Human History of Wildlands: Brockton Preserves

Stone walls traverse the woods at Brockton Audubon Preserve. Photo by Jerry Monkman.

By Skip Stuck, Key Volunteer

Back in 2018, Wildlands Trust President Karen Grey addressed an audience of land conservation professionals, town conservation commission members, and volunteers at the Southeastern Massachusetts Land Trust Convocation. Though Karen spoke broadly about Wildlands’ land protection, stewardship, and education initiatives, most of the audience’s questions and comments came when Karen described Wildlands’ activities in the city of Brockton. It was clear that many listeners were surprised that Wildlands would invest so much time and effort in the state's sixth-largest city of over 105,000 residents. Karen asserted that land conservation is an important goal anywhere, and perhaps even more so in a city where natural and recreational resources are limited.  

To help a city reconnect with its long-lost natural resources, we first need to understand its history. How have humans altered the landscape over time? What exactly has been lost? Only by knowing an area’s past can we begin to repair its future. 

Wildlands is lucky enough to work with someone who has witnessed Brockton’s history firsthand, who can share local stories that might otherwise have been forgotten. Since 2020, Frank Moore has protected his 20-acre farm and forest property in East Bridgewater through a Conservation Restriction (CR) with Wildlands. But in the 1930s and ‘40s, Mr. Moore spent his childhood in Brockton, where the lands of present-day Stone Farm Conservation Area and Brockton Audubon Preserve served as his “playgrounds.” In April 2024, Wildlands Land Protection Assistant Tess Goldmann and Communications Coordinator Thomas Patti visited Mr. Moore at his East Bridgewater home to hear his many stories from growing up on these lands. Mr. Moore’s encyclopedic knowledge of the area was crucial to my research for this piece.  

If you, like Mr. Moore, have oral, written, or photographic accounts to share pertaining to the natural or cultural history of Southeastern Massachusetts, we would love to hear from you. What may seem to you like trivial stories might be pivotal to our understanding of the places we strive to protect—and to our very ability to protect them.  

Please contact Communications Coordinator Thomas Patti at tpatti@wildlandstrust.org to share your stories. 

Glacial erratic at Brockton Audubon Preserve. Photo by Jerry Monkman.

Brockton’s Beginnings

Brockton lies within the Taunton River Watershed, the history of which I explored this spring. The area has a 10,000-plus-year history of habitation by native peoples, most recently members of the Wampanoag Tribe. Their population thrived, creating one of the most densely populated areas of local native settlement. According to the Wampanoag Tribe, the areas that now includes Brockton Audubon Preserve and Stone Farm Conservation Area also had religious significance, as evidenced by the rearrangement of some of the many glacial erratic boulders into formations that align with astronomical events, such as the daily and annual path of the sun through the sky.

However, in the early 1600s, exposure to disease brought by European trappers and fishermen—even before the 1620 arrival of the Pilgrims—decimated the local population by as much as 80 percent.

Then Plymouth Colony was founded, and within 20 years had out-grown its initial settlement. In 1649, Massasoit, sachem of the Wampanoag Tribe, sold the land then known as Saughtucket to Myles Standish. It was renamed to Bridgewater, and again to North Bridgewater in 1821. The area thrived as a farming and forestry community until the mid-1800s. During the years leading up to the Civil War, the area was a well-known stop on the Underground Railroad, helping runaway slaves reach safety in New England and Canada.  

But rapid change was coming. The end of the Civil War accelerated the westward migration of farmers out of New England. The Industrial Revolution was taking over, and farmers were soon replaced by immigrants from Europe and beyond, drawn by jobs in the burgeoning textile and shoemaking industries. The rapidly growing town was reincorporated as a city in 1881 and given its current name of Brockton in 1884. Interestingly, the name came from Sir Isaac Brock, a British officer in the War of 1812, who had no connection whatsoever to the town. Who'd figure?  

From the Brockton Daily Enterprise, April 3, 1937. “With the near completion of improvements to the new sanctuary, located off Pleasant street, the Brockton Society has one of the finest wild-life conservation areas in this section of Massachusetts. … [It] contains a diversified terrain suitable for a variety of birds and plants.” Clipping courtesy of Frank Moore.

