farm
down, is one of the best gravel areas in 60 miles.
And this gravel is the only gravel that seems to
pass the state specifications for roads . . . In other
words, everybody and his brother would just love to
have a gravel pit here.

Robert Raskevitz Right west of 63 that"s@Pufferls, and that's just
about mined out. What Puffer has plans for is just
to blope it off as one-big hill and then sell it as
house lots. Because he now has another pit just
over the Leverett line in Sunderland.

(Would he eventually look towards other Leverett lands?)

Well, he would like to, but.1 doubt very much that
he would be able to get a permit.

(So there's a dilemma. You'v e got a resource here
and building would close off using it.)

Well, the people who own it aren't likely to sell.
It's farmland. But if they got a high enough price
they'd sell. Either for house lots or gravel.

(And it could be a progression of both?)

Right . . .

personal space

Robert Raskevitz I,honestly think they just kind of want to keep it.
New people have bought. And what they're doing is
they're buying large acreages. And they buy it, and
they just keep it. They don't sell it. They won't
sell it.

Including myself, you know. I've got 75 acres up
there. I cut a cord of wood off it a year. I just
bought it for something to hold onto. I've had
several offers to sell it, but you know, why sell it?
It's just sitting there. It's not hurting anybody.
The taxes aren't killing me. They're high. But it
pays to hold onto it as land values go.

Denzel Hankinson I have no plans whatsoever. I bought the land as a
retirement investment. There's no controlled cutting
nowin my woodlot. I take down trees as they die
for firewood. It's mostly just a place to walk and
a place to enjoy. So I'm not making good total use
of it now. I don't plan any fields to farm when I
retire--perhaps a woodlot to manage.

When I said retirement investment I didn't mean to
selloff, although there are portions I might sell,
if I needed the money for retirement. I've never
posted the land and have said I won't till someone
misuses the privilege. I'm not running people off
the land.

Edward Field, Sr. In case we were involved in serious illness, possibly
we would resort to selling the land. But we feel it
would be best to hand it on down to the two sons, and
they could possibly resolve something. Basically we
would rather not see it developed.

We've encouraged people to use it as horseback trails
and so forth. I allowed a logger to go.in and cut
the trees that should be cut. 60,000 feet of timber.
I thought he knew what he was doing. There was no
written contract, but in the future there will be.

Paul Woodard lid rather leave it the way it is. I cut wood up
there. I try to keep the pine trees growing. No,
I don't have any plans,for my land, but the way
development's,going, you cant-tell.

Homer Germain As far as the future we see now, I don't think we
would sell. We don't know what will come, of course,
in the future. But I think it will be handed down
in our family.

Elizabeth Germain We have one son.and four grandchildren. They don't
want any land sold.

Charles Roys. I use the land as far as hunting and fishing and
that, and walking and that, but not.where it's pro-
ducing an income. I don't think there's really any
appreciable timber. I've seen some land that's been
timbered and I'm not too keen on what the land looks
like when they get done. There would have to be some
awfully tight restrictions or agreements. It was cut
off not too many years before we came here. (1948).

John Paczkowski I'd like to keep it just as it is now. Maybe get
into this forestry business where they help take care
of the land for you, planting timber and everything.

I walk around it, fool around with the snowmobile,
tool around a little bit. But as far as farming on
it, no. Just mainly for the horses and the hay.
Just to graze out there. They keep it down a little
bit for us.

But as far as selling for developments, no, never.
As long as I can afford not to, let's put it that
way. If I were on the way to the poorhouse, maybe
then. . . We lived originally in the suburbs, and I
just don't think I could hack living back there again.
especially if I were the one who caused it to come
up right around myself. I like it the way it is
right now.

I'm not very recreational. I just don't have the
time.

Constantine Kamansky Used to be dairy. Sold out in '48, Thatks when
they were getting bulk-tanks in, you know. The state
said build a new milk room, build this and that.
Cost-me $5,boo. I said the hall with it. You can't
make money with 40-50 cows today. 200-360. I!m'
retired. I raise a little tobacco. Got to do some-
thing. And I have some cucumbers sometimes. But
I don't know if I'll put them in this year or not.
Too much work. My belly's too big to bend down to
pick them.

If a guy came along and gave me $100,000, 1 don't
caxe what he puts in there, But the kids--there's
three of them living right here--they work in con-
struction, and that ain't too good. So they got
something to fall back on.

Vernon Aiken I supposeit's just progress, and it has to come.
You'd begin to feel hemmed in, though. Of course,
I own enough land both sides of me, so that unless
I sold, I wouldn't feel it. The only thing that
could force me to sell would be pushing the taxes up.

Every little while we go into some selective cutting.
We haven't done any pruning, and it seems to reforest
itself, if you're careful.

We have a few good old sugar maples.. I let them out
to my neighbor up here. He taps the t ,rees and gives
me some syrup.

My daughter loves to ride. She's got plenty of place
to ride right here on our.own land. We pacture horses
during the summer, and there's usually one or two
she can ride. We don't have one of our own.

4 visions
of environment

Clifford Graves What'd I want land for now? See, what we had land
for thenj you lived on the land. You:got your wood
off from your own land. And you farmed your potatoes.
And your garden. And you cut your own hay. And you
had your horses and cows. And you had to have land
to have that.

But now it's just the opposite.. You don't use it for
nothing. And when you, get.older, instead of paying
taxes, I say, you better let it go and put your money
in the bank and have the interest to live on. Land
is no good whatever to me. It don't mean a thing.

There's no land being used here no more. Everybody
used to have a small farm. That's part of the change
that's come, now you're talking about changes. Every-
body had a small farm. You had a driving horse, and
you had a work horse, or a team. And you had a cow,
or ten or twelve. . . That's where your big change-
over's come. Now you're living just the way you live
in the city.

Which they didn't used to do. You lived on your own,
and my boy, you had to have a garden and your own
meat or else you went hungry. They didn't dish it
out to you the way they do now you know. You go and
get a big check somewhere and don't half earn it.
You just simply raised your food. That's what all
the places were, you know, just small one-horse farms
up through here. . .

That's the biggest change I can think of--the way of
living in the country now from what it was 40 years
ago. It's completely changed, that's all. You raised
your stock. Raised beef and a hog and you had chick-
ens. Cut your own wood. Instead of earning money
and buying it, you see, you spent your time working
on it.

And up there at your place, there was a good farm.
Now it don't mean a thing. You just maybe have a
little garden.

Nick Lenz It's really fine to see that bump of trees. The curve
of the tops, acts as a delay or perhaps a.precursor
to the roll of the land. That is, the peak occurs
downhill, and then it flattens out, the bonsai.garden
being.tucked waydown there in the hollow where it
was-well out of the wayof the main visual part of
the property., and where it definitely wouldn't inter-
fere with any-thing that might be built or happen
afterwards.

Oh, that nice power line. Joanna and I and before
that Carol and I and before that Peter and I used to
sit on that rock an awful lot. Being a pulpit, it
was the place we came to meditate the world. And you
can see, the scar's particularly evident from there.

When you become familiar with a landscape, looking
out over it to the same rows of trees and the one
pine tree sticking out of a grove of maples, it's
very startling to see a fresh scar cut in the ground
like that. You know, we're quite far away from it.
But essentially, that is a visual scar to an incred-
ible acreage in just this part of the valley. Every-
one sees that, and it ruins the environment for a
lot of people if they are sensitive to something like
a straight line cut down a hillside with creosoted
poles growing out of it.

Now Mr. Black's fields are very nice. The whole thing
works very well, and I think if it were all forested
it would be very monotonous and boring. One of the
more exciting things to me, which I see from the
house, which is on a level with the beginning of his
field, is that you can follow a very definite steep
drop of the land, heavily forested, down to the river.
And then of course above this line begins this field
spreading out, going up across the road, which is
really a nice thing going through it with the houses
on it and then up to the hilltop beyond.

That old cherry broke during the tornado. That's
too bad. I cleared out everything around it. Not
that it's terribly spectacular, but there's something
really fine to its age and the gnarliness and shaggi-
ness of its bark. It's own peculiar color in the fall
and flowers in the springtime.

Nick Lenz Carol and I-used to come up-here-and sleep underneath.
this pine tree. The branches used to come.right
down to the ground, so when you were inside it, you
were essentially inside your own tent. That's a
remarkable thing to find in nature. Unfortunately,
it's like everthing with nature, it's there for a-
while. You see it, you enjoy it, but it changes.

One-approach is to leave it, watch it. The other is,
yeh, I've studied the various trees and so forth and
there is sort of a plan to this of architecture and
reshaping. This is again a very dynamic place to
me. You just walk 20 feet and you have the,vhole
sense of something different happening environmentally.

These butternut shoots make good fence rails. Again,
you can see where I cut them down the new shoots
coming up. If they grow up straight they'll make new
good fence rails. This is what I was hoping. That
you could perpetuate an area that has a specific
function like that.

I could conceive this whole area as a series of glades.
Because everytime you hit a prominence, like there
are a couple of little rocky heap areas going down,
there are several neat trees or things happening on
top. Branches that hang way down and almost go to
the next heap. But you know- it just looks like
anyone else's junky forest. I've seen so many things
here, I'm going crazy.

I can understand how the man in the city with his
tiny yard and his one skanky forsythia bush in it can
really worship that damn bush as he becomes familiar
with it.

So far I think the place is coming along very well
as a dumpy little New England farm.

These are the days I'm coming to enjoy the most
around here. I suppose because they're not the most
common. And the beauty, the.change in it, the soft-
ness, the fading of one space into another until it
disappears in a really soft grayness is so fine.

This is a lost area. This is the public part.of my
property. But I don't feel publically inclined. It's
a random public driving by on their way to somewhere
else. It's not like a town front yard. There such
space has a social function. Here I just feel para-
noid.

Rhody McCoy I wanted to stay-out.of the city. And I'm looking
towards that retirement age, where I can do more
things on a leisure time basis than a work basis.
I've got kids.. We have some horses. We built a
barn before we even came on the land.

We looked at the land and sav the opportunities.
This was a logging road, and we came up,.and this
was a beautiful little plateau here, covered with
pine trees, and.we decided this was where we wanted
to build a house. By the time the builders got through
with it, I mean it was unbelievable. It would cost
you twice the.cost of the house to replace all those
trees that they knocked down. And where did they
knock them down?. Right all around the damn house.
Just unbelievable.

And we looked at the brook, right behind us. Fantas-
tic brook. It.runs all year. It sings. We wanted
to go up and dredge out spots of it and stock it with
fish. There's an area over here big enough for a
big lake. We want to put a show ring out back. So
really for my family's pleasure, to build a kind of
leisure time place.

But like I say it's just unbelievable what people can
do. I go back and look at where these people have
been getting out logs, and I don't understand it.
What I'm saying is, it raises questions in my mind
like what's all this beauty everybody's talking
about protecting? Is it beauty you see immediately
on the roadside? Or off the roadside, some of the
hills, fields that people farm? Or are you really
talking about the town, you know, all behind the
roads, where people live? This would be another
whole different story.

(What do you find beautiful in Leverett?)

Well, to be,honest, I'd say the potential that I
saw when I drove around, drove through it. It's
beautiful country. If I stand by my back porch and
look at the range, it's just an unbelievably beau-
tiful sight. But let me start walking through my
own property, and I want to come back and cry.

You take a guy like me who comes from the city, I
don-It know how- to control this land. I know I'd
like to. I'd like to go 'back and cut some of that

Rhody McCoy undergrowthand grow some hay,. It used to be a
gravel pit. It's located at a point where it would
be very attractive to see. But I don't have the.
slightest idea what I'm doing. Take me a machete and
go back there and chop it all up. Come back two
weeks later, and it's come back thicker and stickier
and stronger than ever. And I say to hell with it.

So I ask a guy to come through with a dozer, right?
So.he comes through, and it's.just havoc, takes
everything down. And what ever falls down takes
something else with it. So you go out and get a
chain saw. Man, you want to see some logs, we could
supply the whole town of Amherst with logs for the
next five years, man. But I don't want to spend my
waning years with a-damn chain saw cutting up fire-
wood. It don't make sense.

For me at this juncture, the landscaping, quaintness,
New England atmosphere was an attractive thing.
Otherwise, I could have stayed in Amherst. So in
order to preserve that, most people as I look at
this particular town, need help. Things like mos-
quito control, which I think is atrocious. And to
preserve the beauty of the land and so forth. They
need help that a town like this can't afford. Or I
don't believe they can. I think the taxes would
just drive the people out.

When I first came here, somebody told me there were
all kinds of federal programs that you could get, and
they'd help you say enlarge your brook, put fish in
it. They kept telling me all the things they'd help
me do, and I haven't seen anybody help me do nothing.
I think I've asked like 900 different people what's
the best way to drain this land. The best thing I
could get was a ditch and a drain. Seems there are
natural springs in it. So it gets mucky and marshy
and mosquitos come in.

Everybody's hollering about taxes. I see it reflected
in their properties. Buildings tilting over, need
to be repaired and painted. Even some kinds of
construction, particularly along the arteries here.
All kinds of lean-tols. People just can't afford to
enhance the aesthetics along here. And one reason
is the taxes.

And then you look at the kinds of services here.
There's something of an imbalance.

Rhody McCoy Like with.these stores, I'm caught between two
things. What they render in service.and what they
look like. I'd be supportive of.getting the whole
town out to.rennovate those stores, make them look
like country stores. I mean don't tear them down
and build some fantastic, ultra-modern shopping center.
I'm saying you can have a nice fascade, but something
inside.that.serves-the.town. And the.hours are just
unbelievable for people that have some sort of
mobility.

You get garbage at some spots along the road that are
just wide enough to pull off. We went down this
summer and cleaned up a couple of those. Some kind
of policing or refuse control would be good. Used
to go all the way down to Guttersnake Road cleaning
UP -

You're talking about preserving an aesthetic quality
of the countryside, yet I'm saying driving down the
road you can see all kinds of trees that have fallen
and are rotting and take away from the very thing you
say you want to protect.

Another thing up here is I can't get the papers. I've
got to go all the way into Amherst to get the papers.
We've had five or six instances where company can't
get to a telephone, can't get a container of milk
without going all the way to Amherst.

Had two young men break down on this road, and they
were here all day, after calling that service station
in Montague. Ok, let's translate that and say that's
living in the country. That's what you got to expect
living in the country. Well, I'm not so sure.

Then I look at the roads, and I take my chances.
Maybe I got too much of a city orientation. Maybe
that's the problem. But obviously with the kinds of
roads we've got and the increased traffic and the
increased population, we've got a catastrophe.

In order to improve the services to keep the land
open and everything, they're going to have to develop
for more people. And that's obviously going to drive
a lot of the people presently here out.

Dorothy King I've Plways wanted to live in the country. I was
born and brought up in.the city, and I hated.it.
I hated it. And I hated New York. So 1 said, when
I grow up, I'm going to have a place in the country.
Well, I worked all the time I was going to school,
saved my money. So that when I graduated from Pratt,
I had enough to buy a little house in the country.
And I got.together with a real estate agent. On week-
ends I'd go with him. He took me all over Connecticut.
Finally, we got into Massachusetts. And then one day
we got into Leverett. And I saw that red house. I
said, this is it, this is what I want. And I bought
it.

I never was sorry that I came to Leverett. There's
no other place that I've ever been--and I've been in
every state in the Union--that I like as well.

I'm not likely to be here more than one year or
possibly two years.. That's what my doctor gives me.
But I hope that the new people who are coming in
will learn what the old have contributed, and try
to keep the town more or less as it's always been.
Now that doesn't mean that there aren't new houses,
because there's hundreds of them coming up every-
where around here. But it does mean that the phil-
osophy of the town, that the future of the town be
not allowed to be like Amherst.

We don't waxit developments. I bought this big farm
down here in order to save all this land. 103 acres.
Stanley Kosloski owned that farm. I heard one day
he was going to sell out. Well, it didn't take me
five minutes to walk down there. I said, 'Stanley,
I hear you're selling.' He said, 'Yes, I'm too old
to farm.' 'Well,' I said, 'I hear Walter Jones wants
it.' He said, 'Yes, but he doesn't want to pay me
enough.' I said, 'How much does he want to pay you?'
'$35,000.' 1 said, 'How much do you want?' '$37,000.'
I said, 'Put on your hat, we'll go to Amherst, I'll
pay you cash for it.' Which I did.

(What motivates you. . . Where does your sort of town
or civic responsibility come from?)

Well, I think it comes from my love of Leverett and
my love of beauty. I don't make one cent in real
estate. My grandfather, my great-grandfather, and

Dorothy King my great-great grandfather died with the equivalent
of a million dollars. Now I could have been a million-
aire right here today very easily. If I wanted to.
But I didn't want to leave a million dollars. I'd
rather leave Leverett a little better than I found it.
I'd rather add-which I have--to the benefit of my
friends, both financially and in other ways. So
I.have given away more than $100,000 in the last
few years.

