Hartford’s biggest community hope chest awarded a $165,000 grant to a Middlefield conservation nonprofit overseeing continuity of the 63-mile Metacomet Trail that bisects seven northern Connecticut communities.
The Connecticut Forest and Park Association (CFPA) got the grant from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
The Metacomet Trail is a hiking footpath that starts at the Connecticut/Massachusetts border and passes through Suffield, East Granby, Simsbury, Bloomfield, Avon, West Hartford, and Farmington before ending just north of Middletown.
“Despite increasing public interest in outdoor recreation, more than 40 percent of the Metacomet Trail ¬is currently vulnerable to subdivision or fragmentation,” CFPA Executive Director Eric Hammerling said in a statement.
The group said the grant will allow it to work with town planners, land trusts and conservation commissions in each of the seven towns to develop a conservation plan and to leverage funding from the national Land and Water Conservation Fund and other funders to maintain the trail. The plan will prioritize key properties for protection or acquisition, and develop a land protection strategy.
The association says the trail is named after a 17th century Indian chief who, according to legend, watched from atop Talcott Mountain as his warriors burned Simsbury in 1676.
The trail route, never more than two miles from a public road, passes through state and town parks, municipal watershed areas, land managed by conservation nonprofits, private land under conservation easement, and unprotected land via permission of individual landowners.
