Across the Northeast – especially in Massachusetts – golf courses have been closing up shop. The Boston Business Journal estimates at least 57 closed in the Commonwealth between 2012 and 2022.
It’s led to some communities getting creative with the former fairways. As WAMC reports, that includes Northampton, which is on track to make over a dozen greens even greener.
For the last month at least, new sounds have been joining the chorus of birds chirping off of Old Wilson Way – heavy machinery that’s been tearing up pavement that ran between Rocky Hill and Florence roads.
Officials like Sarah LaValley of Northampton’s Office of Planning & Sustainability say it’s the city’s first-ever "ecologically-related road closure” – part of a reforestation project that goes back to 2020, when the city acquired the former Pine Grove Golf Course.
“The owner was hoping - for several years - to have another golf ownership group take over, but that just didn't make sense, so the city came in,” she explained to WAMC ahead of a tour of the grounds Wednesday. “This seemed like a really ideal ecological restoration project.”
Found just north of the city line with Easthampton, the golf course once sported all of the usual amenities: 18 holes with a clubhouse and a small pond.
Plenty of green, but as Tom Lautzenheiser of the Massachusetts Audubon Society says, not the kind of green that necessarily helps the environment. In fact, Pine Grove may have been doing the opposite: causing abrupt, sometimes chaotic water levels downstream by altering the Nashawannuck Brook.
“You know, you can’t have soggy fairways - you want everything to be as dry as possible for the folks who were golfing, so, water was just directed into all these cisterns and trench drains and so forth and just directed off the site, straight to the brook, and it would just blast out on the southern end of the golf course and right downstream into Arcadia eventually,” the senior conservation ecologist explains. “This is a 300-acre-or-so watershed, and 100 acres of that was golf course. Even though it looks green, it was essentially acting like pavement… water was just being directed off of that as quickly as possible.”
Protecting the watershed’s been a priority for Northampton and Mass Audubon – both have formed a partnership that protects a 200-acre “wildlife corridor,” according the city’s website.
It’s what’s fueling the Nashawannuck Brook Restoration Project and Pine Grove restoration, which kicked into high-gear last month.
The state Division of Ecological Restoration is also assisting the effort to essentially tear up some of the current landscape and, for the most part, let nature take its course. Or, technically, golf course.
Bad golf puns or not, DER Ecological Restoration Specialist Kate Bentsen says, while human restoration activity has been getting underway, the local beavers got the memo at least a year earlier, settling in and jump-starting their own restoration work.
“The beavers have capitalized on that and moved into the site,” Bentsen explained, gesturing to what was once a well-rounded pond into something more natural. “As you can see here, this very small stream has now been flooded out by a large beaver dam that started developing about a year ago. It’s a few feet tall - it's maybe 6-8-feet-tall - and is impounding quite a large area. We see a lot of birds starting to come back[, too]. There's wood ducks here, there's swallows….”
Hailed as nature’s engineers, the animals have made great headway, Bentsen adds. The wall of mud and sticks is near impenetrable, save for a healthy stream flowing at its bottom, keeping water in the habitat amid mild drought conditions.
Of course, the brook restoration will have plenty of human benefits, as well. In addition to restoring wetlands, a network of trails is part of the broader picture. Northampton Land Planning Assistant Tom Annese says the area gives the city a rare opportunity to offer hike-able conservation land that’s far more accessible than most.
“Most of our conservation land, is rocky, hilly and shaded. It's wooded and so … one of the reasons [the site] is so popular is that it's open, and there’s an openness here that doesn't exist in a lot of other conservation areas,” he said, noting residents had already been taking advantage of the former golf course since the pandemic. “It’s become really, really popular from a recreation standpoint. To me, it's always had kind of like a western feel, like there's like an openness here that that we don't have at other sites.”
Annese notes that, while most of the land is flat, its own watery conditions and wetlands made alternative uses like housing mostly untenable.
The lots that were viable ended up being developed, after they were carved out for the previous property owner as part of the 2020 transaction, LaValley says.
For now, the public’s also being asked to not tread through the area, at least not until July 1, says Travis Sumner of SumCo Eco-Contracting. Phase one work is still well-underway, with over 800 feet of pavement ripped up, with mud and gravel mostly taking its place. That, plus a new, small parking lot and more importantly – re-naturalization.
“… restoring 1,600 feet of the stream, re-naturalizing, as Tom had said: [the stream] has been kind of forced into a fairly-narrow, rock-lined channel that just accelerates water leaving the site,” he said during Wednesday’s tour. “The project there is to remove all the rock… spread the water out, to kind of re-naturalize the stream.”
Sumner says the hope is to have much of that work done by the end of June.
After that, it’s a matter of phase two. According to LaValley, that will include dam removal – not the beaver dam, but a man-made dam found at a nearby irrigation pond – along with more trail and wetlands work.
Project leaders hope to also build an accessible All Persons Trail looping the grounds, with a bridge going over a recently-failed culvert crews are trying to remove.
For now, funding for phase two is a bit up in the air. Recent activity was made possible in-part by the DER and city funds, totaling at least $720,000. Later construction, though, could fetch as much as $3 million.
LaValley is optimistic about securing additional state grant dollars, though she concedes her team might have to reevaluate if funding doesn’t appear.
For now, project overseers are upbeat. That includes Julianne Busa of Fuss & O’Neill, who’s engineering and design firm is not only assisting with the restoration work, but also a similar effort in nearby Williamsburg.
“This is really the first project of its kind in Massachusetts, and we're all really excited about it being a model for other courses,” Busa said. “That's already sort of starting to happen: we're seeing that with the Beaver Brook project that [The] Trustees are working on. There’s a golf course driving range that's being rewilded in Stow and a couple other projects in the works around the way. But DER has been really excited about this being sort of a flagship example for golf course rewilding as courses are retired.”
As DER’s David Eisenhauer says – it’s all work that’s breaking new ground in some ways, but also reimbuing something that used to always be there.
“This isn't so much creating something new, although there's some of that,” he said as the tour came to a close. “It's really returning something that's been here and that's around us all the time. It's the connection between people and nature, and understanding that is something that benefits all of us."
More information on the project can be found here.