(What are your favorite places in Leverett?)

Right in this house is the one I like the most. I
love it. And I'm so grateful to God for it. Of
course, I made it what it is. When we came here,
my dear friend and I restored this house. The former
tenant,kept hens upstairs, a horse in the kitchen.
You can still see some marks--I've tried to fill them
in there--where he kicked the fireplace. On the
porch there was a whole row of chambers, all full.
And you can see how close it is to the road. And
that was before these trees were planted. We planted
these trees and that big fir tree out there, in fact,
there were two fir trees. I had to take one down;
it was too close to the driveway. A mama and papa
tree.

We ought to be very grateful to those people way back
there when they were so beset with every hindrance
to have built these things, built these churches,
built these beautiful houses . . . They came from
England. And in England they remembered the beauti-
ful English architecture. And they brought that
over here in their memory so that they could plan
and make houses that would be equal to their old
English homes. See, they were still hungry for the
old. This house is 300 years old. Have you ever
looked at my door?

4 versions
of community

Portia Weiskel I'm very committed to a,sense of a small conmunity.
I knov good things happen to human beings in small
communities. I know that that's at least one of the
good ways to live. Somewhere within you it's very
important to live with a sense of community. And
especially at this time in our century when there's
so much that's impersonal and so much that seems
distant and irrelevant to our lives.

Just to know, just to be aware of other people's
rhythms. That they come and go at a certain time
during the day. You wave at them at the same time,
you know who they are--even if you wave to them more
than you've spoken words to them. It's important to
see a small number of people. Small enough so that
you can be aware that it's a community of people and
have a feeling that the whole thing somehow makes
sense. The point of it is just the sharing of
dailyness.

I think human beings are much happier and more inter-
ested and interesting when they relate to people who
are very different from themselves. To the extent
that that's true in Leverett, I cherish that. Here
I know the people I could go to and open up our
discussion on a number of issues, and I would get
tremendous arguments, and I'd get people that feel
strongly about things. And I love that. I love that.

Issues like the way one lives, the life-styles, and
the way you relate politics to your life. And the
values of sharing and community values vs. everyone-
out-for-himself values. You know those are the things
I think are important in America.

I'd like to see our whole way of thinking about towns
be such that instead of expanding on the population
of one town, people would be encouraged to go to
other places and start other little communities. You
know, with a post office, with a church. My ideas
are not that unusual. This is basically a rural
revival.

William Floge There is a sense of Godliness and a sense of the fear
of God throughout this valley. And we all sort of
pull together. Along this road you belong to the
road, as it were.

The two churches in the valley believe the Bible,
preach that people have to be saved to go to heaven,
and that the Lord Jesus Christ is the answer to life.
That has made our valley different from the other
paxt of town.

If you do something unkindly up here, everyone knows
about it because everybody is related. You can be
in another section of town, and you can live like
anybody you want because nobody knows you. But this
is a family valley.

Along our valley now we have these young people's
houses, and they live in a different type of life
than we live. We're friendly, we love them, but it's
made a difference. It's something brand new in the
last five years in our way of thinking and living
up here.

Everyone of these young people who come by our home
looking for a hop, I will stop whatever I am doing
and take them down to Route 63. Really, I do this
with about three to six kids a week. And I do it
for two reasons. First, to show them some kindness.
I want them to know that I'd like to be their friend.
And secondly, I present to them the Lord Jesus
Christ as the answer to their searchings.

Our congregation is mostly from our own little neigh-
borhood, Moore's Corner. And I like it that way.
The bible teaches us that we should begin right in
our own neighborhood. Every Monday night God has
given us seven men, and we visit two by two from
bouse to house. We do that in order to reach the new
people that may be moving in and also the fathers and
mothers of our own Sunday school children.

The Lord Jesus' last words were, Ye shall be witnesses
unto Me both in Jerusalem. . . He says to the disciples,
start right here in Jerusalem and preach the gospel
here. And we do. We stress that. We're interested
in our own community. We live here, and we're
interested in reaching the people.

Steve Trudel I just had cause to go into Boston, and I realized
how alien tall buildings and streets with cars on them
are to me. I have a natural place in me that identi-
fies with trees and water.. I guess that has a lot
to do with my roots in Williamstown. I lived on
land that was owned entirely by my family, my grand"
father, so that no one.else.built on it, nothing
changed, it was all the same. It just kind of grew
in my blood. I'm pretty sure that's why I came back
here. Seeking the same roots, roots being a nice pun.

I have a great deal to learn from the people. I was
involved with the Zoning Board of Appeals last spring
because I was an abutter to land which had been built
on. I got to know quite a few of the people through
that experience.

I was a symbolic arm of the community, so it was easy
for people to identify with me as opposed to somebody
who came from the outside as a real estate developer-
not even knowing me, just because I was a landowner.
I felt comfortable with that. I felt very warm to
have been received in that manner. It certainly
didn't puff my ego that much, but there wasn't any
hostility because of my appearance, my living style--
that being collective, or communal as might be said.

There are maybe three kinds of people. Those who can
afford to build new homes for instance. I guess
about 3 or 4 new homes have gone up just since this
summer'. I don't know the people, I don't know who
theyare.' But they seem to abuse the land, rather
than,become a part of it. Now that is very prejudiced
of me to say because I don't-believe anyone intends
@to misuse or hurt a person or an environment. None-
'theless, it happens. It's rather unique for anyone
to understand his place in nature, as opposed to
believing that nature is one thing and man is some-
thing else.

A second variety of person I might say would be a
person, a couple or a group of people interested in
settling in this area to do whatever alternative life-
style they might have in mind--maybe to farm and in
that way remove themselves from whatever city life-
style they had lived before.

Steve Trudel Thirdly, there are the established-families here.
In-historicalterms, the people who used this area
and-community as a focus for their life had their
livelihood here as well--going back to when I believe
farming and milling were means of subsistence, and
the people really didn't travel anywhere else. As
the years went on, that broke down, and I think it
really is a major breakdown. You have people's minds
.expanding to such an extent that they're very dis--
content with their own immediate environment.

Now, most people, not making their living here, are
coming and going. Ours is not going to be a once a
day or four.times a week kind of meeting community--
but to whatever extent possible I think we should
actualize this community. It would take a reshifting
of priorities,.bringing energies back to the community--
that, in my mind, is one of the greatest things I
have to look forward to achieving.in whatever community
I live in. Unfortunately, my community now--all the
people that I know within almost a fifty mile'radius--
is much too expanded for me.to have that sense.

It may have a lot to do with my age, but the idea of
settling down in a place is very threatening to me--
I might be closing off experience. At the same time,
I know this was the right thing to do, because I
have been so disenchanted with travel and not having
roots.

I think I'd be much readier t.o travel and know when
it was time to come back if I had a sense of the
community that-I was leaving and coming back to.. It
would give me reason to choose in my travels some-
thing to bring back, whether.it be material or intell-
ectual or experiential. It would give me a focus
for mytravel.

A lot of this is my attitude abstractly. I'm not
sure that I'm absolutely settled here. 1 know I feel
good about being settled here. Eventually, I know
I'll be in a similar circumstance. The more I stay
around the more I find myself becoming a'part of this
community or being sought out by people who realize
I've been here awhile. Just the fact that you came
over is a good example of the community, of sharing
what we have--because we have something in common.

David Fife I think the thing that mak@s the church-. unique in
my experience, other than just a village church,
would be that half the folk come perhaps from the
Amherst community and the other half from right
around here through the valley. And their families
go back hundreds of years some of them. This means
you get a great stability from that 50%, and we also
draw on the ideas of folk from the University
Community. They've been down south, all over. It's
a challenge to weld the two groups together. But
it's also our strength.

-(What strengths can, newcomers contribute to a small
community like this?)

I would say a breadth of ideas. Whoever travels,
their judgements will be that much broader. And on
the whole the University folk do travel much more.
They come here for perhaps three years, and then they
move on again. If they're professors down there.
they can often.use those same talents to lead in the
church.

(What strengths are native here?)

I think I would have to say loyalty. You.know, it's
largely these folk that built the church.- They.re
very handy often.with their practicalwork-much more
than I would be. They support a meeting, they come,
week.in and week out. For.a minister that's ideal.
They are folk you can really rely on. If you could
really.sell them an idea, they would be with you, I
should think, to the end.

(Do you worry about an,influx of new people eroding
this type of community?)

,If what has gone on in the church"goes on in the
community at large, there's quite a lot of hope. It's
our tremendous strength. It does heed working at.
When we first came here, almost every house that sold
seemed to go to-outsiders. But I think recently
some of,the outsiders have toned down a little bit,
andsome of the people in North Leverett have accepted
them 6 little more. I think it's hopeful.

shared place

Vernon Aiken We live so much different than we.used to. We don't
see people.. I don't know who lives in some of the
houses. Years ago, someone would come to live here
a number of years, and you'd get to know them. The
farmers especially: You come to help me hay this
week, and I'll come over to help you next week. When
we filled the silos, two others would come help us
and then we,a return a day's work allaround. Not
everybody got in the car and went to work.

You meet other people, but you don't meet the people
right under your doorstep so much. Fellow who lives
in the next house here, I've just seen once. He's
a student. He just eats and sleeps here. Up here
in t*he village there's a fellow I see real often at
work. All of a sudden I found out he lives right
here.

Edward Field, Sr. It was almost a feeling of relationship with people,
as if they were related to you. People still assist
a person in trouble. That hasn't died out.

Loyce Dunbar They're so friendly. Now I remember when my father!s
house burned, everyone just came out and helped.
One lady took home all the silverware and polished
it. It's little things like that you remember. The
people went arouna--my folks were poor, it was a
big farm--and they collected money. This was back
probably in 1934. That was following the depression
years--it had hit us here in town. Just everyone
was so generous.

If there's a death in the family. I remember at the
time the children's father died, people, well they
brought in the meals for three days for us. Little
things like that.

(They.could suxe use a store in Leverett Center.)

Clifford Graves Well, the little store they:haa, you know, was too
good. It war, so good I hated to go in.there, didn't
feel'at home -you know-. That was too clean. It
didn't need.to be as good as that. But you really
should have a little kincl of store in a little
village. Now up in Moores Corner is not too bad.
She has quite.a lot of stuff there that you can go
in and buy. Instead of going to Turners or Montague,
you know, you can go in and get a few potatoes and
your Sunday papers. But this place down here, it
isn't safe to go in there.

Homer Germain My father ran a store two houses from here when I
was a boy. At one time, this was quite a factory
settlement. . . I wouldn!t be surprised though, the
way tl@e place is-growing, if somebody didn't open
up a little store in these places-and stay going.
One of your drawbacks is, you have to stay open nights
and weekends, Sundays, cause that's when you're
going to get your business--when the supermarkets
are closed. Because I don't think the local stores
can compete on their prices with the big ones. . .
-I guess Muriel enjoyed dealing with the public and
helping the public out, more than she did the money
she made from it.

Fannie Taylor I don't know as the town is exactly excluded. But
they don't mix. . . Most of these people that have
come in.are rather socially inclined, but they don't
have the incentive to branch out from among their
own class of people. . .

William Bramlage If you go to town meeting you'll find the majority
of people there are the older townspeople. But if
you look at the composition of the town boards, the
town officers, you find its turning over very rapidly.
Simply because the old people axen't willing to do
it.

Phillip Woodard The only time you get a large percentage reaction is
when you have a particular involvement at-which a
group takes issue. Then they develop interest. I
guess what I'm saying is most people take a negative
attitude rather than a positive attitude, and that's
unfortunate. Many issues are lost because people who-
approve the issue do not make their voice known.

William Br6mlage The major motivation for my-involvement is that
there are.things.that must be done. I'm.not trying
to shapethe town-to my vision of its future, be-
cause that's.-pretty vague. The,chances of my kids
living here are pretty remote.

John Paczkowski Someday Ild.like to get into something. But right
now I just don't have the time. We're just starting
out the business, and most of my time is devoted
to my.own work.

Mrs. Walter Carey Moore's Corner and North.Leverett have a very active
church life.j.and we do see people there. And of
course there's always the local store. And-we do.go.
to Montague for the post office. Years ago we women,
had a women's club and we would meet once a month in
somebody's home or a hall and have a speaker or
something interesting and a sort of social time
afterwards. 'It was nice for,us to all get together
and get acquainted, you know.

It isn't.much of a life if you just get up, go to work,
come home and k6ep repeating that.

Gordon King The fire department fills a social need only because
if your house catches on fire, you better know where
the-equipment is and how to run it. We have
drills every weekend. Both trucks go out. This is
work. The next five Tuesdays, we have first aid,
'112 hours. They aren't interested.

Frances King What brings the people together is always things like
the Conservation Commission. Whenever there's a
common task. The Bicentennial Committee. We all
have televisions now, we're all busy. If we can have
an evening at home, it's precious.

If there.are folks who have built homes out here to
live out in the woods, what are you going to do?

Whenever there is a need in Leverett, the people
rally. When the Boy Scouts built,that cabin up on
Brushy Mountain,' the turn-out of.fathers to get up
there and build that thing was terrific. People
donated lumber. But once the,job was finished, they
naturally disintegrated.

The center of their life is not Leverett. This is
their bedroom.

Homer Germain Maybe because of the transportation, the highways,
there's more going on. We used to have 6. grange in
town, a menis club. We had quite a large turn out
at those meetings. The grange was.really quite
prosperous here. Then they kept going down and
down and about 8 years ago, out.

Thepeople froml.the college have a lot of time tied
up down there.- Of course, the grange, you have a
lot of@ritual you have to learn, and they put on
degrees and all that. At first you had to learn it
all by heart and then it,got so people couldn't have
time to learn so they'd let them read it. And then
You couldn't even get them to come to.read it. That
was the trouble. That's when we started to.loose
our friends hips-with.everyone in town. Now about
the only one that's going is the PTO.

Elizabeth Germain Our Friendship Club and Ladies Aid's still holding
'forth, but without many members.

Homer Germain -The grange was a farmer's organization. Back when
--it was first set up they bought food, you know.
And they could buy it at larger quantities, and
people could pick it up at the grange hall, and they
got a better,deal.

Fannie Taylor I came here in 1894. 1 came in April. So let's
see, pretty near 78 years . . . T shortly became able
to know most everybody. And so long as I was doing
the town work of Clerk and Treasurer, I did know
pretty nearly everybody. - Now there's so many
_--peoIple that.I don't know where_they live, and I don't
know their names, and I don't know what they do.

the formative community

Pat Conklin I really want to get involved in a community that's
a community of people. We've been talking about
moving to different communities or buying land and
setting -up a community. But I've decided that moving
again is just not the thing for me to do now. I've
got to settle down.finally and just do something.

I like Leverett, and I really like this house and
this valley and this town. And I think it has
possibilities. Although I may always change my mind,
so I may always be frustrated. I feel the people .
in Leverett are really independent minded@-and that's
a word that people use here. I'know quite a few.
Not a lot know me, but I know about them.

If I'm going to get to know somebody that I don't
know, then I have to care about something that they
care about and talk about that. And not just go, well,
here's a little dinner and we're going to be friends.
That Just doesn't work. The kinds of issues that
might work are, for me, child care and the school.

I am interested in keeping the town free of being
cluttered by buildings, but I don't know if I would
spend a lot of time and energy on that. I would if
it was right across the street from me.

Our neighbors are really close to us, and they're
really good to us. He grew up in this house.. He
knows where the drains are. Dick gets a ride into
the University every day with him. They're good people.

Portia Weiskel We're trying to get the town hall to use as a center
for the distribution of food. We're serving at the
moment 43 Leverett families,. And these Leverett
people are quite diverse. There are University
people and there are Amherst College people, but
there are also people who have been around a.long
time. There are middle-aged people and there are
young people and there are two old people who are
interested and I'm hoping will join.

A food co-op is by nature a co-operative community
venture. We do work so that we all save money. And
it's fun. We get together a lot. As a matter of
fact, a week ago at this very hour in this very house
on this very rug was about a ton of food. And there
.were about 6 of us all bagging.people's orders.
Ana my house was left, ha, askew, to say the least.
And there are still broccoli fermenting under some
couch in this house that I can't find. And that's
a minor inconvenience.

But it's just well worth it in terms of the sense
of community that takes place because of it. You
know, the people all came to my house--and we don't
do it at my house all: the time--and they see my child,
they see the animals, they see the way I live. They
see I'm a g-utton for plants, you know, and that
maybe gives someone an idea to have a lot of plants.

