To the Editor:
For more than a century, Bates Woods in New London has been torn between becoming the public park that was envisioned in 1912 and being developed piecemeal by the city of New London and private interests. Currently, the City of New London is working with Greenskies Clean Energy LLC to build a four-acre solar installation in the middle of Bates Woods. A public hearing was held in New London City Hall on July 11 before the Inland Wetland Conservation Commission, because the developer needs a permit to install utility poles within 150 feet of the park’s wetlands and watercourses.
Depending on who you ask or where you look, it seems that today Bates Woods is about 75 acres. Most New Londoners may think of baseball fields and pavilions for family gatherings, but that is just a small portion of Bates Woods. The rest is actually still forested, hilly, and criss-crossed with streams, trails, wetlands and ancient rocky ledges. It’s the type of natural setting that any city in its right mind would love to have within its boundaries for the sake of biodiversity, carbon storage, clean air, education, exploration, hiking, nature, open space, picnicking, recreation, running, walking, wildlife, and refreshment from summer heat.
Bates-Woods-Map-Proposed-Solar-revisedWith the prospect — or threat, depending on how you look at it — of losing some of the park to development before us once again, and with The Day’s historic back issues now accessible via Newspapers.com, this seems like a good opportunity to revisit the history of Bates Woods. How did New London acquire such a large and beautiful natural park? And what can community members do if they want to help protect it?
The “most charming and picturesque natural scenery” of Bates Woods was purchased by park commissioner George S. Palmer on April 2, 1912 at a cost of $8,000 “for [the] purposes of a public park” (4/3/1912). A year earlier, The Day reported that “20 men [were] at work to quarry and cut the stone in what is called Bates Woods” for the spire at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea church on Huntington street (4/28/1911).
The purchase of 100 acres in Bates Woods for a “picturesque public park” signaled a watershed year for New London, as the city bought hundreds of acres of land for a comprehensive park system that was being designed by landscape architect John Nolen (see park plan here). No sooner had the city created a plan for public parks, thanks to gifts from benevolent community members, and the community began voicing concern that without additional care from the city, the parks would not function as imagined (7/10/1917).
Before the end of its first decade, high school students called for improving the park (3/27/1919), the Boy Scouts organized hikes in Bates Woods (2/7/1920), and The Tattler section of The Day newspaper expressed a desire for a “bigger and broader policy in the matter of maintaining city parks” to be “used by those people of the city who love the enchantment of the wild woods” (4/12/1919). “All these beauties of nature,” The Tattler warned, “ought not to be allowed to go to waste.”
Throughout the 1920s, Boy Scouts continued their hikes, a biology club won an award at the YMCA for an exhibit of birds’ nests and pine cones collected in Bates Woods, chestnuts were gathered like old times, the First Congregational Society led a Sunday hike and 6 piece orchestra song service in one of “the wooded knolls of that beautiful piece of woodland,” a girls’ club learned outdoor cooking, the Williams Memorial Institute led girls on hikes, and importantly, the Lions club took up the cause of advocating for Bates Woods to be turned into the public park that was promised. Even The Day joined the cause, promoting Bates Woods in its Do You Know New London trivia series (6/21/1927; 8/9/1927).
By the mid-1920s, the Lions Club, the Boy Scouts, and others had successfully persuaded the mayor to advocate for the development of Bates Woods into a magnificent municipal park (10/20/1925; 10/261925; 11/3/1925; 11/5/1925; 2/2/1926; 5/24/1927). In 1926, Mayor William C. Fox assured members of the Lions club that “Bates Woods will become [a] city park” (8/17/1926). The mayor had made a habit of such proclamations (4/15/1926; 8/3/1926); and still, nothing happened. Suffragette Emily Spiers was running for women on the City Council in 1928 and included an entrance to Bates Woods in her campaign (9/6/1928; 9/8/1928).
With the onset of the Great Depression, by which time the city refused further gifts of land for public parks (3/19/1929; 4/3/1929), the Chamber of Commerce stepped in and encouraged the city to hire the unemployed to undertake the task of finally cleaning the park and making it ready for the public (12/12/1929; 1/1/1930). It was a great opportunity to invest in the city and its citizens. Almost two decades after its initial purchase, it was not until Christmas 1929 that the city ultimately made its “first move” towards realizing the promise of Bates Woods (12/17/1929), by hiring men who needed work to clear briar and begin the project of opening the park. Demands for more visible progress continued nevertheless. How about a park entrance for Bates Woods? The Tattler section of The Day remarked (1/4/1930).
Impressive stone walls and gates were eventually added during the 1930s, and the park was used by many, but by the 1950s The Tattler section of this paper officially lamented “that the city has never indulged itself in a park appropriation of first magnitude [… despite the fact that] some cities — even smaller cities — have beautifully kept parks” (9/20/1952). The postwar decades bore witness to an increasingly familiar back-and-forth between community members organizing care for the park as an unrealized public promise, and members of city government using its wetlands as a landfill.
While the city was dumping 60-80 tons of garbage per day in a swamp in Bates Woods (10/7/1952), the Connecticut College Arboretum director Richard Goodwin urged the opposite. Goodwin advocated for the expansion and preservation of Bates Woods as a park for trees especially, and he cited the unmet recommendations of Nolen’s 1913 park plan (2/16/1956).
