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John Coston
It was a ramble through bramble on Wednesday, April 17 as a handful of Hotchkiss students armed with loppers attacked a thicket of buckthorn and bittersweet at the Sharon Land Trust’s Hamlin Preserve.
The students learned about the destructive impact of invasives as they trudged — often bent over — across wet ground on the semblance of a trail, led by Tom Zetterstrom, a North Canaan tree preservationist and member of the Sharon Land Trust.
The return of students on this working walkthrough was part of Hotchkiss’s Fairfield Farm Ecosystem and Adventure Team, a program that incorporates environmental stewardship in the learning experience.
The Hamlin Preserve is a 210-acre property with 2.5 miles of trails, and the Hamlin conifer grove restoration is a large-scale landscape forest preservation project.
Tom Zetterstrom, a tree preservationist, stopped to make the point to Hotchkiss School students that invasives have the power to dominate.John Coston
The group entered at the end of Stone House Road and proceeded into an invasive thicket that has already taken its toll on cedars and pines. Zetterstrom stopped the group for several lecture moments and demonstrations of the proper way to cut bittersweet.
Tim Hunter, stewardship director of the Trust, pulled out a folding handsaw that student Oscar Lock, a senior, used to sever a buckthorn at ground level.
Shaye Lee, a sophomore, took a turn with the saw on some privet.
As the group huddled under a close canopy of invasive vegetation that was overtaking everything in sight, Zetterstrom explained that invasive-laden patch was once productive farmland.
As the two-hour stroll-and-lop ended, the group assembled in a hay field on the property to observe a healthy American elm at the edge of the open field that has been saved by the Trust’s efforts.
Pointing to Red Mountain in the short distance, Zetterstrom told the students: “When you come back for your reunions — maybe in 50 years — you can say I helped save those trees.”
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Leila Hawken
The enticing aroma of freshly baked breads and pastries should lure opening-day customers to the new Tarts and Bread bakery, on Saturday, April 27, at 9:30 a.m. in Amenia. The new French/Belgian bakery is located at 3304 Route 343, just downhill from the post office.
Recent weeks have seen delivery of equipment and furnishings for the new bakery and eatery. In anticipation of the opening, it is said that the first 200 visitors will receive a free sample pastry. The delectable choice will be between a cinnamon crun and an almond apricot “8”.
Ample seating will provide space for eating in, whether for pastry and beverage or for lunch when choices will include savory tarts, quiches and sandwiches made with house-made spreads using locally sourced ingredients. All baked goods will be made fresh daily, offering lactose-free options. All breads are to be made with sourdough starter, easier to digest and high in nutrients.
Two examples of local sourcing will be the coffee from Ilse Coffee in North Canaan, Connecticut and the tea from Harney’s in Millerton.
Chef Christophe Raza is leading the bakery enterprise, reflecting his training at Le Cordon Bleu, while firmly believing that bakeries should be accessible to all, as they are in his native Belgium. As an example, the bakery’s baguettes will be priced at $2.90. And there will be light-as-air eclairs.
Tarts and Bread will be open seven days each week, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. But, for this one Grand Opening Day on Saturday, April 27, the doors will open at 9:30 a.m.
At the new Tarts and Bread bakery in Amenia, madeliene cookies are just some of the offerings.Provided
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On Sunday April 21 at 2 p.m, actor Kaiulani Lee presented her one woman play about environmental writer Rachel Carson titled “A Sense of Wonder” at the Botelle School in Norfolk.
Lee has been performing “A Sense of Wonder” for the past twenty-six years at universities, high schools, the Smithsonian Institute, the Albert Schweitzer Conference at the United Nations, and at the Department of Interior’s 150th anniversary. It has been used as the focal point in conferences on conservation, education, journalism, and the environment.
Also a highly regarded stage, television, and film actress, Lee has appeared in The World According to Garp, Cujo, Before and After, A Bird of the Air, The Waltons, Law & Order and others. She was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a play for Kennedy’s Children and received an Obie Award for Best Performance by an actress for Safe House.