One of the main points, of a food co-op is to encourage
people to take responsibility for their own lives.
And to eat more honestly. For example not to have
to buy 8 lemons in a plastic bag when you only want
2 and you know that 6 of those are going to rot but
you can't buy 2--they only come in plastic bags of
8. And it is in this co-op possible to order one
lemon once a week. That seems like a small detail,
but it somehow represents this sort of honesty. Being
able to take control of my own life. Saying I only
want one lemon, I don't want 8. 1 don't want them
in a plastic bag either. Because I don't like
plastic bags.

And at the same time freeing ourselves from those big
institutions called the Stop & Shop and First National
and those endless hideous things that are going up
on Route 9.

Pat Conklin I want to get day care set up. A parent co-operative
day care center. That's an important word to me
because it means.less money as soon as you involve
the people who benefit. That's a technique Leverett
doesn't use half.enough. Getting people who live
here, to spend their time and energy as opposed to
spending money. Like parents want to be involved
with their kids. That might apply to the school, too.

I think one of the church nursery schools would be
a fine place. Tha state will approve them as a
facility. Perhaps enough people in town would
support it so the town might pay for heating.

Another thing is that Nancy and my sister and my
husband all work in nursing homes. And I know there
are a lot of elderly.people in Leverett. I'm sure
there are some people who need rides and other things.
In the country, they.often can't walk to the store.
When they get a little older, nursing homes may be
the only answer, but there's that in between area
.where they just need some help.

In this town, a large percentage do have their parents
in their homes, but that's getting less common. And
it doesn't link them to the community. Even trying
to link schools and older people, so they might
spend time as volunteers in a day care center. You
know, old people just love little children. Some
could take a lot of responsibility.

I don't want to get old and find out that there's
no place for me to go when I can't@get a job. Older
people want to keep busy. That's the whole problem
with getting old. They feel worthless when they're
doing nothing.

I think the town should be responsible for that.
Maybe a sort-of retirement home. Or maybe they want
to live alone and just have help with services.
Even if it's only five people, it's worth it.

I would think a co-operative grocery store would be
a really nice thing. Of course, you'd have to hire
someone to run it.

(Interested?)

I could be interested. I'd want to do it witha
group probably.

Portia Weiskel I haven't done this yet, but,I've been interested in
starting a machine and tool cc -op. Anyone who wanted
to join would contribute some sort of tool or machine
such as a chain saw or a tractor or a roto-tiller.
Because this is a country setting and because a lot
of us have gardens, the tools would have to do with
woods and garden enterprises. I think it's absurd
for everybody to have their power lawn mower. Which
is what happens in suburbia. You would have to work
out the details, but it seems to me at least possible
in a.town like this where you do know people and
there's a relationship with other people to start
with because there aren't so many of us, to start
something like a machine and tool co-op which would
enable.us all to have maybe one or two appliances
which we use maybe not more than ten days a year,
but then share them with people and in turn be able
to borrow so-n-sols saw or roto-tiller or whatever
they have. Again, it's getting away from consumer-
ism and towards sharing.

Steve Trudel- One of the things I've talked about is alter-econ,
where you'd have a co-operative of people in the
community who-would lend their abilities, their
skills, to the rest of the people. Let's say Nick
the carpenter would lend his skills to Gordon in
return for Gordon working on his car. The problem,
of course, would be to establish a credit system of
hours worked.

One"of my fantasies is to give a community meal each
month. Let's say in the Town Hall.

David Fife Quite a lot of folk have a common interest in garden-
ing, don't they? In the town where we used to live,
the town supplied magnolias I think free, and you
put them in and cared for them. If the town wanted
to do this, it might bring all sorts of folk together
making a-display in their gardens. In England they
have competitions and give out geraniums and this
type of thing.

Joanna Stone All studio space is privately owned. What the Craft
Center needs and what I dream of it having is a whole
new building really with 24-hour available studio
space for public use. Perhaps we could have A
general arts and crafts instructional program with
apprenticeship for a few afterwards. We would want
to incorporate adults as well as kids. ... The
master craftsman are there because they enjoy doing
their work, not particularly teaching..

Nick Lenz New communities just don't seem to work. You move
into an old town, you seem to sense the community
more. Perhaps because it was a.community more. It
was built up organically because the community need
was there. They all lived right there. Because
they had to be together, work together. About the
only damned thing they could do was be sociable, to
help their neighbors and be helped by their neighbors.

There's a sub-community which has inter-functions.
Groups help other groups. I'm beginning to feel
this sense of community which I certainly didn't
feel with the town the way it was when I moved in.
This is all very new--the last three years.

Terry Glazier People used to run into each other more when the
store was thei:e. Now it's the same people all the
time. There's a group that stops by on their way
home from work and a group that stops by on their
way into work, and they run into the same people.

The store was a meeting place * Each small town
should have a place like that. I miss it. Usually
people would stop and hang around a few minutes,
especially if they ran into someone.

The post office is a poor substitute. Some of the
old ones don't talk as much because I'm so much
younger. They did with my grandmother. She'd been
there 20-30 years, and they all knew her. Theytre
not so sure about me.

the school

Robert Raskevitz I think one of the big things that holds this town
together right now and also draws people into town
is the school. The whole town seems to revolve
around the school. It's new and it's modern, and
they have good teachers. This is the reason I moved
here. Because I knew that my kids would get an
elementary education in a small town atmosphere and
then go from that into the Amherst system. That's
the only reason. . . Taxes are high. You're paying
for the school. But people are willing to pay for
it. They just tried to regionalize it. They
knocked that right down.

James Lumley People living in Leverett prefer their school to
Amherst's because of better student attention. It
harks back to earlier days.

Nick Lenz Traditionally in New England, school was not an all-
day process. You went there, you.learned your
basics. You came home, you learned how to run a
farm, you learned how to make shoes. All the differ-
ent functions of living.

Fred Muehle Maybe once a week the kids from one class don't go
down to the central school. They go to a mobile
unit. And the mobile unit changes maybe once a month.

Loyce Dunbar We have freedom that we never used to have. The
rooms are noisy, but I go along with that, it's OK,
as-long as it's a constructive noise. Sure, we
used to have quietness in the schools, but it was a
forced quietness.. But the children learn just as
much now. . . Everyone works along at their own
speed now. You spend 10 or 15 minutes a day with
each child. You know, we used to just stand up and
talk and read from the books together.

We feed our own birds here. When we started feeding
the birds, -very few of the children knew the name
of a bird, but they have learned the names. And
they.seem to enjoy watching them--and feeding them. . .

Alice Levenson As an-educator, I would hope that the school could
maintain its uniqueness--which to us seems to have
to do with its size and its ability to be really
meshed with the community, with community people
having a lot of influences and being able to parti-
cipate directly in the school.

There's the school committee, of course. And the
library is staffed one day a week by a professional
librarian and then by mothers. People turn out for
open houses by the PTO. Other PTO informational
meetings, discussion hours,. They turn out a lot for
good old-fa@shioned fun-type things like potluck
suppers--which are sometimes accompanied by programs
that the kids plan, plays and music.

They turn out in good numbers for this day workshop
program that we have some Friday afternoons. Regular
classes are called off, and teachers and parents and
other community people come in and offer small courses
to everybody in an ungraded fashion in areas in
which they feel paxticularly competent.

Next Friday afternoon we'll be having several field
trips--one to a printing press in Amherst, one to
the art exhibition at Mass that's a tactile explor-
ation of art rather than a visual one, where kids
are blindfolded and they explore with their hands,
seeing art that way. There'll be breaamaking. There'll
be cooking for men only--called 'Survival in the
Kitchen'. ThereOll be weaving--which would entail
making a loom and then weaving with it. Cross-country
skiing, hopefully, ice-fishing.

We envision a nice exchange of kids going up to the
Craft Center to see their craftsmen and artists at
work. And maybe they would like to use the school
as a display place for some of their things, and may-
be in turn they'd display some of the kids' things.
Because they're just down the road, we hope that we
can make a pretty informal and constant exchange with
,them.

There's quite a bit of formal teaching about ihe town
on all levels. And that will particularly start to
gel towards the.end of this year and all next year
with the bicentennial celebration.- The school plans
to be very active in that.

Alice Levenson We do a lot of exploring of Leverett, physically-
and historically. The Primary takes'a bus tour of
Le:verett with people at different spots to tell
about them--like the charcoal kiln, the'pond, the
sawmill that's been reactivated. This would be a
round trip thing so that the kids are.acquainted
@with the perimeters.of.Leverett--how big it is. And
then to learn the neighborhoods within this big
neighborhood that's Leverett.

People's enthusiasm about the place t-het they live
is pretty evident to kids. I'm sure they feel a
deep sense of pride living-here.

I think they are very conscious of the way this
town's government functions. The people who give
their time to running the town are well known to
the kids. People wear so many hats in this town.
Kias:see people that they know very well inmany
different roles, and one of the roles is town official.
I think that gives them a very good picture of the
town's government being really a function and ex-
pression and extension of the people who live in the
town.

Just last night I was thinking of ways in which the
school could be more in touch with the social needs
of the community. Ways in which the school could
be open..to use by adult groups. That's something
I'd like to hear from people about. That the school,
not only because it's the major financial committment.
of the-town, but because it just Iseems to be-the
one unifying locus or focus of a lot of the town's
thinking and feelings--that the school ought to do
more and be more open to adults as well as to kids.
It's under-utilized.

There might be people who would want to learn some-
thing, and the school could be a clearinghouse for
them to find out about people who would like to
teach something. The school could bring those
people together--say in the evenings or during the
summer or weekends. There might be people who would
want to use the school in an old-fashioned quilting
bee. I don't want to limit possibilities. We'll
just see.

(Who wou ld start it?)

I guess we should start it. This would have to be
initially -generated by the School Committee, and I
have not discussed it with them yet. Certainly, it
could be within the next year. It would tie in with
the bicentennial.

Alice Levenson (Does the school help.create a more unifiea.sense
of the town.than the old one-roca schoolhouses might
have?)

I think it does. What I'm wondering about now is
whether we'll have to go back to more than one
schoolhouse as the town grows. I think we will. We
need an addition to this school now. But we don't
want to see the school turned into a giant sprawling
complex. So after the addition, then what? If the
population expands greatly after that, will Leverett
grow so big that that kind of cohesiveness can't
exist anymore?

Part of the function of the school is, or has been,
to exert a generalizing influence--to prepare kids
mentally for a wider society. This is the very thing
which is encroaching on.the town physically. And
threatening the character as well as the size of the
place--both of which you value as educational re-
sources. Is this a conflict for you?)

We feel an acute sense of responsibility to bring
more diversity into the school--cultural diversity,
racial and.religious diversity. But we must not
preach. We want to be very careful not to impose
values on kids, but to expose them to a range of values
so they can form their own.

(Of course, that very relativism is perhaps in conflict
with traditional small town society. IVs a cosmo-
politan value.)

But the town isn't that anymore. It's not a closed
society. Partly due to the University.

(Is this a blessing of urban society?)

You might say that. But what a loss if we became
nothing but.

(I think this is a key challenge to the town's
planning process--and I would hope to its schooling
process as well. Can we develop the values, the
uniqueness, of this specific place, along with a
cosmopolitan consciousness?)

I would hope to achieve a sense of commonality by
recognizing aad fostering diversity.

Robert Douglas In the old school houses there were a lot of people
packed together, so you didn't really mi'ss one
student.

(,Do you ever study town history?)

Matthew LaClaire We study Lexington, but we don't study much on
Leverett.

Would you like to find out more about Leverett?)

Of course I would. Like how old it is and who our
ancestors were.

(Do you know where the old mills were?)

I know where one of them was. Right down at the end
.of our driveway. You can still see rocks with iron
pieces pounded into them.

(How did it work?)

When the thing went around, it turned some gears that
ran this power into that power and turned like this
and then there's a big grindstone up here and one
down here and they put the grain in between them and
it comes out a pour spout down into bags.

(Did the bread taste better that way?)

Well, I hope so.

(Do you study Leverett's local government?)

We were talking about how the United States government
came from Greece. Now we@re into France and England.

(What happens at town meetings?)

Jonathan Field They decide what's going to happen. They have suppers
there.

(what do the selectmen do?)

Matthew LaClaire My uncle is one, but I don't really know that much
about it.

Susan Hoadley They work on the reads and help build houses.

Robert Douglas They say where you can build a house trailer.

Matthew LaClaire They scrape the roads in spring.

Holly Greeley They get volunteer firemen and policemen.

(Is zoning a good-idea?)

Robert Douglas Yeh,. People are going to hate me for-what I'm going
to say, but I truthfully don't like the house
trailers just:there And no landscape. If they build
it back in.the woods it wouldn't look so bad, but
I don't like house trailers myself.

Jonathan Field The'thing that I don.1t like is some people are
building so many more houses in this particular
Leverett@spot. It's turning into a town. . .

Matthew LaClaire it's turning into a city. I like Leverett just the
way it is right now-with a couple of less people.

Robert Douglas They'd have built apartment houses across from us
if my dad hadn't bought the land.

(Why is it good to have such a small place?)

Privacy.

Linda Field it would turn into factories and smog all over the
place.

Susan Hoadley Ana start littering.

Jonathan Field In my opinion, I think cities are the worst place
anybody could live, I don't see how they could live
in them, because of all the smog in the air. And
people are so stupid because they try to raise dogs
and cats and they get hit by cars and if they don't
get hit by cars they're always in the house.

Matthew LaClaire In the country a dog or cat can grow up healthy. He
has a big field to run in. And kids need the same
thing. A place to run and have fun.

(Where are there good places,for that in Leverett?)

I've got a great big field up by my house I fly my
rockets in. We used to have two cars to drive around
in the field, but my father finally sold them for
scrap. . . There's a pine forest on the side and a
hemlock forest in front and on the other side all
kinds of stuff. And in the back it's mostly wild
cherry, pine and maple.

Jonathan Field Down behind my,grandfather's, you can go but in the
wooda-and there's a nice.road and some railroad
tracks, but the train doesn't go by very often.
There's some big sand heaps that you can jump into.

Robert Douglas I like to go back in the woods and bring my fishing
rods and well just take a nap. There's lots of
little creeks.

(Any fish in them?)

Well, every now and then.

Jonathan Field We have a nice spot. We live on a lake. It's nice
for boating and fishing. And we've got a big field
in back of olar-house. And a pine wood in front.
And-we've got a big hemlock, and my dad just loves
it. He won't even let me climb in it anymore. There's
a place my uncle cleared out in the lake.that goes
out about 50 feet, pretty shallow. I keep walking
and go all the way under and then I start running
the other way and my head pops up. Then there's a
dock. I found out that it's pretty'darn shallow
where you dive. off.

Holly Greeley We have a pond in our backyard to swim in.

Matthew LaClaire We have a pond, too, but we can't go swimming there,
because that's where we get our -water. We have a
well,.but..a dead rabbit fell in. The brook down,
below us is freezing cold, so you jump in there
boiling hot and get out freezing and that makes you
feel good.

Jonathan Field Route 63 is the only place to-ride a bike around my
house. But cars really don't care if you're there
or not. Come along blasting their horns..

Linda Field We have a trail in back of our house. It goes to a
gravel pit where we always stop and have picnic lunches.

(Would you like some more bike trails off,the highways?)

Robert Douglas Ild love it.

(What about between the school-and the church?)

Everyone Yes.

the roads

Steve Trudel I get up in the morning and have a very pleasurable
drive into town. It's not like driving down a
superhighway from one city to another. I really
appreciate the sanctity of the forests and this land.
Going from my house down to Route 63--passing that
whole stretch of land which the river borders on one
side with just the plain forest on.the other--I get
a very beautiful spiritual feeling.

David Fife I'm not really sure whether making bigger and better
roads helps the community. Because then people drive
fast and you have another problem. . . More folk
come, and.then you have to widen it again in another
five or ten years. When we first came here five
years ago, it was no problem. When people had gone
to work by nine o'clock, there was hardly anything
on the road until four.

I would say North Leverett Road has become tremendous-
ly busy to what it was. A lot of people just use it
as a quick,cut between 63 and 202.

(Would you like to see this road widened?)

Mrs. Walter Carey Not so much widened, but I'd like to see it smoothed.
So you don't get those potholes.

Walter Carey @The worst trouble is you get it too straightened out,
they go too fast. Boy there's a lot of them up
through here going to Lake Wyola.

Mrs. Walter Carey There's a corner right below us. . . I would like to
see taken care of. I do feel that life is more
important than land. I don't think it would hurt
the beauty of the countryside at all.

Clifford Blinn I don't see any reason to think the road might change
right now. I don't think it's i#ortant. I hadn't
really thought of it that much.

Peter Steve I think a lot of the people in town would not inind
narrow roads with curves. They object-to state
standards that a road has.to be so wide and clear
of trees within so many feet and have a radius curve
of 400 feet.