Progress Spurs Preservation

Brockton was headed for the big time. In 1883, it gained the first municipal AC electrical power system in the world, with the first switch pulled by none other than Thomas Edison. By 1900, over one-third of Brockton’s male population was employed in the shoe industry. Growth was changing the character of Brockton. Land was developed for industry, and housing was rapidly replacing the wetlands, farms, and fields of 50 years earlier. 

Wildlands Trust was not the first organization to recognize the need for environmental protection and education in Brockton. In 1919, Amelia Brown and 88 others came together to found the Brockton Audubon Society, with a mission to save wooded areas and the wildlife within them. In 1921, the Society purchased 23 acres from Martin Packard to create the first Brockton Audubon Preserve. In 1937, they added 39 acres and built a log cabin-style building known as the Clubhouse to use as a headquarters and a site for picnics and special events. In the following years, the Society, under the leadership of Brockton tree warden Rufus Carr, obtained additional parcels to bring the preserve to its current 128 acres. For many years, the land provided a beautiful and popular resource for the community. However, as the founding Society members grew older, its membership shrank, and caring for the property grew difficult. In 2011, the remaining members voted to donate the land to Wildlands Trust to ensure its permanent protection. 

Adjacent to the Brockton Audubon Preserve was a City-owned tract of 105 acres known as Stone Farm Conservation Area. Over the years, this land witnessed many changes, as well. At various times, it has been a pasture, a timber plantation (until the 1938 hurricane leveled all of the pines), a horse farm, and an ice pond with an ice house. It has been the site of a Brockton police firing range and a city dump. Each successive use eventually faded into the woods and wetlands we see today. In 2018, the City of Brockton, while retaining land ownership, contracted Wildlands Trust to undertake the management of the property through Wildlands’ Community Stewardship Program. Wildlands staff completed new and restored trails in 2019, reopening the farm to the public.  

Brockton High School Envirothon Team members test water quality during the 2023 Massachusetts Envirothon competition.

A Bright Future

Not done yet, Wildlands continues to work closely with the City in other areas. Through the D.W. Field Park Initiative, Wildlands has spearheaded ecological and recreational improvements in Brockton's largest and most popular open space asset. In Brockton schools, Wildlands is working with Manomet Conservation Sciences on a NOAA grant to build outdoor classrooms at three Brockton elementary schools. Furthermore, Wildlands co-leads both the Brockton High School Envirothon Team and Green Team to engage Brockton-are youth in environmental education, stewardship, and community service.

Which brings us back to where we started. Karen Grey's message in that 2018 presentation was simple. Whether Wildlands is acquiring an urban preserve, providing resources and expertise to help a city reach its environmental goals, or advancing public education and youth development to foster long-term commitment to environmental protection, all of these initiatives flow from the same mission that drives the organization’s work elsewhere in the region. In many more affluent areas, Wildlands’ goal is to preserve the natural beauty that remains—to keep woods as woods and fields as fields. But in less fortunate areas, the time for preservation is long gone. Instead of turning its back on these communities, Wildlands proactively and holistically supports them, returning pistol ranges and dumping grounds to their historic natural conditions and helping future generations take pride and action to protect their local environment. Thus, the Wildlands mission is just as relevant in a city as it is anywhere. 

Learn More

I encourage you to visit Brockton Audubon Preserve and Stone Farm Conservation Area to search for evidence of this history on the landscape. Please also explore the following sources, which I consulted for this piece:

• Brockton Historical Society: brocktonhistoricalsociety.org 

• Wildlands Trust Baseline Documentation Report, Brockton Audubon Preserve 

• Brockton Public Library: brocktonpubliclibrary.org 

• History of Brockton, Plymouth County, Massachusetts 1656–1894. Bradford Kingman. Library of Congress. 

• Interview with Frank Moore. April 23, 2024. Conducted by Tess Goldmann and Thomas Patti. 

Human History of Wildlands: The Taunton River Watershed

Striar Snake River Preserve in Taunton. A project is underway to improve public access at this preserve.

