Spring Cleanup—

Making A Pathway Between The Parks

By Dottie Evans

If you were a Newtown Parks and Recreation Department grounds maintenance worker, the first week in March would be a good time to get your hands dirty and your feet wet.

Working fast before the rains came, John Moore, Scott Graves, Jack Honan, and Sean Taylor spent Monday through Wednesday cleaning up the big open field that lies along Elm Drive between Dickinson Park and the Liberty ball fields.

They were preparing the ground to make a walkway connecting the two town parks.

“We’ve wanted to do this ever since we got this field nearly ten years ago with Iroquois [Gas Transmission Company] money. It’s for open space so it will never be developed, but we’d like to lay a path of woodchips along the upper part so people walking along Elm Drive can use it,” said Parks and Recreation Director Barbara Kasbarian.

“Now if there’s a parking overflow at Liberty, they can park at Dickinson and walk across,” she added.

Clearing the upper portion of the field involved moving aside a mountain of underbrush and fallen logs, as well as uprooting the giant, yellowish pricker bush roots (invasive Japanese barberry) that had overrun an old stone wall along Elm Drive.

“We hope to use these stones to build a new wall when we have more time,” said Mr Moore as he and the other workers wrestled with the piled-up debris.

“We want to finish the path before ball season starts,” he said, noting that without the aid of a couple of backhoes and a grater, the job could have taken weeks.

One interesting feature about the new path will be the fact that when completed, it will connect to an old cart road that can still be seen between the tall hardwoods leading down to Deep Brook Road, a dirt road the goes past the Village Cemetery.

As Scott Graves working the backhoe kept turning up new boulders buried beneath the muck and underbrush, the outlines of the old stonewall became obvious, and the machinery kept turning up new items of trash along the way.

“We’ve picked out bags and bags of old bottles, golf balls, and cans. We’re still waiting to find buried treasure,” Mr Moore said.

The large field that was purchased for the town with Iroquois Open Space Funds is an important piece of never-to-be-developed real estate for several reasons. Not only does it provide a parklike connection between the ball fields, tennis courts, and playgrounds at Dickinson Park and the newly constructed Liberty ball fields, it is also a vital link in a mile-long greenway along Deep Brook stretching from Dickinson Park to The Pleasance at the center of town.