Basically Depot Road was acceptable-to us as we
found it. It.was dusty and it had potholes, but we
accepted it when we moved here. And we expected
other people who would want to live in a town like
this also to accept it. I would not want to see
this sort of Chapter 90 construction throughout the
town of Leverett.in the name of progress. I think
it would bea step backwards, not a step forward.
In the future, any road that's up for construction
should be considered in all aspects. And where it
can be left alone, leave it alone.

Nick Lenz People obviously want to build on a road. So your
roads get all built up and look bad. And still
there's all this open.space in behind. I suppose
that isn't bad because kids can walk up into that
open space and have a wonderful time, but the
appearances of the community sure become trashy.

Of course, you can increase your speed so you don't
have to notice any-thing.

Fred Muehle If you abandon a road, the town has no more authority.
If you discontinue it, the town doesn't get any
money (Chapter 81) for it, but the town still main-
tains the right-of-vay for whatever purpose you want
to use it. And there's all kinds of hassles as to
what -the status of many of these roads are. I
personally don't like abandonment, because the town
loses control.

There's also what they call unofficial discontinuance.
That's when the town,is still getting money for a
piece of road, but they figure nobody lives there.
You know, it hasn't seen a chainsaw-in 10 years, let
alone a snowplow. The problem you get into there
is that if I can find that, and I can prove that's
a town way that was never officially discontinued or
abandoned, I can force the town to get that road
up to Chapter .81 standards, and they got to do it.

Clifford Graves The big change that I can see is the roads See
when I started out.they were just sand an d.,mud. In
-the spring, it was mud and a.car couldn't possibly--
when the cars first came around, well, you were stuck
everywhere,.right in the main road, and you,a have
to hire somebody to bull you out. TaJ@e an *old model
T, they might churn their way through and get home.

Then we worked what we called an all-season road,
which was dug out and gravelled. But they'd be
rougher than the devil, but you still wouldn't have
mu d.in the spring. And-then people got where they
were so rough, of course, they kicked, and you kept
going till,.you got the blacktop.

And.now, we thought we had a wonderful road here,
'you know--but now people are not satisfied because
it's too crooked. You got to keep going all the time.

You straighten a road and more people get 'killed and
,hurt than do on a crooked road. Because the speed
doubles. -There's quite an argument there. But down
here there's parking on the side of the road you
know. It isn't the road's fault so much as parking
in the road. Up on your,corner is a dangerous spot,
but you don't see many smash-ups there. . .

I went with my father with just two common dirt plows
on the sIed-with horses to plow roads. You just
simply broke a track. That's all you did. And then
you had two or three men shoveling to get the horses
through. Then you had little trucks to start out with.
The first truck I had was a one-ton truck.

I was working down at Leverett one time, and I was
suppose to plow snow up here. And I was hung up
down there with a team of horses, and it was snowing
something awful. I had a hell of a time hitching
those horses up, you know, cause the wind's blowing
so. And when I came over the hill with a buggy--
the wheels that high, you know--I plowed snow right
ahead of the dasher all the way home. And I was
the only track over the hill for three days.

Larry LaClaire I came on steady in '67 driving truck for theia. It
was in.the spring, you know, and I'd rather work
outside, instead of*being cooped up in a shop, you
know, where you see-that nice sunshine out there
and the temperature's up to 70.

This time of%year, driving around, you look for pot-
holes. Mud can come overnight on some roads. Up
,above North.Leverett, you've got a section in there
where the ledge runs'right out under the road.
That's the reason you're getting_all those frost
heaves-up through there. The water follows the
ledge right'out of the mountain.

And you're looking at the trees to see which ones
are dying. You can go down a road four or five times
a day for a year., and there's one tree on the side
you might not ever see that's dead. And one day
you come along and look in and there it is, you know.

On dirt roads when it came to muddy season in years
past-, they.1d close'them. -Well, nowadays,you can't
do that, because you're getting a house every quarter
of a mile. Now we're putting what they call a
crushed gravel in. It's expensive, but it makes a
good road. Once in a while you have someone come in
and say,, why don't you surface that road? Well, as
quick as you go out there with some.asphalt, why
you'd have everyone in town over there. Because
the people who live on the road don't want it. They
don't -want a tar road going by their house. They
went more gravel all the time. We spent more money
on the dirt roads this spring than we have probably
ever.

On the main roads, if you had a lot of money, Id
like to blacktop them all. We do have some blacktop
right in the center of town. It costs about three
times what a hone mix will cost. That's what's out
here. -Put a tenth of asphalt down, then put roughly
an inch of three-eighths stone, and then we put two
tenths of asphalt over top of the stone. Then we
take a grader and mix it and then level it out again
and then put stone on top.

It's better. than a seal. A seal is just giving it
one quarter of a gallon and then covering it. What-
ever's underneath, if there's a bump'there, the bump
stays there. The cost of a hone job is about double
a seal job. Looking at a seal job, the road looks
real light, but a hone job is darker. And most
generally in a hone job, where the grader goes
through and levels it, you'll see ridges where it
ran-out of mix in*some spots.

Fannie Taylor Well, there's greater-care taken of the roads,
therefore the roadsides look better. I've been
impressed by the fact that years ago-when somebody
cut off a field of timber, they put on a steam mill
and took off,everything. And that made the roadsides
or the hills beside.the roads, made them look very
bare and very, well unsavory, perhaps. But now the
roadsides practically all look very well kept. There's
more care to, have the trees.kept growing along the
aide of the road. And there's less appearance of
kind of moving out.

Homer Germain I've always thought.this main road to Shutesbury
should have gone the January Hill Road. That's
pretty near a straight line. Then there wouldn't be
anybody here, only the people that live here.

You'd be surprised. You take a hot day in the
summertime, from here up to Shutesbury is a cool
drive along that brook and through the woods. You'd
be surprised at the people that come out of Amherst
just to ride up through here in the evening to get
cooled off. It's real nice up here.

Portia Weiskel I was happy to hear at town meeting two years ago,
.someone stand up and say. . . we should do some
preventive medicine on those trees. To find out
what maybe those trees need to eat, and maybe they're
not getting enough. Make sure that nothing happens
to them, instead of waiting to see if they make it.
And they probably will. Trees are pretty sturdy.
But that's an incredible asset to this town.

David Fife I should think there have been half a dozen or ten
public street lamps since we've been here put up.
Which at night tend to detract from the country point
of view.

Clifford Graves This spot here I wouldn't sell to anybody. I suspect
my grandfather built that wall down there. They've
been talking about widening this road this year.
Now if they do that, boy I want some help. I don't
want them to take that wall. I'd hate awful to have
that wall go, you know. I know I could stop it.
They can widen the other side. Cause if you look at
that wall you'll realize what I mean.

possible
public places

Phillip Woodard @The Rattlesnake Gutter project,it looks like quite
a thing. But in one sense it's kind of a frighten-
ing thing.to the.people here. It might bring
out the very-nice point of interest which it is. It
might make a lot of people more appreciative of that
point of interest. And it might make a lot of us
just curse the day that anybody ever heard of it.
You could have quite an influx of people there.

Robert Douglas A thing that should really be preserved is Rattle-
snake Gutter. When we went down there we found cans
and bottles.

Matthew LaClaire It's nifty when you ride along there in a car. My
father likes to scare my mother. He drives real
close to the side. Another cool thing is when you
ride down there on a bike. So long as you know how
to drive a bike.

Jonathan Field Also that waterfall's fun to go down.

Matthew LaClaire Up at the top of the ledges there's a big forest you
can get lost in. And you have to be pretty sure
footed. There's some old Indian footholds you can
climb up.

Donald Wise It's a scenic area with very'recent collapse result-
ing from the over steepening of the walls while the
glacial melt waters were going down. .

Chester Woodard I think the Gutter should be preserved if.possible.
As is. Before they start building over there.

Portia Weiskel Possibly down..here on the lake, it would@ aem
awfi@illynice if.we had a beach.front, a swimming
place. I say that with,@ome reluctance..personally
because I knov it would mean a lot-of cars going
down-there,-but; I relegate that to a-less@important
place in my vision of what should happen.in Leverett.
I don't think my-desires are all that important.

Edward Field, Sr. I like.it the way it is. With a spotting scope you
can see so.much life going omon that pond. Water-
fowl,.snakes, turtles. I hate snakes, but in their
place they're part of the picture. I have had a
good deal of pleasure out of watching. Yet the
feeling persists that for the good of the town, some-
thing possibly should be developed. . . I feel it
should be in the hands of the Conservation Commission.
I have a lot of confidence in them.

Loyce Dunbar We have no place in town for kids to swim. Nothing
here in the Center. I think that would be fine here
on the lake.

Peter Robinson Leverett Pond is a valuable resource that I don't.
think is being carefully looked at in terms of -
pollution. I'm not aware of what the chemistry of
the pond is. It's pretty obvious there are a lot
of septic tanks draining into it.

Donald Wise It has no recharge area other than the area right
around it. It's basically a glacially gouged
puddle. There is very little volumn of water flow-
ing through there. So what you're doing with all
the houses around there is pumping the ground water
up through, adding whatever nutrients there are,
putting it back in the pond--and the pond is probably
recharging its own ground water table. You.'re simply
filtering the water. So you're going to increase
its nutrient content.

I've taken a canoe out there and there are some bed-
rock ledges almost at the surface. If it were
cleaned out it would be a broad area of nice swimming
and some rocks to sit on.

Portia Weiskel There's this land down here that goes between the
Heath's red house and the church. I think town greens
are psychologically very important, and that would
be the obvious place. I'd like.tosee that left the
way it is.

-Frances King I'd like the town to buy the land up along Roaring
Brook.- where they're already starting to build
houses. This breaks my heart, to.see houses on
that brook. You're going to destroy .the purity of
that brook-which in turn will destroy the life in
it. It's going to destroy its aesthetics. Because
to see that pure water tumbling through those black
rocks under those hemlocks. And to drive along
that road--you know that road goes within six feet
of that brook. And just see it or fish it. We used
to take our kids up to Shutesbury, and they'd fish,
their way all the way down that brook. And these
are things the human spirit needs..

Charles Roys Yes, that's very beautiful up there.,

Baxry Schonhaut I-shot.some be autiful film at Roaring Brook. Just
very transcendental. I can't describe it. Just a
lot of different wildflowers you find, different
.grasses, ferns, rocks, moss. @Stuff that's not
especially happening only in Leverett, but that is
what Leverett is--the geological and physical
structures which make up thetown.

Charles Roys Dad often talked about that piece up Roaring Brook
for town use. But if it's going to be a refuge for
beer cans, I'm against it. A good number of people
used to swim-up along the stream, before there were
so many swimming pools.

Ursula Roys Dad had said held like to see that piece turned into
a park or something.

Charles,Roys I, d lean towards the.use of it in a natural sense
rather than picnicking, because that changes the
whole complexion of a property. That's not saying
they can't go up there and picnic, but nothing formal.
-It's bordered by the brook, and there's a smaller
brook down through it. There are beaver in there now.

Peter Robinson We own quite a long stretch along-Mountain Brook.
We've thought ultimately we would make some arrange-
ment with the town for a@conservation area. Chester
Woodard, who owns some-of the opposite bank, may
have a similar mind.

Chester Woodard Been thinking about it. Still thinking.

David Fife There are quite a fev.chilaren-in North Leverett.
Ana there aren't too manyt-places wht@re they can
really skate or.even play. . . There are plenty of
areas that couia-be.fairly easily.turned into a
baseball diamond or a tennis court. We've skated
aown on the millpona, but that's not exactly very
safe. And perhaps swimming. There are some swim-
ming holes aown.along the river. There again I don't
know hov safe they are.

If we personally want any recreation, we have to go
to the University. Which once again attracts the
community towards Amherst. Even on some of these
little things if the community could develop its
own it would keep people back here. The paxents.
have to take the children down, so everybody leaves.

Alice Levenson When kids don't play around their own homes we see
them a lot back here. One of the things we hope to
be doing with the kids this spring is planning and
designing andthen constructing some playground
equipment that would meet their needs.

(Where would you put a paxk?)

.Chester Woodard That's the point.

I wonder if the disadvantages are more than the
advantages of it. Taking care of it and all. Of
course with the automobile, anybody in town can go
anyvhere they want to. I've been down to Hartford.
Nice park down there.

Paul Woodard I'd like to see the Conservation Commission take over
more land to keep it natural. But I don't know
whether they want to put the taxes to that. I wish
that yearsago they could have latched onto more
land. It's too late now. But it'll be more too late
in a few years.

Dorothy King Anything I don't sell@-now if I were to sell those
three lots down there that would come out of it,
those three acres--but anything I don't sell is to
be left to the town for conservation. Nothing to be
built on it, to be kept forever as it is now.

historical resources

Ed-ward Field, $r. Right now I'm working on a story@ about a sawmill
that was located in a -woodsy part of town east of
whatts now Route 63. It was the most unlikely
place for a sawmill. It was a member of myfamily
that built it. All my life I've been hearing about
@it. To me, here is one opportunity for a hiking
trail. It would be a spot -worthwhile. The be at part
of the dam-is still there. It's in native rock. And
part of the foundation. It's quite plain,what went
on.

it was the imagination of the man who built it
which.intrigued me. There was an old road that went
by there,and I suspect that he walked that road
often, working up his ideas.

Right down here was a one-horse-power cider mill.
It was a platform along side of the road. They
dumped apples on it. The horse walked around on
top and operated the machine that cut the apples up
and also worked the screws that crushed them. I
don't think anybody in town knows that now. When I
.was growing up the remains were still there, and I
was always told, this was the cider mill. My dad
explained part of the operation.

Another one was a barrel and wooden pail shop down
on Long Plain. On the brook out in back of the
Mitchell apple farm. No one would ever suspect it
now.

Then down below was another sawmill, originally an
up-and-down saw.. This was right next to Route 63.
In order to get enough water they dug a ditch all
the way across Bull Hill Road over to theLong Plain
Brook. The remains of the ditch are still visible.

Fannie-Taylor Carlyle Field.9 he has. 2 daughters and 3 sons.. Four
of them have built houses or bought trailers into
that. section on. that land. There was quite A
large farm, i guess it was over 200 acres. . . But
some of.it's been sold for building lots, some of
it's been sold for woodlots. But to me it's inter-
esting because they have, that whole family-has kept
together enough so that its gone from one generation
to another. Some children lived there awhile and
they were the 6th.generation. I don't know how long
since-it,vas a Field place. -It wasn't built by the
Fields, but it was occupied by the Fields shortly
after that. . .

I don't know much about the other family places.
There are some in North Leverett that. have been
in the family quite awhile. But I don't know those
people so well. But they're interesting places be-
cause -of the fact they're old and have been restored
some of them.

Clifford Blinn I've been in the Historical Society since before it
started, cause this buil ding was started as a recrea-
tion-for this part of town. To start with, the
building was going to be torn.down. And a group got
together and met with the selectmen to see if they
couldn't get permission to fix it up. We fixed it
up as a North Leverett Recreation Building, which
was then used as a library also. After that, the
Historical Society was started and the two groups
combined. The library was used for 3-4 years. After
that, people lost interest. . I

It's used now for Historical Society meetings and
any group that wants to use it--they have showers
here. It's still a community building. Theboy
scouts and the girl scouts started using it just
this week. -I guess they'll meet one month up here
and one month down at the other end of town. We
still feel that the community made it possible to
start with to renovate the building.

The only thing I can say is distinctive (About Moore's
Corner) is this building. Everybody just gets to-
gether and if there's something to be done, they do
it. Ther.help each.other out. Somebody needs some-
thing done, why, they go helpthem. That's it. They
don't ask to be paid for it. They just volunteer to
-help them. I think this is something that's unusual
in a lot of other places. When the work was done on
the building, all of the families pitched in and
helped.

Charles Linscott Th6rels-celler holes up through.there. There used
to be a co=unity up through there you know.. 5 or,
6 holes-. Years-ago, people used to@live there, farmed
there. A couple.of fellows from that section there
went off down.to Connecticut. Worked for a man who.
kept his money in a little safe. Two 'brothers. One
night they took that safe, run of@ with it, came
back here.

The-sheriff:down.here was expecting them. Someone
does something like that, always come back to their
own roost. Set a boy up there, said, when you see
those two [email protected] come down and let me know.
When they come-,'one laid down there beside the road,
went to sleep, and the other took the safe and hid
it somewhere. Sheriff cam by, both of them sleep-
ing. And when they woke up, they was in.chains. In
jail for 20, years.

All that time the safe was hidden. The one who hid
it wouldn't even tell,his-brother where. He died
in prison. Just as he knew he was going to die, he
told him.. But.by the time he got-out, got back
here., the place had changed so, he couldn't find it.
Whether anybody else ever found it or not, nobody
knows. They say that there's $5,000 in it.'

75-8o years ago. Dan Glazier down here told me he
was-12 years old when that heppenea. Said he went
up.there the next morning apd people were out there
rolling thestone walls right down onto the road. . .