By Skip Stuck, Key Volunteer

Those of you who have been following our "Human History of Wildlands" series know that the approach so far has been to tackle one preserve or one community at a time and to dig as deeply into that story as historical resources allow. However, when I started researching the history of Wildlands Trust’s Great River Preserve in Bridgewater, it occurred to me that there was a different kind of story here, not just of one preserve, but of an entire region—namely, the Taunton River watershed. Here, I take a broader look at this 500-square-mile area, one within which Wildlands Trust and its partners protect a variety of landscapes that are important as individual parcels but carry even greater significance in the context of their shared history. In upcoming entries to this series, we will zoom back in to the stories of individual preserves in the watershed, like Great River Preserve, Striar Conservancy in Halifax, and Wyman North Fork Conservation Area in Bridgewater. Today, we will take this broader view.  

A watershed is a land area within which all rainfall and snowmelt funnels into the same place. A raindrop in Foxborough, even if it’s 15 miles from the headwaters of the Taunton River, will eventually work its way down smaller streams or in groundwater to the Taunton and empty into Mount Hope Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. So, the point where that raindrop first splashed down in Foxborough is part of the Taunton River watershed. 

The map below will help convey the size of the Taunton River watershed and its importance to Wildlands’ work. Of the 57 cities and towns that Wildlands Trust serves, 30 lie at least partially within the Taunton River watershed, which encompasses 562 square miles across Southeastern Massachusetts. Wildlands protects over 2,150 acres of land in the Taunton River watershed through outright ownership, Conservation Restrictions, and deed restrictions.

The Taunton River watershed is home to geographical and historical features that exist nowhere else in Massachusetts. It features the longest undammed coastal waterway in the state. This is in part because it drops only 20 feet from its source in Bridgewater to its mouth in Fall River, curbing its power generation potential. The Taunton River is tidal up to the City of Taunton, meaning it contains salt and brackish water for about half of its length. 

The watershed is home to over 500,000 people across 43 towns and cities, covering portions of three counties. Despite the dense settlement around it, the Taunton River is a federally designated Wild and Scenic River. The region is also home to the largest freshwater swamp in southern New England, the nearly 17,000-acre Hockomock Swamp. 

These features and many others play important roles in the area's human history. Now, let’s move back in time. 

Pre-history 

As the glaciers receded between 12,000 and 13,000 years ago, they left a landscape scraped and scoured, with piles of rocks, rubble, moraines, eskers, and other geological features. Across central Southeastern Massachusetts, a large moraine created a debris dam that prevented melting glacial water from draining into the ocean. The result was Glacial Lake Taunton, which spanned 54 square miles and plunged 130 feet deep. The lake lasted for about 300 years before the dam broke.  

View fullsize

Glacial Lake Taunton. From “Understanding Geological History when Selecting Trenchless Installation Methods” by Haley & Aldrich.

When the dam finally breached, the rushing water spread a mix of gravel and mud across the watershed area, building the foundation for some of the richest forests and farming soils in Southeastern Massachusetts. It also created today's Taunton River and its many tributaries.  

People soon arrived. We know a good deal more about the pre-European history of the Taunton River watershed than of much of the rest of Southeastern Massachusetts. In fact, some of the oldest archeological evidence of human habitation in New England comes from digs, finds, and studies in Bridgewater, Middleborough, and the "Titicut" site, dating back more than 9,000 years. The watershed was heavily populated for the time. Several area names survive. Cohannet, Tetequet, Titiquet were all used by the resident Wampanoag Tribe to describe the river and its valley.  

The flat, slow-flowing river also became a major route for Native Americans to trade and move seasonally to productive hunting and fishing areas. The 72-mile Wampanoag Canoe Passage was a well-traveled route that allowed relatively easy passage between Cape Cod Bay and Narragansett Bay via the North River and the Taunton River. The passage has been restored and cleared in some areas and can be followed today.  

Along the route, Natives likely passed through the Hockomock Swamp, derived from "Hobomock," the deity tied to death and disease, but also to the spirits of ancestors. It was also an area favored as a sanctuary and for its rich game and hunting resources. 

Great River Preserve in Taunton.

