Near Dickinson Park—

New Trail Will Be Ready For The Spring

By Kendra Bobowick

Daylight lingers seconds longer across the horizon each day before darkness stains the sky. Chattering birds have begun to chase away the stillness of winter mornings as the seasons trade places. One sign of spring is clear in the new path near Dickinson Park.

At the junction of Elm Drive and Deep Brook Road, a triangular plot of land that has done no more than support a street sign in past years will have a new job by winter’s end.

“We’re hoping that little corner patch will be a little garden area” and serve as one end of a new urban trail, said Parks and Recreation Chairman Ed Marks. Recreation crews are currently establishing the meandering Elm Drive Trail. After strolling the loop that winds through and around Dickinson Park and ending again at the corner, Mr Marks imagines, “You could rest on a bench.”

As we trade our down-filled parkas for lighter jackets, and indulge the urge to reach for hiking shoes, Dickinson Park will have its new urban trail mapped out by next month. “We’re anxious to see how it turns out,” Mr Marks said.

And so far, so good. The Elm Drive trail “is going very well,” said Assistant Director of Parks Carl Samuelson during February’s Parks and Recreation Commission meeting. The path reaches around the triangle and “circles back on itself,” and encompasses the lawn where the Dickinson pool once sat, moves past the pavilion and tennis courts, around Liberty baseball field and toward the small triangle of land in front of the cemetery — roughly a mile long. Newtown-based LRM Inc landscape contractors are dong the work.

The passive recreation trail near Dickinson has been part of the recreation department’s conversations for the past few years, since the acquisition of a $40,000 reimbursement grant. With the money accounted for, negotiating the trail’s route began. Initially the plans found the trail flowing across Ram Pasture and past Hawley Pond, but met with resistance from the property owner. The recreation commission reworked its path through and around the park instead. Lack of a trails subcommittee also complicated efforts.

 

A Glance Back

In November 2006, then-director Barbara Kasbarian realized that plans to draw the lines for the Elm Drive Trail along Ram Pasture and skirt Hawley Pond were not going to work. “We need an alternative plan,” she had said after learning that the pasture’s caretaker, the Newtown Village Cemetery Association, was resistant to seeing a roughly six-foot-wide compressed gravel path cut into the lawn. From a jumble of scenarios emerged another idea for rerouting the trail similar to what Mr Samuelson discussed this week — a loop that wound around Dickinson, Liberty field, the tennis courts and pavilion, and toward the triangular swatch of ground where Deep Brook Road and Elm Drive intersect.

At that time the trail was just a sketch on the drawing board, which had not changed by July 2008, when the recreation department at last determined that the triangular parcel was town-owned. With that news the triangle could be incorporated into the trail.

An urban trail, the Elm Drive trail is part of what Parks and Recreation members envision as a part of a larger, townwide trail system.