After a decade of negotiations and legal issues, the Harvard Conservation Trust has acquired just over 46 acres of rocky ridges and wetlands along the town border with Boxborough. Both Gina Ashe, the president of Harvard Conservation Trust, and trustee Marc Sevigny gave much of the credit for the acquisition to Tom Cotton, who is also a trustee. “Tom has worked on this land deal for years,” Ashe told the Press. The transfer was completed Aug. 27.
Cotton described the new land as steep and rugged, saying it had possibly been used for grazing rather than farming. While there are no hiking trails on the land, he said there are a couple of old cart roads that were perhaps once used for logging. With its wetlands, the area is also probably home to some endangered species.
The new land is surrounded by protected open space on the Harvard side of the border. Its acquisition fills a gap in the protected lands along Littleton County Road, connecting the Horse Meadows Knoll conservation area with Westward Orchards land preserved for agriculture.
Acquiring the 46.12 acres was a complex process. The land was part of a larger property in Boxborough that Cisco Systems purchased in 2002. At one point, Cisco expressed the intention of giving the land on Harvard’s side of the border to the town for conservation. But instead Cisco sold it in 2019 as part of a larger tract to Campanelli, which planned to develop the Boxborough section as a commercial campus called the Park at Beaver Brook.
Campanelli applied to the Boxborough Planning Board for permission to construct more buildings on the property there. And, in an example of cooperation between towns, the Boxborough board required Campanelli to give Harvard the 46.12 acres across the town boundary as a condition for granting the company the permission it sought.
Like other conservation lands along Littleton County Road, the new property is part of an area known as the High Ridge Corridor. The new parcel lies just east of the Three Brothers Farm Conservation Area, which HCT acquired in 2024 from the Carlson family. Nearby is the Muller Land, the Harvard Conservation Trust’s first property, which was donated by Erhart and Ruth Muller soon after the HCT was founded in 1973. The land also abuts the 200-acre Eastern Greenway, which the HCT acquired in partnership with the Sudbury Valley Trustees in early 2022.