European Settlement 

After 1620, the English settlers of the Plymouth Colony soon moved west and found that the Taunton River area held great promise. Good soil. Easy river travel. And while the main river's current was too slow to produce power for mills, tributaries such as the Town, Matfield, Winnetuxet, Nemasket, and Three Mile Rivers all tumbled into the valley with sufficient energy to provide waterpower and to support the largest spring runs of alewives and river herring in the state. 

The watershed was initially part of the "Duxbury Purchase," but settlement soon created towns such as Taunton in 1637 and Bridgewater in 1645, and ultimately Plymouth and Bristol Counties. Farms thrived upriver, while ironworks and shipbuilding made Taunton a growing city. Eventually, Taunton earned the name "the Silver City" due to its reputation for silversmithing and jewelry making. 

As with nearly all of Southeastern Massachusetts, and much of New England, this prosperity was not to continue without setbacks. The most notorious one was King Phillip's War from 1675 to 1676. Initially good relations between European colonists and the Wampanoag Tribe and its chief Massasoit, crucial to the Plymouth Colony's early survival, had in two generations deteriorated into war. The Tribe, led by Massasoit's son Metacomet (who chose the name King Philip), was feeling taken advantage of by the colonists. A revolt ensued, and the Taunton River area, especially Hockomock Swamp, was its epicenter. While the hostilities eventually reached all of New England and upstate New York, the Plymouth Colony and adjacent Rhode Island bore the brunt of the fighting. Whereas the colonists feared and avoided the swamp, the Natives found safety and sanctuary there. In fact, the war only ended when the colonists finally entered the swamp and routed Metacomet and his people. In the end, King Phillip's War was the costliest in terms of property destruction and death—to both colonists and Natives—in all of colonial America. 

The Taunton River passes through the forests of Wyman North Fork Conservation Area in Bridgewater. In 2024, Wildlands acquired an additional 90 acres directly across the river from Wyman North Fork, further protecting this section of the Taunton River corridor less than two miles from its headwaters.

After the war, colonial prosperity resumed, and towns grew and flourished. Many attempts to drain Hockomock Swamp ensued, but each ultimately failed. The swamp served as a natural "sponge," absorbing water and preventing the kinds of floods that periodically disrupted life on many nearby rivers. Indeed, failures to drain the swamp substantially contributed to the Taunton River’s wild and pristine state today. Similarly, the Taunton’s incapacity for waterpower has benefited the watershed’s ecological health, as it kept the river undammed, free-running, and surrounded by forest and farmland. Thanks to its unique natural characteristics that stifled colonial industrialism, the Taunton River is now a federally designated National Wild and Scenic River.  

Today, the Taunton River watershed is home to many wonderful nature preserves. Wildlands Trust, MassWildlife, the Taunton River Watershed Alliance, and its cities and towns work together to protect this special place. Great River Preserve, Wyman North Fork Conservation Area, Striar Conservancy, Brockton Audubon Preserve, and soon Striar Snake River Preserve in Taunton are some of the Wildlands properties where you can see the results for yourself. 

To learn more, please see our website at wildlandstrust.org and visit some of our preserves in the Taunton River watershed.

Striar Conservancy in Halifax is located on the bank of the Winnetuxet River, a tributary of the Taunton River.

Learn More

Resources for this article include: 

• The Taunton River Watershed Alliance: savethetaunton.org 

• Tetiquet To The Sea: A History of the Taunton River: oldcolonyhistorymuseum.org/product/tetiquet-to-the-sea

• Wild and Scenic Taunton River: srpedd.org/environment/wild-and-scenic-taunton-river

• Archaeology of Dighton: plymoutharch.tripod.com/id157.html 

• Understanding Geological History When Selecting Trenchless Installation Methods: haleyaldrich.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/NETA 

• The Wampanoag Canoe Passage: North and South River Watershed Association, "River Watch," April 2015. 

Thanks to Thomas Patti for his editing and encouragement, to Owen Grey for his mapping assistance, and to Tess Goldmann for her analysis of Wildlands’ holdings in the Taunton River watershed.

If you have photographs, historical documents, or maps related to the history of the Taunton River watershed, we want to see them! Please send any information to communications@wildlandstrust.org.