On Al’s Trail —

The Ninth Mile: A Path To The Past

By Dottie Evans

Imagine a place in the very heart of our 300-year-old town where there are no houses and no roads, where towering pines, hemlocks, and oaks stand tall above ancient, moss-covered bedrock. Where the ever-present sound of traffic is totally and completely obliterated by the primal roar of water cascading over rocks and tumbling down a shaded gorge.

Impossible in 21st Century Newtown?

Not so, if you are one of the lucky ones to have explored and helped clear the southernmost section of Al’s Trail known as the Ninth Mile.

Perhaps leaving the best for last, a large group of volunteer trail workers and Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) members spent Thursday, November 18, on this final portion of the trail as it follows the western bank of Deep Brook through Fairfield Hills.

Its terminus on the opposite side of the brook at Reed Intermediate School will not be reached until some future date when a sturdy footbridge can be built over Deep Brook.

The trail workers began where Al’s Trail volunteers and local Trout Unlimited members left off at the end of September during the streamside tree planting project. That section of the trail ended where Fairfield Hills agricultural fields are crossed by Old Farm Road.

The new and last section begins just across Old Farm Road bridge and to its immediate left along Deep Brook’s western bank.

“It was amazing. At the beginning of the day there was a forest. At the end of the day, there was this wonderful trail –– something out of nothing,” said Al’s Trail coordinator Pat Barkman.

“We got a tremendous amount done. They built a stepping stone bridge…and a series of hairpin switchbacks up a slope to level ground where the trail proceeds south,” she added.

The volunteers worked under the direction of AMC Trail Consultant Harlan Jessup. They filled in holes, cut out sections of a falling down wire fence, removed invasive species such as autumn olive, multifloral rose, and bittersweet, and raked the trail clear of a seemingly bottomless bed of fallen oak leaves.

“Under Harlan’s direction, they made the neatest switchback out of cedar logs,” she noted.

 

The Historic Landscape:

Sherman’s Square Mile

Walking the newly made trail and following the diamond-shaped yellow trail markers tacked along its route, a hiker walking the Ninth Mile trail today feels safe in what would otherwise seem like a trackless forest with no signs or sounds of present day life.

The only visible evidence of past agricultural uses –– the glimpse of an old cow barn seen afar through the trees or a bit of rusted barbed wire fence sticking out of a thick tree trunk –– are not immediately obvious and are quite overshadowed by the trail’s more primitive surroundings.

It is so much easier while walking beneath those ancient trees overlooking the Deep Brook gorge to imagine a time when the land now known as Fairfield Hills and the section of Al’s Trail known as the Ninth Mile were part of a land grant originally known by the colonists as Sherman’s Square Mile.

Not much seems to have changed. The huge trees, the flowing brook, the moss-covered rocks, the ferns, and the princess pine peeking out from under the fallen leaves could all have been there from the very beginning, even before the colonists came.

Records show that in 1667, the General Assembly of the Connecticut Colony assigned 200 acres of property purchased from Cowanock, a Pootatuck Indian, to Daniel Sherman and five other colonists “for a village or plantation.” Though the original deed has been lost, later documents mention the purchase by his son Samuel Sherman in 1687 of a tract bounded by what would become Queen Street on the west, Church Hill Road on the north, the Pootatuck River on the east, and Mile Hill Road on the south. In 1700, Samuel Sherman’s son Benjamin Sherman inherited the property also called “Sherman’s Old Farm.”

This historic area would later become the center of Newtown and the southern portion of Al’s Trail called the Ninth Mile is located in the very heart of it.

(More work on Al’s trail still needs to be done, including building a stile near the I-84 underpass, constructing three bridges over smaller streams, designing side-hill steps down a steep embankment, further blazing of road passages, and placing more trail signs to guide hikers along the entire nine-mile route. Anyone who would like to volunteer to help is urged to call Pat Barkman at 426-8949.)