If they had a history of how these places got start-
ed, it would make interesting reading. 1 don't know
how they ever made a living up there. They raised
more things that they ate themselves. More self-
sufficient. Made their own clothes to a considerable
extent.

Clifford Graves I was-in the other celebration they had. We made a
float right here in the dooryara. We had an old-
fashioned squaxe dance. My father drove a pair of
horses, you know, we had them all decorated up, and
we made a big platfor'm--16 feet long by about 8 feet.
We had 2 or 3 musicians on there and a gallon of cider.
I was a tree during that thing.

trails

Georgend Bramlage The Conservation Commission essentially has a blank
town to work with.. If we stop the building--the un-
desirable building--now-,:then we-have that much more.
So, logically, I think we are the ones who should be
doing the planning. . .

I'd like to take the Natural Resources Team study as
a basis of planning. Let's say there's a beaver site.
ObviQusly, you can't build a house there. You can
back this up with our zoning right now or the Inland
Wetlands Act. So-you take sites like this and say,
OK this is what we would like to see saved in
Leverett. And then go about procuring these sites,
whether by outright buying or by getting the owner
to say he will open this land for people to use and
then have the Conservation Commission regulate its
use.

(I would wonder how much acreage the town would be
willing to get--which means how much tax money might
be spent and how much taxable land set aside. And
secondly I wonder how effective land acquisition is
as a planning technique. Though acquisition
may traditionally be the main thing Conservation
Commissions do, if this one's undertaking more of a
planning and lang-range interest, I wonder what
other techniques it might devise to this end.)

Ok. Leverett has a lot of old roads, some of which
the town owns, some of which are old logging roads.
It's a beautiful system of trails, which I understand
the utility company already.has marked out for hiking,
snowmobiles and such. So we can incorporate this. . .
But you have to get people in town to realize.the
need for it. If you don't do something now, ten
years from now, it's going to be worse. You've got
to let snowmobiles go somewhere. You're not going
to get rid of them completely. You're not going to
get rid of people completely. A function of the
Commission, too, is education.

(Could a trail system be a priority for the Commission?
If your aim is to have a finger on.the whole town's
growth., this.might best be accomplished through-an
open:space.network extending throughout the town.
Rather than one 6r@two big public landholdings.)

Georgene Bramlage Yes. I think.that would be easier at.this point,
really. Because a lot of these woodroads axe still
under town control. @This gives us a basis.

William Bramlage The Selectmen are afraid of someone building a house
up on an old road and saying, Ok, here I an, now
maintain the road.

(Perhaps there could be a system of designations of
town ways: some.for bridle ways, some for walkers,
some for.snowmobiles, some for cars. Instead of the
automotive monopoly that now exists. This could
limit the reactivation of -wooaroads to car traffic.
After all, these roads were not originally devised
for cars. I don't see why, as the town landscape is
revitalized, it has to be totally in terms of the
automobile's values. . . A trail system might also
use the town's natural drainage system for corridors.)

Georgene Braml,age It would he.Lp-disperse recreational use throughout
the town's landscape. It could maybe control where
people go.

Phillip Woodard You don't have to contend here, as you do in many
small towns, with large amounts of tourists. It's
at a minimum. So there's not the scramble, there's
not big gift shops . . . Of course, we don't have
any real attraction . . . And this is maybe to our
advantage, not to attract too many people.

Other than those that perhaps just like to meander
through and take walks through the woods and relax.
Which a lot of-people do. It's surprising if you've
been here any length of time and know people--well,
of course, we don.1t know them as well as we used to--
but you see people just come into town, they'll park
their.car somewhere and walk@around town.. I'm sure
it's just for relaxation, many of these people from
Amherst.

(In light of such.lov-intensity recreational use and
the fact'that most open space in town is going to
remain inprivate ownership, I feel.the.town should
try to@preserve and.enhance its roadsides and formal-
ize a trail system.)

.Phillip Woodard Yeh, I would go along with that to the point that
by-doin&this we don't make it too attractive, which..
then defeats its own.purpose.

There's been talk of using some of the old town ways,
which may or may not be--and I don't know-how we'll
ever prove it@-town property. There's been talk
of using these as trail areas. My only caution there
is we don't want to make these trails too good tothe
point where we'll have a steady strean of--for
instance if they're bridle trails-a steady stream
of cars and horse trailers coming by the dozens and
literally the hundreds to utilize these areas. Be-
cause once you do, you've defeated your purpose.

Without seeming selfish. . . you'want to preserve an
area like this primarily for the people that are here.
I don't think we should feel an obligation to make
it very comfortable and attractive to someone who has
really no basic int@rest in the town. Sayyou have
1,000 people in town and we customarily attracted
several thousand people from out of town in here to
utilize our facilities, then we've defeated our
whole purpose.
It's.fine.for those coming. They can enjoy them-
selves,, but the more people that come into an area,
the less the people already here can enjoy their
peaceful existence. This is very hard to pin down--
to what.degree should these things be developed?

(Do you think they're developed to the right degree
now?)

No, I don't. It's very haphazard as it is now. And
there's no set pattern of use or control of the use.
And I think control of the use is very important.

(I'd hope that formalizing trails somewhat, perhaps,
with agreements between landowners and the Conservation
Commission, would give people.,a central point of, -
information and a place where landowners could take
any complaints about abuse. . .

Fannie Taylor Some people find that walking or riding a bicycle
or.even,just riding@an automobile or riding a horse.
keeps them out of the house-and broadens their inter-
est. And.perhaps it broadens their social life some-
what.
(Does lack of transportation keep children f@om'
getting together?)

Loyce Dunbar If you really want to go somewhere, you can walk. . .
I suppos6.it isn't transportation as much as the parents
don't like to have their children on the highways
perhaps, walking alone. These kids do commutei On
-the average, I get three.notes a day from kids saying
they want to go to a friend's house.-

Homer Germain They used to have a path, and everybody who came up
here, they didn't go on the road here. They always
took the path. M y wife's afraid to go out there on
the road. A car brushed her coat one day.

Elizabeth Germain I was just as tight to the bank as I could. Well,
that scared me. I know.I couldn't jump up that bank.
I'm not that limber. We'need someplace that is safe
to walk, where the cars can't go.

CHow would you feel about a town trail over your
land along the Sawmill River?) -

Charles Linscott That'd be alright. Couldn't do any harm. People
use it already. I'm not using it.

Vernon Aiken The only trouble is you always have a few that are
kind.of careless. Certain times of the year there's
a lot-of danger of fires. And in the summertime I
have it fenced to pasture right along the river.

Clifford Blinn I don't see the advantage of a trail for the dam
sites. They're all right beside the road.

Mrs. Walter Carey I think it would be great to.have hiking trails.
-Healthful. People are too sedentary now. They sit
around watching TV. I think if they had-something
like that, it would really be to everyone's advantage.
I would really love to see that, I really would.

the public landscape

Frances King We were in Germany on sabbatical. Sometimes there'll
be a great park, and you keep looking for the park.
It.'s simply farms the way they've always been, but
they've put a ban on doing anything.but farming. Which
keeps the land open. And the government subsidizes
these farmers so that they won't leave the-land. They
have footpaths through parts of it. But people do
not misuse the land they are allowed to hike on.

(Ts anything in that model applicable to Leverett?
We seem to be dealing with an environment at least
as valuable.for its cultural aspects as its natural
features. How do you keep that alive and make it
accessible? To what degree can the whole Leverett
landscape be considered a park or at least a resource
meriting public attention?)

The-state would have to provide subsidies or incen-
tives.

(Preferential taxation of farmland is a start.)

It sure is. We hope it will be enough.

(I would pick-up on the footpath part.of your model
as something that could be accomplished on the town
level--by the Conservation Commission. Use and
appreciation is your best argument for preservation.)

The M&M trail, which Gordon maintains with student
help, is an example of this. It goes entirely
through private land. They got permission from-all
the landowners.

Gordon King The best way to keep a trail open is to use it.

Frances King Unfortunately, our own people aren't educated yet to
hike. The great bulk of people want to drive somewhere
in a car and maybe get out and have a picnic. We
really have to educate our people to use this kind
of land. We can't just let them loose. Maybe you
ought to have a license to use public lands. Ana to
get one you have to take a little course on outdoor
manners.

Gordon King Holland has this in some of its parks.

(Applying.your model.further, I wonder if-the town
could develop its public interest in the use of rural
resources. Beef to keep the fields open.. Sugaring
to keep.the roadside maples. Advilsing people how-
to.manage their land for timber, wildlife, aesthetics.
There are existing means.of encouraging these activities
through extension'service and the like, but those
agencies are perha@s-a bit distant from the perspective
of the local landowner. Are there other means of
public involvement with private land uses?)

Frances-King They might develop in time, but this is really quite
a large order. For a town in the old New England
tradition, where your land was yours and you did what
you liked -with it. The idea of controlling land is
still difficult for us New Englanders to accept. But
I think.it.is necessary. What makes it difficult is
that the necessity for it doesn't show yet. Most
everybody's backyard runs into the woods.

The kids from the neighborhood over near our pasture
all run down and look at the cows. As long as they
don't leave the gate open-, we don't mind. And most
Leverett folk are like that. They're all hospitable.
But I can.see with the influx of a new kind of person--
just new people--and people who on a fine day are
looking for a place like Leverett, we've got somehow
to be.prepared for this. Because they're going to
come.

Edward Field, Sr. I am very much in favor of opening up vistas and
.cleaning out brush. I like the-idea of picnic sites.
I think the general public is becoming educated to
taking care of these sites themselves. I don't
think that in the near future you're going to need
the caretakers you had to have at one time. I think
the general public will police those places.

(I share that optimism. While in England I was very
impressed by the public paths, -which often cross
private property, even working farms, with very
little vandalism or the like.)

This is one of my problems. I'm afraid I don't have
the.sense of ownership that a lot of people have.
I feel that, well,'I have it for a while, my lifetime,
and it's.great to feel that I possess it possibly.
But if people want to use.my property and know how
to take care of it, I have no objections. Fences I
don't like.

Clifford Blinn I guess I'm old fashioned. I feel it's.my:own land,
wny-should I ask.for troubleT. Years:back'a lot of
people from Chicopee and Springfield cl6aned:.out all
the game here. When they did-this-, they were cutting
fences and being destructive.' People got sick of it.

So they formed the North Leverett Sportsmen Club.
This consists of four square miles, goes from Lake
Wyola down to Montague Woods, which is this side of
the@railroad. When it vas-formed all the landowners
were members and posted their lands.. We stocked
fish, white hares%, pheasants. There's still good
fish in thebrook. Had regular meetings all the
time. 20-30 people.

It'swhat I call controlled posting. Each landowner
had a'membership card and two guest cards. Anyone
wanted to come in, just had to see a member and get
a guest card, which was good for one day.

Frances King We've already had that brook down there destroyed
by people, by overuse. At one time there was a
beautiful old milldam down there with a deep swimming,
pool--it was 14 feet deep where the waterfall kind
.of gouged it@out. And I guess for 200 years that had
been Leverett's swimming hole for all the kids around.

As soon as Amherst began to grow, students discovered
it. And they didn't care so much about its beauty
or its swimming, but they found they could hide up
behind the dam and break the drinking laws and have
big bashes up there. Then they'd smash their bottles
to get rid of the evidence, and when the Leverett
children went swimming, they'd cut their feet on
the glass.

Then the mothers from the new housingdevelopments
in Amherst would come out in droves--with their
children move into the backyard down here, dump their
garbage all over the place. Gordon and I used to go
down every Sunday afternoon and pick up bushel bask-
etsful.

Students and children would push the big stones off
the dam to hear them splash... When they finally
pushed out the keystones, one day there was a big
rainstorm, 'and-the whole dam.fell down* So now
there's no more swimming hole. The place is ruined.

David Fife (Could you compare this landscape to the English
countryside? Which.has I would say a-longer-history
of.sort of intimate human involvement with.the land,
and perhaps.at thi@@point a stronger'senae of what
might be balled the public landscape or.public rights
or interests in the-landscape-the idea of private -, ,
ownership being somewhat moderated there compared to
the American scene.)

Well, I think the thing that impressed.me most about
America is there is so much land. I mean you talk
of all these problems, which are.very,real, but then
you go to England where there are so.many people on
such.a little island, comparatively speaking. Folk
just have to give a little for everyone to live.
harmoniously. . . So I think there's more willingness
to let some sort of authority dictate in zome areas.

(Would you.expect that sort of consciousness to
develop,among Americans faced with the pressures of
growth?)

I think it is developing, even nationally in the-last
ten years. But it has to be a give and take.
The public footpaths I'm thinking about, near London
where we lived, are across fields where people axe
farming and.have animals. If you leave a can around,
some cow is..-going.-to bemutilated on the can. If
you-leave,.the gate open, it's going to stray right.
out. These things work together. The landowners
realize, over the centuries, they have a sort of
concern.for people who don't own the land. And the
people in turn respond, hopefully, by just using it
as pleasure.

Then there are government lands that"people can graze
-their animals over. It's always give and.-take. My
favorite golf course was one where once or twice you'd
hit a.cow or a sheep. It was an old common.

openness

David Fife (Are there differences in visual character between
English and New% England landscapes?)

A thing that struck.us when we came here was to see
all these hills covered with trees. In fact, you'd
prefer if there were some open spaces on a purely
human level so you could look at some landscape once
you climb the hills.

Portia Weiskel Coming out from Amherst, just as you pass the inter-
section of Teevaddle Hill Road,and Juggler Meadow
Road, coming this.way on the left is a very beautiful
expanse of pasture and field with stone wall. It's
just exquisite and I would hate to see that go. And
it's always beautiful, no matter what the season, no
matter what the time of day, it's beautiful.

The view from the top of Cave Hill@Road looking into
North Leverett is exquisite.

Clifford Graves You can hire tractors with old big rotaries--they
don't cost much--to go in and cut it. It's awful to
have them close in cause they close in faster than
you think they do. It gradually creeps in.

You know when ve used to run a farm--anybody--they'd
go around those edges and get every single spear
of grass there was with a hand scythe. And you'd go
around with a rake and rake it just as clean as could
be. The whole thing would be clean when you got done.
Now when they hay, they leave the stuff scattered all
over the fields you know, bunches of stuff that the
bailer leaves.

No, I should like awful well to see them keep the
mowings open. Now mine started to crowd two years
ago, and I got.a tractor in there and he Igot all he
could get. There's a few alders over there he didn't
get. Cause that was going to be just a mess of
alders over there in a short time.

Chester Woodard It's growing lip now to brush. You don't see many
nice pastures and open land anymore.. Course I can't
say much.. I planted trees on mine.

(Are any lands in Leverett affected by.the new pre-
ferential taxation of agriculture?)

No farmers.

But I should think if they managed the land as farm-
land., they could keep the value down. Of course,
there's always the possibility of putting it under
forestry law. $10 value on the land, per acre. Just
got our second one. . . I read the laws 2-j times,
but it didn't sink,in too much. I didn't think
anybody'd try it. It's a state law, just remodeled
two years ago.

(Will more people be taking advantage of it?)

Too complicated.

Vernon Aiken The pasturing (of horses) keeps it.down pretty well.
You should clip in every year, too. Last year I
didn't get to it because I work six days a week at
the University. We hope to do a little more. My
neighbor raises a few goats, and he grows some corn
on my land.

I have thought some about beef cattle. You just have
to have a shed they can go in. . . Most everyone has
fields and would rather have them stay open. It's
hard work to.find anyone to mow.

Constantine Kamansky When we had cattle we had acres and acres of pasture
clean. I go up in the pasture now, I don't even know
where the hell I'm going. I think I'm not on my
own land. Trees up there.30 feet high. And that's
since '48. You got to keep that clean. If you don't,
it grows up.

Charles Roys With that five acres up on Broad Hill Road, we're
toying around with.the idea of getting a couple of.
white@faces and fence that off and just pasture them
up there.

Gordon King We keep 3-4 xhite"face. We raise pigs.. The kids
come home to do the slaughtering and@butchering.
It@smainly for the meat. The fencingIll kill you,
though. This is the biggest problem. We're probably
putting in six more acres of Christmas trees.

(Could the town.go into beef as a management technique
to preserve open,fields?)

Many.parks raise beef to cut down on brush control.
It would really oe up to the property owner. I don't
see how the town could afford it. The fencing would
be prohibitive. Now for an individual-to do it, I
think it would pay. If he has the interest. But
you'd almost have to get someone who's never been
raised on a farm who'd be foolish enough to try it.

John Paczkowski People come up, and they'll cut the hay for us. If
they need it, we just make some kind of arrangement
for them taking it and then giving me some.

