WESTMINSTER — At the beginning of 2017, two separate and very different gifts were made to the Windmill Hill Pinnacle Association, a nonprofit organization known for conserving land in a multi-town area for both wildlife and people to enjoy.
One gift involved money. The other involved land. Yet both were associated with memories of childhood, young people, and a love of nature. Both gifts were planned years ago and implemented recently, according to a news release.
Marion Berry bequest
The Berry family moved to Westminster from Portsmouth, N.H., in 1977. Tom Berry graduated from Bellows Falls Union High School in 1980, sharing his love and respect for the outdoors with his parents and friends. After majoring in geology and biology at Bowdoin College, he moved to the Bay Area in California in 1984, and has worked as an environmental consultant and professional geologist on contaminated site remediation ever since.
His parents, Arthur and Marion Berry, moved to Maine, Arthur's home state, in 1985, but they always remembered those young people they knew who loved the land and were actively dedicated to conservation within their community.
Especially inspired by Judy Anderson, a great friend and student who lived in Westminster West, and her passion for conservation in the earliest days of the Pinnacle Association in the 1990s, first Arthur and then Marion left bequests to the Association, and Tom includes the Association as part of his family's annual charitable giving.
The recent bequest from Marion is the largest ever received by the Pinnacle Association and honors, both practically and philosophically, those Vermont conservation memories, Judy Anderson, the Pinnacle Association, and Pinnacle's mission.
Radford land gift in Brookline
Some years ago Terry and Edna Radford of Atlanta, Georgia, purchased a rustic cabin and 69 acres on Mountain Road in Brookline as a rural retreat. They had been attracted to the property because it borders Pinnacle lands and its extensive trail system. They bought the property and joined the Pinnacle Association.
At the time of that purchase, Terry expressed his hope to someday donate a portion of the upper acreage to the Pinnacle Association. A few years later, a neighboring 16-acre parcel came on the market.
Terry realized that it would provide a trail corridor from the Cascade Trail down to Grassy Brook Road. He bought the land with the intention of donating it to the Pinnacle Association for a new trail that would provide improved access from Grassy Brook Road and parts west while expanding the protected habitat of the Association's holdings. That 16-acre lot is part of the 50.1 acres Radford recently donated.
The proposed trail route has already been flagged and will be among the more dramatic trails in the Association's system, due to its picturesque descent from the ridgeline, overlooks, switchbacks, and balconies - ending in a foot bridge that will be built across Grassy Brook.
Known as the Radford-Smith Trail, it is a personal testimonial to friendship and an enduring love of nature during the lean years of World War II in England, as well as a memorial to Terry's boyhood friend Paul Smith.