After decades of neglect and continued dumping, the publication of two studies in the 1970s rekindled interest in protecting the park. The Bates Woods Park: Master Plan of 1977 identified the park as “one of New London’s finest resources” and showed how the site could still fulfill its potential “as an outstanding recreational resource.” The Bates Woods Park: Environmental Review Team Report of 1979 made a surprisingly compelling case that the city was still interested in trying to realize the park’s potential as it approached its 70th birthday. The situation was “very poor from an environmental standpoint,” however, with the landfill “obviously established in a wetland which constitutes the headwater[s] of Fenger Brook,” which flows south and drains into Alewife Cove and Long Island Sound.
The 1980s were the decade when the landfill in Bates Woods was supposed to close but didn’t. In 1984, state pressure to close the dump coincided with renewed calls for developing nature trails, but the city continued to dump (10/18/1983; 11/6/1983; 6/5/1984; 5/6/1987; 10/15/1987; 6/24/1988; 10/30/1988). The Conservation Commission even scolded the Public Works Director for dumping in its wetlands without a permit (1/31/1989). In 1997, Parks and Recreation Commission members encouraged the city to protect the park and restore the trails (5/19/1997). In the early 2000s, Kathleen Grasso Andersen, a founding member of the Bates Woods Environmental Education Program, reminded readers of The Day of plans already in place to use Bates Woods for environmental education (11/23/2002; 12/17/2002; 1/3/2003).
With much fanfare in 2003, scientists descended upon New London for a BioBlitz in Bates Woods (2/3/2003; 6/2/2003; 6/7/2003; 6/8/2003). The goals were educational, recreational, and scientific. Scientists found 1,691 species in Bates Woods in less than 24 hours, including the goldcap moss-eater moth (Epimartyria auricrinella), which has been called a living fossil. One can see the full list of species found during the BioBlitz here.
State archeologist Nicholas F. Bellantoni toured Bates Woods later in 2003 (10/1/2003). The Day reported that Bellantoni hiked through Bates Woods for an hour with City Park Supervisor David Denoia and Kathleen Grasso Andersen. Bellantoni liked the 19th century stone thrones he found and admired the caves and stonework of the Civilian Conservation Corps that had worked on the park in the 1930s. It’s possible, said Bellantoni, “that evidence of American Indian life could be uncovered, particularly where stone outcroppings would have provided shelter for migrating tribes.” The archaeologist described Bates Woods as a great natural laboratory.
The city quietly pursued dealings with a solar developer sometime before 2020. While the details of those arrangements are not clear, they left a prominent trail of asphalt, construction debris, curbs, discarded concrete, pipes, rubble piles, and tangles of rebar in multiple locations of Bates Woods that this author has been monitoring since 2019, and which are surprisingly documented in the Greenskies soil report. After 2020, the city’s dumping of concrete, asphalt and stone from sidewalk and road replacement work in and around a series of wetlands and watercourses in Bates Woods near the old landfill has intensified, as anyone who passes through the park may have noticed.
The Greenskies Soil Scientist Report – which was previously accessible on the city website for the July meeting of the Inland Wetland Conservation Commission – made the outrageous claim that the wetlands in Bates Woods possess limited recreational value, no educational or scientific value, no uniqueness or heritage value, and no inherent visual quality or aesthetic value (pp. 6-8), despite a hundred years of testimony to the contrary that has been published in The Day newspaper. At least the people who think it’s okay to dump in the park obviously don’t think it has much value, but what about everyone else? And what about the city’s century old promise to make Bates Woods a public park?
A group of concerned citizens challenged Greenskies’ claims in the public hearing on July 11, one-hundred-and-twelve years after the initial gift of Bates Woods. Maureen Connaughton asked a series of basic questions that forced the public hearing to recess until further notice when it was made clear that Greenskies failed to notify the abutting property owners ahead of time about the public hearing, a protocol required by the city’s Inland Wetland and Watercourse Regulations (sec. 9.3).
A few weeks later, Bates Friends Forever, a new community group dedicated to caring for the park, organized its first clean up in Bates Woods. With the support of the City of New London’s Public Works, Parks Department and Neighborhood Coordinator, the group attracted 29 people who labored for three hours to collect 65 bags of garbage (1,950 gallons of garbage), along with 14 tires, 4 mattresses, 2 pallets and a single golf bag. The group found discarded televisions, clothing, and lots of plastic containers. It was hot, gross and dispiriting work, but it was also fun to see what a small group of committed people can accomplish.
Bates Friends Forever hopes to continue organizing clean ups (as others have done in the past), but also to connect with more New Londoners to develop and enact a vision for a 21st century wooded park. What would you like to see there? A disc golf course? Marked trails for hiking, mushroom hunting, and exploring? Interpretive signs at the unique features like old trees, rock ledges, and wetlands? Spruced up picnic sites for family enjoyment? Access to the pond for quiet observation like frog, hawk, and turtle watching?
The promise of a picturesque public park in Bates Woods hasn’t been kept. But it’s still a big, beautiful, historic, natural, undeveloped, system of trails through woods and around wetlands that could yet be cared for and open. Let’s take a centennial second step towards making it happen by 2026, with the location of the solar farm to be discussed in public.
Andrew Lopez
New London, CT
The City of New London’s Inland Wetlands & Conservation Commission will hold a Regular Meeting and Public Hearing on Thursday, October 10, 2024, commencing at 7:00 p.m., in City Hall Council Chambers, 181 State Street, 3rd Floor, New London, Connecticut, on the following application:
APPLICATION FOR A WETLANDS PERMIT. To allow the installation of utility poles within the 100-foot upland review area to support a proposed solar array project. 0 Chester Street (C13/118/19). Applicant: William Sweeney, Esq. Property Owner: The City of New London.