If the town wants them to keep cutting the land as
much, as possible they should offer them some assistance.
Maybe something to help the people find someone to
take care of the-land for them.

Rhody McCoy Most horse owners around here rent people's pastures.
So with horses out there, it's green and pretty all
summer. You don't have to worry about it growing up.

But you got to get booked months in advance to get
mown. And they've got to do it at the right time,
too. Yeh, guys go all up and down the road here and
have a hell of a problem getting their hay cut. . .

Have your group, through the town, buy the necessary
equipment.

The University is the biggest dnnn free resource you
got. Untouched. . . It's a state institution. I
pay taxes for.that. Why couldn't some of all those
graduate students there adopt pieces of land out
here and give some advice on managing them?

rural resources

Charles Linscott Well, I think.the country would be better offif we
-e
had some farmers around hex that cultivated the
soil. Don't you?

Constantine Kamanslqj Farmers are getting better prices now than they were
ten years.ago. Farms'll come back. But the young
people, they don't want to farm. The farm stands
there. The old 7 kicks off, and that's it. But
@uy
I told the kids, don't sell this place. Because
someday maybe you'll need it. EverythingIll be so
damn high.

(What determines what you grow?)

The easiest thing you can get away with. Yeaxs ago,
they used to grow.a little bit of everything, do it
the hard way. Used to be down on their knees all
day.. Now you raise sweet corn, there's no work in
,that. You raise potatoes, there.'s no work in that.
One guy can take care of 100 acres.

Fellow down there used to peddle his own stuff, a lot
of stuff. Now he goes to Springfield farmers market
and buys it. He don't raise it cause he's got no
help. He buys it,.and he'-s-still peddling.

Edward Field, Sr. There's a potential sugar bush here. -It's so hard
to get aroundi we gave it up-It would be an excellent
location for a tube and spigot operation.

Vernon Aiken I loved working here for myself. The last of my
working for myself, I worked in the woods, selective
-cutting. The only reason I stopped was in certain
kinds of weather Ild.get so lame I could hardly move.
I thought I better get a job indoors.

Walter Carey I knovthey do it different now than they used to.
When ve cut off lots years ago, we'd cut down pretty
small. But now the lots are marked.trees. We need
just so much, so we say, well, maybe'25---30.year.9,
there'll be another cutting.. And maybe quicker than
that. Because they leave some big trees to seed in
And-it does make it look a lot better'. it doesn't
make it look, you know, stripped.

A lot of them, particularly the state, are kicking
about having you on their lots withsome of these
big machines that, you knov, pull the trees up. . .
They maybe can get them out cheaper, but it destroys
so much ypiu-ig growth, you lose in the long run. . .

.(What's the preferred timber species?)

Well, of course the pine grows much faster.

(So from a lumbering point of view you'd rather see
a young stand of pine?)

That's rignt.

CWhat's itlusea for eventually?)

Well, they@sell it everywhere. Boston,-all around.
lwouldnlts@ay what they make it into. Of course,
it isn't building material, because pine is so much
softer than hemlock.-

(So there's quite a demand for hemlock?)

Yes, there is. And of course it makes a much
stronger house. Once in a while they do use pine,
but it doesn't have the strength.

(How has that sawmill being revitalized affected
North Leverett?)

Clifford Graves Well, it's put it back the way it used to-be. It
keeps one of the oldest things around. See that
mill is one that people-drew long timbers for miles
around to have sawed, because it would saw a.longer
timber than any mill in the entire area--like that
board there hanging up with the sign on it. Oh,.
I think that's a great improvement. It keeps the
old village back the way it should be.

-the regional context.

James Cope I expect the area population will continue to increase
but perhaps at a somewhat lesser rate. I think the
University is serious about limiting its own size.
At least for a period, I would say for a decade.
Once they hit 25,000 1 think they probably would have
put on so many brakes that that will tend.to level
them off--have them at a plateau for at least 10
years. Beyond that, no one can.really predict what
would happen. They're now at about 23,000.

(Is the present physical environment of Amherst caught
up to those numbers@-are there enough facilities,
housing, highways,.etc?)

I think it's pretty much kept pace, although not
everybody wants to live in Amherst, of course. There
are apartment vacancies at present. So as the Univer-
sity grows, this next small increment, that housing
will perhaps absorb most of that.

(Have those vacancies'dampened the tendency to build?)

Oh yes, absolutely. But at the sam time 'that that
.was happening, the town made a zoning change that no
longer permitted apartments in the neighborhood
resident zone, which is one of the very large zones
in the town. So this really put a damper on apart-
ment construction.

(Would you see in the future any possibility of
sharing facilities with Leverett?)

I would think in terms of solid waste that's a strong
possibility.

The school system already is partly combined.

I'm not sure what kinds of agreements may or may not
exist among police departments and fire departments
for mutual assistance, etc.

9.3

James Cope I think the operational problems-if several towns
get.together and buy a road grader, snow plows or
other equipment--may outweigh the savings. But then
again that may depend on the specific location, an d
perhaps those kinds of things can be worked out.

(How soon would Amherst be looking for a new land-
fill? A need 5-10 years from now.has been mentioned
to me in Leverett.)

We're looking at a system that will handle both sew-
age sludge and solid waste and combine them and turn
them into a fuel for the University steam plant.
Which is a pretty exciting kind of proposal, and one
which may require a lot of solid wa*ste in order to
operate efficiently. So Leverett's problem may be
solved by this system. But I'm not sure about that.
They're just starting the study.

(Does Amherst have sufficient recreational facilities?)

When the North Amherst recreation area is done we'll
probably be in pretty good shape. The thing we're
deficient in is water-based recreation, and you're
pretty limited in hov to do something about that if
you don't have any lakes in the town. Developments
are providing more and more recreation areas within
their boundaries, so the demand is a.little different
than.it used to be when everybody was in a single family
house.

One reason for the.SCOG Report's recommendations on
clustering and op en space is that we didn't want to
ultimately get into a situation like Springfield,
where the only place to find open space is outside
the town boundaries.

(What's-your attitude toward outsiders-people from
Leverett-coming and using Amherst parks?)

As long as they don't prevent Amherst people from
coming up and cross-country skiing in Leverett. I
think the -best situation is where you have a recipro-
cal arrangem*ent. It may not have to be a formal
agreement of any kind. It can Just be a live and
let live -kind of thing.

James Cope I think.the most important thing is attitude. Qne
of good.will and cooperation. With..that, then-may
be the Leverett Conservation Comniiszion might be able
to get things like trespass rights.from certain
landowners for hiking and skiing trails, etc. I
think that that's an important thing to try and put
across.

(I s there any possibility of-Amherst sever and water
lines ever being extended into the southern part of
Leverett?)

I think a lot of thought -would have-to be given to
that beforehand. We just finished a study, the
report of the Select Committee.on Goals (SCOG). And
it recommended there be limited extensions of
utilities, essentially in order to.prevent the kind
of sprawl-situation that we tend to get when sewers
are just extended willy-nilly, or water or whatever.

I personally would like to see what Leverett.'s
intentions are in.terms of growth. If they are
interested in undertaking some kind of study of what
the future pattern of I-and use ought to be or might
be. And after looking at alternatives, arrive at
some kind of pattern that's consistent with what
Amherst has chosen to do--that is concentrating on
villages rather than endless amoebic sprawl. Then
something might be worked out.

Everything is tied together and all of the villages
that have been designated essentially have some
water and sewer provided already. What is going to
happen, I.think, is that extensions of utilities in
areas outside the villages will be discouraged, if
not eliminated. And in the villages, they'll be
improved and enlarged to accommodate growth at these
places. That's the way it's worked.

If there were to be a--letts make believe that Amherst's
boundaries didn't exist--a new village that has no
utility support at the present time, then I expect
that there would be some kind of a connection made.

After studying the potential-effects of various
policies, Amherst would be.reluctant to extend sewers
to Leverett.and permit Leverett.to permit.uncontrolled,
sprawli,ng.development. If there were some committment
made by Leverett to work toward a land use pattern. -
that is consistent with Amherst's then there.may very
well be a good chance that utilities could be extended.

James Cope (Thegoal that I've been able to. gather.from . most
people in Leverett is to. keep,things. the way. they
are nov. To a degree there's som ething functioning
in the private sector to preserve large parcels--
what you might call the privacy factor. The people
that are getting into Leverett at this point in
time--that have-money and can buy fairly large tracts--
want to keep their places open for their own use.
And as long as taxes or something else doesn't push
them too much, they likely would. So one might think
in terms of restraining the general growth of the town
in order to keep the taxes low and to.keep the
pressure low on these.people. The question would
become, do you see the pressures in this region as
becoming so great.in the next 15 or 20 years that
that natural pattern would be disrupted by market
pressures?)

I think it would be. I think that even if the
University levels off there's going to be a continued
growth in migration of people.

(Why?)

I think the general area offers a way of life that
people desire.

A kind of balance. You have the amenities of urban
areas. Such as a lot of movies to choose from-or
big libraries and cultural activities. And yet you
have a small scale environment, one that you can
deal with very easily.

It may be that there would be no jobs or too few jobs.
But employers as well as,employees. would be interested,
in locating here. We've got improving transportation.
You wind up with a work force that's happy in gener-
al. I think these are some real attractions to
establishing a place of employment in the area.

I don't think that there's a likelihood that Leverett
will decline--it's not in Appalachia. The rate of
growth.for the whole region may be slower than the
past 20 years, say, but that doesn't mean that the
processes won't occur. It just may take them a bit
longer.

I think the people in Amherst like Leverett just the
way it is, too, and would be.disappointed to see it
wrecked by one form or another.

James Cope (Would there be amarket for a subdivision in
Leverett right now9)

I don't know,. Land is expensive and getting more
expensive just about everywhere. In Amherst., build-
ing lots are going-for $10,000 and up. Steve Puffer,
who owns some lots in North Amherst, has been offered
$10,000 and has refused since he thinks he's going
to be able to get $12,obo. And he knows what's going
on. So the.high cost of land serves as a dampener
on development of single family houses, I would say.

There's really a limited market. The land costs
$10,000, it would cost you $25,boo-to build. Then
you've got a $35,600,house. Ana there aren't.all
that many people that can afford a mortgage with
today's interest rates.

So I think there'll be sort of a constant production
.of single family houses at a relatively low rate.
But that doesn't help the young families who want to
buy a house because when production of single family
new houses is either low, or the prices of them.are
high, that drives up the price of existing houses,
and so all housing becomes expensive.

I don't know quite how to solve that one. I can't
figure outhow it's going to continue.

(Is there enough building space left in Amherst?)

There's becoming less space in Amherst right now
because people are uptight about how big the town
has grown and so they're erecting barriers of various
kinds. And I think this will cause spillover to a
greater extent in other towns.

(Town utilities being perhaps the main advantage of
building here, how much sewered space is left--space
within your designated villages?)

That has yet to be determined. All we've done so
far is locate the general location of these villages.
This summer we're creating a position called SCOG
Implementer to.specifically study North Amherst and
Cushman villages first to see what land is suitable
for development., what kinds of development should
best be located there. So we don't really know quite
yet.

Fred Muehle One of the things we were supposed to:do this year
was to.lookat@regi,onal water-and sever supply.
There might.have.been the possibility.that Leverett
may.'have been tied in with a larger geographical
area. They could have been put into a system where
instead-of one town supporting the cost, four or
five are. When you look at regionalization, those
kinds'of facilities, you can get all sorts of differ@
ent kinds ofgrowth patterns going if you want to.
I.would.think that if Leverett could satisfy its
sewerage and water requirements, it could accept more
growth.than without it. Politically, that may be
a disaster.

It's difficult among hilltowns. I'm not saying it's
going to happen. But I'm saying you might have been
able to feed villages, and let villages act as growth
centers, if you wanted that.

(Who is to determine whether a town wants that?)

Well, at this stage of the game, the group that
."'-determines it under the home-rule system in Massa-
chusetts is the local community. I'm not going to
propose that that be changed. I'm just wondering if
home-rule isn't dying, not because it is not a good
way to do business in theary,.but under a practical
situation you.can't do business, because there are
so many influences that spill over into other towns.

For example, you know, why should.Sunderland be taking
the heat as much as they are, when Leveretti for ex-
ample, can say, No, we don't want any of this kind
of stuff. So OK, then they say, Sunderland should
do the same thing Leverett's doing. But I just won-
der how long you can stop the sea, OK? I think that
thinking is going to have to become more intertwined
over a larger area. People are going to have to start
taking down their town bounds on sorae things.

(What regional factors should Leverett consider?)

Certain sorts of zoning decisions, I would say, would
probably have to be done vith.regional thinking in-
volved. A classic example is, you know., somebody
comes in and puts up a 60-unit development on the
edge of Leverett, up towards Montague. Montague's
going to get a piece of the action in terms of traffic,
dogs, kids.

Fred Muehle Maybe Shutesbury will get it--Lake Wvola-they.'ll
all be flocking.over.there to go swimming. They!ll
be riding back and forth to,Amherst, so Amherst is
going to have to do something. When it comes to
that kind of scale, I think we ought to open up the
decision making process to more.than just one community
because the guy next door is affected.

Ana then we get the situation that let's say Leverett
had the last piece of Whooping Creme habitat in New
England.. -Does Leverettreally have the option to
say, Well, so what if that's Whooping Crane habitat,
we'll let a guy put a housing unit on it. There are
other people that care about that thing, OK? That
whole decision making system has got to be broadened.

I'm getting paid to try.to do something like that
this year. The direction I'm going in is I'd like
to-define certain natural things that serve a region-
al interest. -Examples of thatare flood plains,
significant wetlands, the hills over so many feet.
Another critical thing is not an area itself, but a
magnitude or type of operation. We talked about the
major development that spills over into two towns,
but-you can also have very small things. When the
bituminous plant down in Sunderland is belching smoke
..all over the place, I classify that as a regional
influence, because you can sit down at UMass and
smell it.

Tax rates still do a lot of.talking around here, OK?
And if it's in my town, I'm willing to put -up with
a little bit more soot in the air because my taxes
are down-two dollars. But how about the guy downwind
of that? Should his taxes not go down two dollars
also? Or maybe mine should.go down a buck and his
should go down a buck.

(So would there be a county board that would pass
on local zoning decisions?) -

I would like to see some kind of-regional board.
Just how it's going to be structured or.how strong
it's going to be, I don't know. And the reason I
don't know,,is that we'll need special legislation.

Fred Muehle (What other regional services do you offer?)

There are services not in the hardware style. For
example 'by,1974, state law says that all communities
in the Commonwealth will have a building inspector
who will be registered and certified. And it's just
foolish in my opinion.to see Shutesbury have a
$10,600 building inspector, Leverett have a $10,000
building inspe ctor, Warwick having one, etc. and so
forth. So I've proposed a regional-building inspector
group.

We give a lot of technical assistance on grant appli-
cations, things like that, because we've got statis-
.tics here that those boxes want. We won't do local
planning per se, but we will provide guidance on .
local planning. For example, they want their zoning
law changed around or updated, I'll help them. If
they want to do a master plan, we've got a couple of
ways of doing that. We.'ll review subdivision control
ordinances, and we may even almost write one for a
town.

We haven't gotten around yet, I'm not even sure we're
going to, to making plans that say this area is that.
We've sort of stayed with what we call a policy plan.
For the simple reason that in-Franklin County, where
you have a relatively undefined situation, you get-
into all sorts of troubles saying this should be
that. How do you say in Leverett, for example, this
should be an industrial area, when it looks like the
piece of land across the street that you just zonea
single family residence because there's no sewerage,
no water, no decent road.

So we've made a policy plan. The policy plan says
we should maintain Franklin County character. That's
pretty weak, I'll admit that. But the point is at
least it says, you know, listen, when something
happens in your town, one of the things that you like
around here--and we found t 'his out--you like the way
Franklin County looks. I guess we're forcing these
people to make subjective judgements as to what they
like and what they don't like. But I don't-knov
how to honestly do it any other way-, because the
county is so homogeneous in a way that nothing
really stands out as saying this should happen here.

100

Fred Muehle (It seems that.that fact might also give you the
chance to ask, whether you want growth..1

I guess Vd.have to say that county thinking wants
growth., but growth.that's acceptable. One of the
good things about growth is that we've got in the
countya 8.5% unemployment rate, vhich.is fairly
.high. Certain pockets such as Greenfield and Montague,
the-industrialized areas, are running in the.10%
category. If we all had secure jobs and were all
making good money, you probably could say we don't
want any more growth, we.'re all.set. But what are
we.going to do with these people who aren't set and
need a job?. One of the ways to get jobs is to get
certain types of growth.

There are also certain amenities in life that you
can't get around here. I always say there's not a
decent delicatessen in the whole of Franklin County,
if you want to use that as a criterion for choic&.

(What would you like to know from Leverett?)