“A Sense of Wonder” was introduced by Pastor Erick Olsen of the Church of Christ Congregational (UCC). Olsen spoke of the play’s importance as a featured event in The Norfolk Earth Forum and Norfolk’s Earth Day weekend, which celebrates Carson’s legacy. Additional programming included discussion of “Crossings” by Ben Goldfarb; a lecture on Carson’s continuing influence in the modern environmental movement, and a children’s pollinator program. Sponsorship was provided by Botelle School, Aton Forest, Great Mountain Forest, Norfolk Conservation Commission, Norfolk Land Trust and the Church of Christ Congregational (UCC).
Lee then took to the stage and explained to the audience how the play occurs in two acts, the first part set at Carson’s summer cottage on the coast of Maine and the second part from Carson’s home in Maryland. Lee “removed the third wall,” which refers to when a character addresses the medium in which they are situated, by describing the layout of Carson’s cottage.
Act one opens with Carson writing a letter to a friend and shows her reluctance to leave the coast of Maine. Sick with cancer, she worries this may be her last visit. But she also describes her joy at seeing son Roger play on the rocks by the ocean and reflects on her lifelong desire to be a writer and how her love of the natural world and science ultimately became her muse. Carson expresses how her deep love of nature inspired her activism to write about the US government’s use of the pesticide DDT and its devastation of the environment.
In act two, Carson is visibly weakened by cancer and arthritis, but urgently brings her message to Congress and the American people. She recounts the backlash she received from the petro-chemical industry, efforts to discredit and label her as “alarmist” but is steadfast in her beliefs which are founded in her love of nature.
After finishing her performance, Lee invited the audience to ask questions. She provided additional historical context, namely how the success of Silent Spring inspired President John F. Kennedy to order the Science Advisory Committee to examine the issues raised in the book, which vindicated both the book and Carson. As a result, DDT came under much closer government supervision and was eventually banned.
Carson died from breast cancer in 1964, but shortly before her death remarked, “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. We are challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”
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Submitted
MILLBROOK — Last Thursday April 18, Bill Jeffway, Executive Director of the Dutchess County Historical Society, delivered a lecture titled “Town of Washington: Antebellum Free Black Community” to a capacity crowd at the Millbrook Library.
A graduate of Wesleyan College, he is the author of “This Place Called Milan and Invisible People, Untold Stories: Voices of Rhinebeck’s Historic Black Community.” He writes regularly for the Northern Dutchess News.
Jeffway, who is a dynamic and improvisational lecturer, offered many asides and anecdotes. Jeffway teaches a course on Living History at Marist College.
The Living History movement emphasizes the voices and perspectives of people from the past through letters, postcards, deeds, court records, and cemetery stones.
In 1776 slavery was banned in Dutchess County, yet the ban was not strictly enforced. It took about twenty years for the Dutch and British to divest completely. Even some Quakers were slow to relinquish slaves, despite the strong opposition to slavery among most Quakers.
Abused white women sometimes took refuge in the Black community. In 1782 Mary Mott married at age sixteen; she left her husband in 1809, staying at first with various friends. She eventually was given long-term secret shelter by a Black couple, working as a seamstress.
Jeffway noted that many free Blacks, as well as slaves, lived in Poughkeepsie where there were eight Black Churches, due to its prominence in river commerce and travel. There were local instances of Southerners boat-kidnapping free Black youngsters. An important free Black boat captain worked the Hudson River around this time.
On the eastern border of Dutchess County, slaves worked on some farms. In the Smithfield Valley, according to a letter, Mrs. Smith had at least three personal slaves serving her at her wedding. Jeffway estimated about thirty agricultural slaves in that neighborhood in the early part of the 18th century.
Jeffway noted that there was a small Black cemetery in Lithgow, and in the 1870s there was a Black community in Clove Valley in northern Union Vale, just south of Millbrook. At that time Black women were predominantly the owners of land in the Black community.
Shortly after the appearance of the automobile, Mr. Collins, a Black man, ran a successful taxi and bus transportation service between Millbrook and Poughkeepsie. His wife ran a laundry service, with washing machines in their backyard, for the wealthy ladies of Millbrook.
Manet Fowler (1916-2004) was the first Black woman to acquire a doctorate in cultural anthropology. The U.S. government assigned her to survey Dutchess County on the “readiness” of people of color to serve in World War II.
By 1944, inspired by Lincoln, the Millbrook Black Republican Club was formed.
Elements of this lecture drew on the Millbrook Library’s Archive on African Americans in Dutchess County.
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