By JIM KEVLIN

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BURLINGTON GREEN

It’s a bit of a mystery why it’s called Cranberry Bog, Earle Peterson will tell you.
Perhaps it reminded early settlers of the bogs near Burlington, N.J., their home town, and William Cooper’s.
There are two species of wild cranberries in the 75-acre watery expanse, but too bitter, Earle will tell you, to eat with any enjoyment.
The dike, in Peterson’s view, may actually be no more than a beaver dam that, after centuries of settling, looks like a man-made barrier, but actually just happened.
Whatever, it’s a wild place, a poem by Poe, perhaps. But there a heron, here a bright mushroom, ducks scattering beyond, make it irrestible.
With certifiably beautiful Otsego County – James Fenimore Cooper penned the certification – under siege from windmills, natural-gas wildcatters, Madison Square Garden’s huge music fest, mini-Wrigleys and mini-Fenways, and just garden-variety development, it’s hard not to be occasionally pessimistic about what the future may hold.
Don’t surrender to those feelings: Earle Peterson, who spent several years as president of the Otsego Land Trust, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary at a reception Saturday, Aug. 23, at Thayer Farm, is holding the line.
All of those concerns seem a million miles away at Peterson’s 1,200 acres, just a few minutes from the flagpole at Main and Pioneer. On the Fourth of July, he can see the fireworks at Fairy Spring from a field high on one of his hills.
One Fourth, the grass had grown so tall it was peeking over the hood of his truck when a space alien appeared before him, long neck, huge eyes and ears flapping forward. “I saw E-T,” Peterson said. (It turned out to be a fawn.)
The Otsego Land Trust goes back to a late ‘80s meeting at Fifth Avenue’s historic Villard Mansion, across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as George Snell, Herkimer native, New York City lawyer (by way of Yale) and a summerer on Hyde Bay remembers it. (Since 1981, the mansion’s been the elegant entryway to the 55-story Helmsley Palace Hotel.)
The usual suspects in these matters were there: Henry S.F. Cooper, Jr., Kent Barwick, Lin and Gib Vincent.
They were Friends of PROTECT, which was evolving into Otsego 2000, but they recognized the need for something more: A land trust, which would allow land owners, through easements, to control, at some degree, what would happen, or not happen, to beloved properties after they passed away.
There was some immediacy to the meeting, since the Campbell family, owners of 100 acres around Leatherstocking Falls in Pierstown, was looking for a way to preserve that property.
As the lawyer in the room, Snell was prevailed upon to perform the “arduous” task of establishing the trust, and he wended his way through the necessary approvals by banking and education authorities, with the final approval by a judge.
“...and now,” Snell told the group at a subsequent meeting, “I’m turning the baby over to you.” Pause. “They didn’t take him.”
It was about that time – “I’m not very good at dates,” he’ll tell you – that Earle Peterson, who had a 50-employee veterinary practice in Hunterton County, New Jersey, discovered 250 acres at the end of a dirt road near Burlington Green, the kind of place he remembered from his boyhood on a farm near Unadilla.
He bought it – or, rather, convinced the realtor who owned it to sell it to him. The crown jewel of the property was the bog. And in the years that followed, Peterson and his wife, Cynthia, began buying up land as it became available to protect the bog’s watershed.
Looking to protect what is there beyond their lifespans, they approached the Nature Conservancy, but learned that entity was only interested in accepting the gift, selling it, and using the proceeds for what it considered more environmentally critical properties.
Cynthia, who has worked for years in the New York City mayor’s office, discovered the 1,700-organization Land Trust Alliance involved in protecting 37 million acres, and the allliance in turn “made me aware of a small land trust in Cooperstown.”
Soon, the Petersons had established The Greenwoods Trust and begun crafting the easement – it allowed construction of a house or two, and includes a provision for an emergency airstrip at some point – to protect their beloved property.
Along the way, George Snell was finally able to turn over the baby; Peterson took it.
In New Jersey, Peterson at one point had found himself chairing the board of a 1,000-bed hospital system. At another point, he was heading a regional chamber of commerce populated with Fortune 500 companies.
“I knew what had to be done” at the Otsego Land Trust, he said: “I created structure.”
One day, arriving home at 10 Pine Boulevard, he found an unfamiliar woman picking flowers from his backyard for, as she explained, a cocktail party she was planning at her home at the north end of Otsego Lake.
You have plenty of flowers; I didn’t think you’d mind, she told Earle.
Her embarrassed husband showed up 20 minutes later and invited Earle to the party.
There, he ran into Jane Forbes Clark – “an outstanding person,” Peterson says – who had heard of his efforts and questioned him closely. By evening’s end, he had found a dependable financial supporter of the land-trust concept.
Today, the Otsego Land Trust is in the midst of a phase that began two years ago, when Peterson handed over the reins to Harry Levine of Princeton, N.J., and Springfield; Levine also heads the Advocates for Springfield.
Levine, in turn, led the search committee that hired Peter Hujick, a Dartmouth grad and Nature Conservancy administrator in northern California, who came to town to implement the “10,000 acres by 2010” effort.
The extent of the challenge soon became clear. The U.S. Forest Service’s study, “Forests on the Edge,” listed the upper Susquehanna among the nation’s 20 most endangered watersheds. The American Farmland Trust’s “Farming on the Edge” came to the same conclusion about northern Otesgo County agricultural land.
Hujick’s accomplishments to date include obtaining a $50,000 grant from the Land Trust Alliance to help develop a “conservation blueprint” – a vision – for the region. Recently, the Otsego trust expanded its reach into the Butternut Valley, where Carla Hall Friedman and Ben Friedman, who halped assemble Sterling Forest on the New York-New Jersey line, crafted easements for extensive acreage in the Morris area.
If anything, the demand is greater than ever, Hujick said – “people are knocking on our door” – but so are the satisfactions.
“The best part of my job,” he said over a cup of coffee at The Stagecoach, “is working with community-minded people who want to do something good.”

Labels: Burlington Green, Front Page, Land Trust