I'd like to know if they think the region is a
legitimate way for doi,ng-business, more than anything
else. If they'd be cooperative in expanding their
decision making,process to outside their bounds.

I would like to know what they want to be tomorrow.
I don't think I know.that. But I would like to see
a consensus, and a legitimate consensus. I want the
guy that cuts wood up on Rattlesnake Gutter Road to
have an equal amount of say and weight in a decision
as some guy who's a Ph.D. down at Wass who's making
good money. I suppose I'd like to see Leverett sit
down and say this is vhat.we're going to be. Let
them hash it over in there and then let their neigh-
bors hash it over. And I classify myself as one of
their neighbors.

101

o- Ha914 A-im v-

ril9w,T--t

22s-

profi/es

Verh6t Aiken was born-in Leverett and has lived here
all. his life, 61 -years. He owns :77 acres on North
Leverett Road, which he used to farm. He now works
at the University of Massachusetts-
Clifford Blinn is a life-long Moore's Corner resident.
He is chairman of the Leverett-School Committee and
the Leverett Historical Society and has been a selectman.
Georgen&@Bramlage is,a botanist at UMass, as well as
a housewife and mother. She is secretary of the Con-
servation Commission. Born and schooled in Ohio, she
has also lived in Amherst. The,Bramlages reside on
5.5 acres on Cave Hill Road.

William Bramlage, like his wife, teaches.at UMass.
He is 37, had lived in Leverett nine years, and is
secretary of the Planning Board. Previously., he has
lived in California, Maryland and Ohio, where he was born.

Robert Brown is an Amherst realtor.

Walter Carey is a lumberman who lives in Moore's Corner.
Xrs. Walter Carey--works outside of town, as well as
being a housewife.
Pat.Conklin, 28:, has lived in North Leverett four years.
Born.in Nebraska, she has lived in New Jersey, Provi-
dence, Boston, Winthrop and Belchertown. @Ilbe.helps
farm.the ten acres she owns and, writes for the Amherst
Record.

Raymond Cosseboom came here nine years ago to retire.
He is minister of the Congregational Ch urch in Lever-
'ett Center and owns land on'Long Hill Road.
James Cope, 28, is Amherst's.town planner. Before
moving there, he had lived in Cambridge., Mass.; Conn-
ecticut, New York and Michigan, his home state..
Loyce Dunbar retired this year at 65, after many years
of teaching in the Leverett Elementary School. She
owns seven acres on Amherst Road.

David Evans is a selectman, Leverett Civil Defense
Director and chairman of the Board of Health. 41 years
old, he has lived in Leverett nine years and owns 6.3
acres on Shutesbury Road. He was born in Pennsylvania
,and has lived in Arizona. He teaches at UMass.

103

Edward Field, Sr. is a retired locomotive engineer
who lives on Long Hill Road. He has lived in Lever-
ett 30 years and owns 100 acres. His fanily was
among the town's first settlers, Pnd he is on the
Bicentennial Committee.
Jonathan Field is nine years old and a student at
Leverett Elementary School. He has also lived else-
where in New England.

Linda Field is a student at Leverett Elementary School.
David Fife, who is minister of the North..Leverett
Baptist Church-, was born in England...Re has lived
here six years and is 32.
William 716ge is 62 and has lived in Leverett 13 years.
He is pastor.of the Moore's Corner.Church.
Homer Germain, a carpenter, has lived in East Leverett
'50 -Vears. He was born in Somerville-.

Elizabeth Adams Germain was born in Leverett. The
Germains own 60 acres.-
Terry Glazier, 25,.runs the Leverett Post Office.
She grew up in Leverett.
Clifford Graves was born in 1906.in.North,Leverett,
where he has livea.P11 his life. He was Leverett's
first fire chief and was tree warden and roads super-
intendent for 20 years. He owns ll.acres.
Holly Greeley, who has lived in Leverett all her life,
is a student at Lev6rett Elementary School.
Denzel Hankinson, 58, teaches.at UMass. A town resident
for.25 years, he has been a Selectman. He owns 102 ,
acres on Amherst Road. He aiso has lived in New Jersey,
Connecticut, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, where
he was born.

Susan Hoadley, nine years old and a student at Lever-
ett Elementary School, hes lived here all her life.
Gerald Jackson, owns 130 acres on Route 63, where he
is selling house lots.
Constantine Kamansky farms on Long Plain, where he
owns 20 acres in Leverett. Although born in Sunder-
land, he has lived here since he was two'years old.
He is 63.
Dorothy King, 85 years old, came to Leverett 44 years
ago. She has built or restored 21 houses in town.
She was born in Connecticut, and has lived in New
York and Arizona. She owns 77 acres.

Frances King is a housewife and former teacher who
has lived in East Leverett 23 years. She has served
on the School Committee and Finance Committee.

lo4,

Gordon King, 5 -6, teaches Landscape Architecture at
UMass. Born in New Jersey, he has lived in West
Africa and Michigan. The Kings own 70 acres. He is
Town Fire Chief.

Larry LaClaire, who lives on Rattlesnake Gutter Road,
is Leverett's Road Superintendent.
Matthew LaClaire, of Dudleyville Road, is twelve
years old and a student.

Nick.Lenz is a bricklayer and trainer of bonsai, who
owns-13-.8 acres on North.Leverett@Road. He is 33
and has lived here six years. Born in Illinois, he
has also lived'in California, Wisconsin and Germany.
Alice Levotson, 29, is Principal of the Leverett
Elementary School. She has lived in East Leverett
five years, and before that in Illinois, Virginia,
Hawaii, California, New York and Ohio, where she
was born and educated.
Charles Linscott owns 38 acres in North.Leverett, which
he once farmed * He how works in a lumber yard in
North Amherst. He has lived here since 1938.

James Lumley is an Amherst realtor.

Rh6d:@ McCoy has lived in Moore's Corner about two
years, where lie owns about 100 acres. He teaches
Education at TiMass.

Fred Muehle is Franklin County's regional planner.

John Paczkowski has lived on 200 acres on Cave Hill
Road@for 12-years. He is an electrician.
Nancy Parr lives on North Leverett Road.

Robert Raskevitz, recent Planning Board Chairman and
Constable, is a heavy equipment operator.. He
is 34 and has lived here 11 years, owning 85 acres.
Born in Northampton, while in the Navy he also lived
in Illinois, Virginia, Rhode Island and Boston. He
resides on Long Plain Road.
Peter Robinson is a UMass geologist, aged 41. He
lived on Shutesbury '@oad ten years and owns 50
acres. He is on the Conservation Commission. Born
in New Hampshire, he has also lived in New Zealand,
Utah, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Charles Roys teaches physical education in Springfield.

Ursula Roys, his mother, owns about 150 acres in East
Leverett, where she resides. She is on the Bicentennial
Committee.

Barry Schonhaut, 25, is a film-maker who has lived
in Leverett Center for three years. He is from New
York.

105

Joanna Stone, a silversmith, is vice-president.of
Leverett Craftsmen and Artists,-Inc.- She is 28 and
had lived in North Leverett two years. Born in
Washington, D.C., she has also lived in New Hampshire,
New-York, Michigan and Denmark.
Peter Steve teaches in Greenfield and lives on Depot
Road.- He is on the Finance Committee.

Fannie Taylor is 90 years old. She has lived in
Leverett 79 years and long served as Town Clerk and
Treasurer. She was born in Pelham, Mass. Until
recently,.she owned 40 acres on Amherst Road.
Stephen has lived here two years and owns two
acres in the-center of North Leverett. Born in
-Williamstown!he had also lived in New York and New
Jersey. He is 23. He is a town Field Driver.
Portia Weiskel, 31, is a high school teacher and a
mother. She has lived-in Leverett Center three years.
She was born in Berkeley, California, and has lived
in Arlington, Belmont, Belchertown, New York, Ohio,
New Hampshire and France.
Donald Wise,.42, t eaches Geology at UMass. He has
lived on five acres on Shutesbury Road for three
years. He was born in Pennsylvania and has also lived
in Virginia.

Chester Woodard is a retired builder who has lived
in Leverett all his 76 years. He is a Town Assessor
and has served on the Planning Board and Conservation
Commission and as Constable. He owns 109 acres.

'Paul Woodard has lived in Leverett all his life, 52
years. He is a school bus contractor and coppersmith.
He owns 17 acres on Amherst Road.

Phillip Woodard is head Selectman and a-life-long
Lever ett resident. He owns 23.5 acres and lives on
Long Hill Road. He is a carpenter.
William Carney, the interviewer, presently lives in
North Leverett, where he continues environmental
.,research. Born in Nebraska, he has also lived in
Bermuda, Virginia, Ohio, Hawaii, New Mexico and
North-Carolina. He has traveled extensively in
-Europe and worked extensively in the Berkshires. He
is-25.

MIMI.
. ..... next steps:.....-,

'N@

insight and concensus:-
a summary
of the interviews

Key-Phrases Used
III like Leverett just the way it is right now--
with a couple of less people."
"One-horse farms up through her e." "Everybody
knew everybody." "A country town, where people have
room to stretch." "Most everybody's backyard runs
into the woods."
I'Independent-minded."
I'Essentially, a blank town to work with." "An
influx of newer'people." "Not the scramble."
I'They don't even know what Levere:bt is." "A
random public driving by on their way to somewhere
else *"
VIA place to make a profit." "Something to hold
on to." "Something to fell back on." "A focus for
my travel."
"No one's out in the open." "Developments, no,
never." "Ledge." "Slow growth."
"Something in common." "Want the same things
we do." "Commonality by recognizing and-fostering
diversity."
"I don't mean avoid by restriction, but by attraction,
perhaps." "I don't think they're interested in money
as much.as in their way of life here." "Now you're
living just the way you live in the city."
"Discontent with their.own@immediate environment."
"Taxes. Tax them out of it." "Intruded upon nature
itself." "Don't mean a thing."

109

.'.'Too complicated." "You sort of see folk looking
as though.they might be thinking of building there."
"I have a great deal to learn frox the people.

Key Pattern

Three social types are recognized.in town: the
oldtimers; the professionals, mostly@:professors-; the

students and communalists. Farming is out; work is

elsewhere; the trees.are closing in. The ideal house
is set well back in the woods: birch for a yard; more
contact with nature than people; problems with.ledge.

Land is held, large parcels of it, because that.
way it won"t change. 20 acre, @@00 acre backyards.
It is held-for one's. protection, one's septic tank.,
one's retirement, one's children. Nothing of much

value grows there, except equity.
Community grows from daily contacts and tangible
tasks. The school and the churches,help but the

center store was a definite los's. Sometimes the

defense of the land in a good zoning battle can help
build community. Diversity in the town is appreciated,
but perhaps not as much as smallness--which perhaps
permits diversity to be appreciated. The facts that
Route 63 virtualiy"by-passes the town and that Amherst

appears to have overbuilt are reasons for optimism.
But growth will probably come.

Cofitrasts

Leverett people contrast the country against the.
city, and the contrast has various versions: nature
versus people, individual lots versus tract develop-
ments,.bedroom versus work, life-style versus profit,
seclusion versus services, rootedness versus mobility.
They prize the paradox that each new homebuilder
wishes to be the last in Leverett. They contrast
the integrity of the individual and his or her right

110

to alter land with the right of the town to -preserve
the integrity:of.the environment- They contrast the
means of preserving the quality of life here vith.the
morality of sharing that quality with more people.

And they contrast nice versus too nice,.shying
from the-publicity and rigidity which.might adhere
to-too gooda place.

Analogies

The University of Massachusetts.represents urban
pressure. Sunderland apartment complexes and Hadley
strip development..embody sprawl and land ruination.
In Leverett, Depot Road demonstrates.the effects of
Chapter 90 widening and straightening. Former farms
and-mills symbolize the involvement of people with
the local landscape. Nature, history or beauty are
epitomized by Rattlesnake Gutter, the Brushy Mountain
cellar holes, Roaring Brook, Leverett Pond, the Amherst
Road Maples, the fields on Cave.Hill, and the villages

of Leverett Center and North Leverett.

Attitudes

In dealing with land, Leverett people practice
a basic conservatism, and in dealing with each other,
a basic agreeableness.

Insight and C6hs'ezi�us

Such ways of thinking.about Leverett--such key
phras,es, patterns, paradoxes, analogies, points of
reference',.attitudes and tones--are the fundamental
tools townspeople use to manage their environment.
These are perceptual tools; they organize places in
people's minds. This mental management is basic to
all other environmental management; people act the
way they think.
In a more direct and important sense, these tools
extract the land's.chief resource: satisfaction.
For while the environment fulfills people's physical
needs, it also supplies the kind of spiritual energy
which stems :@rom effective involvement with something
larger than oneself.

The diversity of viewpoint recorded in these
interviews gives all the people of Leverett a chance
to expand their personal appreciation of this place
by expanding their ways of looking at it. At the
same time, the interviews show that many townspeople
share many ideas about what makes Leverett a satis-
fying place. As more people read the interviews,
this consensus will grow.
Backed by a strong consensus, townspeople can
further increase their involvement in Leverett's
'landscape by effective public action to preserve the
values they perceive there.

112

ac ton:
th e co m' m i ttees

By March, 1973, most of the interviews were com-
plete. The Planning Board.and Conservation Commission

now considered how to move from consensus to concerted

action. The two groups decided to delve further in-
to the areas of agreement revealed by the interviews,
in order to frame particular environmental proposals.

The boards established an ad hoc Plan Committee

to set up and coordinate special committees on Water

Resources, Roads and Access, Educational Resources,

and Rural Resources. The Historical Commission,
Bicentennial Community Planning Committee and Leverett
Pond group also agreed to contribute work to the town's

planning process.

The Plan Committee, chaired by Hugh and Lloyd
Kirley and assisted by William Carney, included the
chairmen of the special committees and representatives
from the Planning Board, Conservation Commission,
Bicentennial Committee and Selectmen. This group
met twice in early April to discuss Leverett's
character. Their ideas were presented to the fifty

committee volunteers in the form of a.slide show.

By mid-May, the committee chairmen reported preliminary
findings to the Plan Committee. These reports were

refined over the summer and filed with the Conservation

Commission.

The committees recommended two dozen specific

measures to improve Leverett's environment. Most of
these suggestions were geared to tie into the work
of an existing town board. The proposed actions are

113

aimed not only at imnediate results. Water, roads,
trails, educational and historical sites. and rural
land uses are so extensive throughout.Leverett's
landscape that the proper management.of any one of
'them calls for attention to the whole environment--

and assures that environment of a basic structure.

Major Recommendations

1). That the Health Board submit the following
article to Town Meeting:
To see,if the town will vote to raise and appro-
priate or transfer from available funds, a sum
of $1,000 to the Board of Health to conduct a
hydrological survey of certain portions of the
town containing large quantities of ground water
in order to determine the amounts, sources and
-susceptibility to pollution of such.vater supplies
and to recommend ways of protecting the town's
ground water resource from potential over-use or
contamination.
2). That the Conservation Commission complete a
wetlands map of Leverett.
.3). That the Conservation Commission, Planning Board
and Health Board compile and distribute to potential
land buyers in Leverett, a flyer explaining the
legal and natural constraints on building within
the town.
4). That the Conservation Commission, Planning Board.
and Health Board, through their powers of acqui-
sition and regulation, pay particular attention
to preserving the purity.and scenic quality of
Roaring Brook along Shutesbury Road, of the Saw-
@@mill River-along North Leverett Road, of the stream
along Jackson Hill Road, and of Long Plain Brook
along Route 63.
5). That the Cons ervation Commission continue to
encourage the idea of a Leverett beef grazing assoc-

6). That the Conservation Commission budget approx-
imately $200 to cover publication costs of a
directory to the natural, agricultural, technolo-
gical and human resources available-within Leverett,
or other materials relating to planning and re-
source education. And that the Commission*continue
to seek contributions from the school for such
materials.

:L14

7). That the Leverett.school staff continue to.
incorporate environmental concepts and approaches
especially the use of local sites and residents,
into its curriculum wherever they prove effective.

8). That Leverett.school children work with the Con-
seTvation Comraission, the Selectmen and other
groups to see that the town meets their needs for
play space and transportation, perhaps in..part by
helping children lay out a bike trail from the
school to the center of town.
.9). That the School Committee make the school build-
ing and grounds more accessible to teenagers and
-adults, perhaps by providing supervision or
custodial'services for evening and summer use.
10). That,the town encourage a coffee shop/snack bar
concession to-proviae-an-informal Leverett meet-
ing place.-
11). That the Planning Board, Conservation Commission
and.Historical Commission jointly submit the
following article to Town Meeting-
To see if the'town.will vote to designate all roads
within'the town of-Leverett, excepting State
Highway Route 63, to be scenic roads pursuant to
Chapter 40, Section 15C of the General Laws of
Massachusetts, as follows:
'After a.road has been designated as a scenic road
any repair, maintenance, reconstruction, or paving
work done with respect there to shall not involve
or include the cutting or removal of trees,,or the
tearing down or destruction of stone walls, or
portions thereof, except with theprior written
-consent of the planning board. . . after a public
hearing. . .
12). That the Planning Board, Conservation Commission
and Historical Commission jointly @ubmit the foll'ow-
- ing article.to Town Meeting:
To see if-the town will vote to accept the following
by-law:
No public way or portion of any public way within
the town of Leverett.which is unpavea'at the time
of the adoption of this by-law shall be paved at
any future time except upon town meeting -votp.
13). That the town shall maintain unpaved roads in
the best condition possible to reduce traffic
hazards and the subsequentneed for paving.

115

-14). That representatives of the Selectmen, Planning
Board, Conservation Commission and Historical
Commisslion attend upcoming hearings on proposed
standards for.rural roads in order to understand
their potential impact on the town's environmental
character', and v6i.ce objections if deemed necessary.
15). That the Planning Boaxd examine the desirability
of requiring grassed areas, tree planting and
supervised pole placement under the town's Subdi-
vision Control Regulations.
16). That the Planning Boaxd examine the junctions
of Route .63 with Juggler Meadow Road, Depot Road,
Montague Road and Jackson Hill Road to contemplate
zoning measures should rapid growth ensue at these
spots.
17). That the Conservation Commission establish and
administer a tree maintenance fund.
18). That the Conservation Commission acquire key
vantage points along roadsides to protect scenic
views from the incursion of buildings.
19). That the Conser-@ation Commission immediately
acquire the available lot at the foot of Rattle-
snake Gutter, allowing citizens to park legally
while traversing the Gutter, and continue to seek
additional lands on either side of the Gutter for
preservation.
20). That the Conservation Commission continue in-'
vestigations concerning the legal status of
'abandoned' and 'discontinued' roads in Leverett
and that such records as may exist be chronicled.
21). That the inventory of Leverett historical sites
prepared by the Historical Commission be consulted
by the Planning Board and Selectmen in issuing
building permits or decisions which may otherwise
alter Leverett's landscape.
22). That the Historical-Commission consider establishing
an historical district in the village of North
Leverett, as well as Leverett Center.
23). That the town consider ways to provide swimming
and ice skating in Leverett as soon as possible.
24). That individual landowners consider*bicentennial
land gifts which would provide a legacy of open
space to future generations.

116

continuance:
town meeting proposals

At the 1974 annual Town Meeting, February 16th,
Leverett's planni.ng.process will be expanded to in-
clude the whole town. Citizens will act on several

warrant articles drafted by the sub-committees of
the Plan Committee--for example, :whether or not to
classify Leverett's roads as scenic and to authorize
a survey'of certain groundwaters in the town. But
beyond such specifics, voters will be asked to.take

a stand on the broad issues posed to the town by

a changing environment and to endorse a continuing
effort to cope with that change.

On the varrant will be a Statement of Leverett

Goals,-which summarizes feelings about the town's
environment expressed by the one.hundred residents
who have contributed their thoughts and energies to
this report. To back,,up this consensus, a second
-article will call upon the town to establish a per-
manent Goals Committee. This group would carry on
the work of this year's Plan Committee by seeking ways
to further town goals through specific town actions
and by expanding and revising the goals as necessary.
The past year has demonstrated a planning process
which can be applied in future years for as long as
Leverett wants.to guide the changes occurring in its

landscape. In broad terms, this process consists of
two phases: articulation and action. This year, in-
tensive intervieving helped articulate what the town
wanted, and special committees followed up on this
consensus with specific proposals. In the future,

117

the.Statement of Leverett Goals.would provide-the
town with a formal arti.culation-of its-objectives,
while an on-going Goals Committee would continue to
seek public action to accomplish these objectives.

Function of a Goals Statement

The Statement of Leverett Goals poses some basic
assumptions about the town's character, mainly in
regard to open space and settlement patterns. And
it points out which parts of this character need
attention if the town is to control its future shape.
The statement grew out of the early interviews
Vith townspeople and three autumn meetings of the

Plan Committee. Since the ideas it contains are so

vital to Leverett's future, they were reviewed with
the full Conservation Commission and Planning Board,
the Selectmen, and a joint meeting of all town boards.
The goals are in tl,e format@of a "policy plan"
or-outline of overall objectives which the town hopes
to further in all its pullic actions. This format
is now used in many planning efforts, including the
Franklin County@Regional Plan. Perhaps its chief
advantage over a traditional "master plan" is that
a Goals Statement is brief and broad enough to be
adopted by Town Meeting vote, thus involving every-
one i.n crystalizing what the town wants.
Another advantage is that the Goals do not lock
town boards into a particular course of action, but
rather grant them the flexibility to respond to changing
opportunities and pressures, working these particulars
into long-range patterns. The Goals can back up a
board's stand on given issues and provide a checklist
of considerations which should affect every decision

the board makes.

118

PROPOSED STATMENT OF LEVERETT GOALS
To see'if the'town will vote to accept the following resolution*,
or act otherwise thereon
Rec.ognizing that pressures of change and population within the
Connecticut Valley-will continue to affect Leverett, and asserting
the town's desire to shape its own future, the people of Leverett
agree that all public.action in the town shall seek to preserve,and
@enhance certain values held in common and residing in the shared
experience of this environment.
Specifically, recognizing that much of the town's character is
due to-a rural landscape, which inspires.a sense of freedom and
acquaintance with the earth, and which permits opportunities
for a diversity of employment and passive recreation within the
town, it shall be the goal of public policy in Leverett:

--to promote the stewardship of.agricultural, timber,.recreational
and other renewable natural resources;

--to encourage the preservation of rural roadside landscapes;

--to conserve areas of backland, especially mountain flanks,
for open land uses such as watershed protection, wildlife
production, forestry, recreation and visual amenity;

--to protect the town's streams,,wetlands, and subsurface
waters from pollution;

--to foster the preservation of the town's historical resources
and the use of its'educational potential.

Further recognizing that much of the town's character relies on
the smallness and diversity of its population, which allow
people the chance for both isolation and connhuni ty interaction,
it shall be the goal of public policy in Leverett:

--to maintain a range.of earning levels andhousing types in
town;

--to insure that all building conforms-to the natural constraints
of the terrain, especially those affecting water supply and
waste disposal;

--to continue the town's traditions of small rural roads and
hamlets;

--to further the-town's visual quality;

--to foster individual involvement in the school, the town
government, and other institutions which in turn foster a
feeling of identity with the town.

PROPOSED LEVERETT GOALS CONUTTEE

To see if the town.vill vote to establish.a permanent Goals
Committee, whichwould function in lieu of a written town plan:

--to administer, and when necessary refine and revise the
town's Statement of'Goals;

--to,provide a continuing public forum for defining Leverett's
overall interests and long-range aims;

--to place the activities of the individual town agencies and
the effects of particular events within the perspective of
the town's overall interests and long-range aims, the
functions of other agencies, and the pressures of the future;

--to initiate studies and suggestions and encourage action on
specific improvements in Leverett.

Such Goals Committee is to consist of at least nine members at
laxge, one of whom would serve as chairman and one as secretary,
and of the chairmen or representatives of the Planning Board,
Conservation Commission, Historical Commission, Health Board,
Finance Committee,, School Committee, Board of Appeals, and Board
of Assessors. In 1974, the nine members at large are to be
appointed by the Selectmen, three for one year terms, three for
two year terms, and three for three year terms; thereafter,
three members are to be elected at each annual town meeting, to
serve three year terms. Such Committee is to meet at least
quarterly and be enabled to appoint ad hoc subcommittees to
assist its work.

A number of specific means might be.employed to
accomplish.each goal. These include land acquisition;
zoning; and regulatory-powers over wetlands, septic
systems, scenic roads, and historical districts.. It
should be noted that most of these measures-require
additional deliberation and approval, either by Town
Meeting or individual boards. The Goals Statement
is simply meant to stimulate their use.

Function of a Goals Committee

The Goals Committee would work to make Leverett's

Statement of Goals an effective point of reference in
the real life of the community.
It would collect data on the natural, technological,
legal and social frameworks within which the town

operates, and insert this information into the local
decision-maki,ng process. It would propose specific
environmental inprovement projects and actions, and
follow through on them. It -would place the daily
decisions of separate boards and individuals within
the perspective of the town's overall interest and
long-range aims. It would encourage thought and dis-
cussion about the town's goals, and revise and refine
those goals as necessary.
The group -would consist.of between fifteen and
twenty members, diviae-1 into a steering componentand
an advisory component. The steering members would be
primarily people not otherwise connected with town
government; they would therefore have the time and
detachment needed to creatively assess the current
means and long-term ends of the town and to advocate
particular measures. They would be elected at Town

Meeting, would include the committee's-chairman and
secretary, and would meet as often as the committee's
work required.

121

The advisory members would be the chairmen.or
representatives from various other boards, in-town;
ther would bring to the committee their knowledge
and experience of town government and provide a

direct link between the 6ommittee,s-aeliberations

and actual public actions.

The full Goals Committee would meet at least

quarterly, and everyone interested would be encouraged
to attend. Some of the particular projects the group
might undertake over the next year include:
--hosting a seriesof neighborhood meetings around
the town to get feedback on Leverett's Statement
of Goals and discuss how they could be achieved in
each, neighborhood landscape;
--working with the Planning Board to review Leverett's
zoning by-laws in light of the Goals Statement,
especially its portions on settlement patterns;
--working with the.Conservation Commission and Bicen-
tennial Committee for land gifts and acquisitions
which vould further the town's Goals regarding open
space patterns;
--developing a fiscal component to the Goals Statement;
--following up on proposals for a Leverett beef
grazing association, a published inventory of human
resources in the town, and other work of this year's
committees.

People and Process

Plans sit on office shelves, untouched, because
their contents are static. The very -reason they were
written--the changability of the landscape--works
against their effectiveness. Yet change must be dealt

with if the future environment it creates is to

satisfy basic human needs like health, beauty, effic-
iency and economy. The problem is to find a means
of managing landscapes which is as dynamic as the
change occuring there.

J-22

To deal with,change, there must-be a clear
idea of what is valued@in a place and constant atten-
ti,on to conaitions-which affect what is valued, either
positively or negatively. The surest source of value

in an essentially residential landscape is the people
who live there. They are, moreover., in the best
position to watch what is happening around them.
One way to deal.with change, then, is to frame
for people a process which helps them to articulate
the values they find in a place, to keep abr east of

the conditions fostering or threatening those values,

and finally to do what they can to determine the

conditions and thus increase the values. It is such

a dynamic and on-going process that Leverett has
framed for itself this year.
Ultimatelylit may be that what's most valuable
in a place is precisely this kind of involvement.
it is the interaction of people and place that pro-
duces environment. Far from dispersing them, change
may well increase the values of New England's land-
scape by increasing people's creative involvement
with their localities. Certainly, New England's

pioneers would have felt that way about change as
they-first cleared, ploughed and humanized this en-

vironment.

People and process have been the touchstones of
Leverett's planning effort to date. The town can
continue this effort by endorsing a Statement of

Leverett Goals and establishing a permanent Goals

Committee.

123

end notes

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notes on the
interview technique

in 1969 the Leverett Planning Board conducted a

town-wide survey on growth and planning, population
density, business and industry, roads, recreation,
and conservation. One hundred twenty-two questionaires

were returned. They revealed widespread support of

planning and conservation measures and general agree-

ment that Leverett's rural character is its most valu-

able asset. The strength of the survey was that it

reached everyone in town, but due to this fact, it

necessarily lacked detail.
The interviews conducted in 1973 tried to give
substance to the overall feelings and statistical
break-downs provided by the earlier survey. Mainly,

the interviews provide a more detailed account of how
people think about their environment. And by tying
this thought to particular landscapes and individuals,
the interviews open the way to greater environmental
perception and action in Leverett.
About 40 interviews were conducted, involving
almost 60 people. Of these people, roughly 40 agreed
to have their comments published. This represents
less than five percent of Leverett's 1,005 inhabitants
(1970 census), and about ten percent of the town's
households (380).
Thirteen of these people were from Leverett Center;

seven each from East Leverett and North Leverett;
three each from Moore's Corner and Route 63; and three

from outside of town.

Of Leverett residents interviewed, seventeen
were large landowners with holdings of more than ten

125

acres a piece and a thousand acres collectively. Ten
people interviewed owned house lots of less than ten
acres, and three residents owned no land in Leverett.

Fifteen of the residents were public figures,
including town officials and employees, school staff,
ministers and spokesmen for organizations.
A predominance of large landowners and public
figures is apparent in these statistics. With only
a limited amount of time to be spent interviewing,
and a major interest in those perceptions which might
lead to actions affecting the town's future landscape,
these two groups seemed the logical sources. Their
decisions can influence the landscape most directly,
and their perceptions were therefore of immediate

interest.

Nonetheless, the impulse to expand perception
and to portray and perhaps help produce as democratic
a landscape as possible, led to a real effort to
represent a range of viewpoints.

From the time of the interviews to the time of

publication, another crucial process of selection
took place as hours of tape and a ream of transcript
were gleaned for significant statement. The challenge
of this process-.-and it is the challenge of much

environmental perception--was to avoid neglecting
the ordinary, and attempt instead to bring out its
significance. If the interviews have met this challenge

they should result in rich reading and enriched

participation in Leverett's landscape.

notes on the
planning philosophy
behind the interviews

The eco)ogical principle that the landscape is
interconnected can be translated into the political
premise that the landscape is shared. Water, air,
roads, visual quality, a sense of history--these are
aspects of the environment which cannot be fully con-
tained nor properly managed within individual.property
lines. Yet they are aspects which anyland-use decision
ultimately, affects. This connectedness-adds to the
satisfaction possible from private decisions by ampli-
fying their significance. It also adds to the need
for public tools which assure shape and structure to

the landscape.
The interviews approach ecological interconnection
-through language, the basis of human interconnection.
Language embodies certain perceptual tools which,
from an ecological perspective, are simply adaptations:
they enable people to relate to their surroundings.
Since language is also the way people relate to people,
from a political perspective it is the initial tool

of community interaction.
In approaching the environment through this medium,
the interviews attempt not only to marshall and
sharpen the ways in which individuals relate to this
landscape, but to lay the ground work for the concerted

involvement of the whole town with its environment.
The thrust is to replicate ecoiogical interconnection
with political consensus: a consensus, it should be
noted, that like the soundest ecosystem, is most
dynamic when most diverse.

127

Roads & Access Committee
credits Peter Steve, chairman
Barbara Burn
I-rope Davis
Jack Frazier
Wallace Godfrey
David. Howland
Margret Howland
Larry LaClaire
Phillip Woodard

Rural Resources Committee

Richard Conklin, chairman
Acknowledgement and gratitude are due. Whitney Garberson
the many interviewees, committee members Ethan Howard
and other-citizens who have contributed Gordon King
Hugh Kirley
to this publication. Nick Lenz
Financial support came from Town Meeting Educational Resources Committee
and the Ford Foundation's "Program to
Assist Municipal Conservation Commissions." Fenna Lee Bonsignore, chairman
Robert Abbey
Hugh and Lloyd.Kirley, of the Land Study Lois Barnes
Group, North Leverett, have freely provided Clifford Blinn.
their professional expertise at every stage John Bonsignore
of Leverett's,planning process. The graphics Deborah Carey
are their work. Bruce Hoadley
Shirley Kirley
Nancy Frazier and Alice Scheffey applied Alice Levenson
their editorial skills to the text. Many Steve Trudel
other people, including Jane Davis, Francene
Kirley and Alice Levenson, helped it towards Water Resources Committee
publication. Frances King, chairman
The report was typed by Lorraine Sylvain Leslie Allen
and printed at Hamilton I. Newell, Inc., Florence Carey
Amherst. Loyce Dunbar
David Evans
Carlyle Field
Priscilla Greeley
Jerry Jackson
Lloyd Kirley
Conservation Commission Peter Robinson
Lloyd Kirley, Chairman Charles Roys
Georgene Bramlage Donald Wise
John Field Bicentennial Land Gift Group
Joan Godsey
Bruce Hoadley Barbara Alfange
Peter Robinson Marie Cashin
Andrew Scheffey Doris Gere
(Frederick Greeley, former chairman)
Leverett Pond Group
Planning Board Jackie McNeal .chairman
Klaus Kroner Fenna Lee Bons1gnore
William Bramlage Peter Daley.
Hugh Davis Joanne Field
Betsy Douglas Arlene Fors yth e
Edith Field Mary Franks
Arnold Glazier Shirley Kirley
Gordon Wilson Paul Patterson
(Robert Raskevitz, former chairman) Doris Tikbs
Portia Weiskel

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